Cambridge; New York; Port Melbourne; New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2018. xiii, 284 pp. (Table, maps, B&W photos.) US$99.99, cloth. ISBN 978-1-107-06803-2.
Unlike most democracies, participation in elections in India is on the rise, thanks to the tradition of inclusiveness followed by its Election Commission. In How India Became Democratic, Ornit Shani traces the origins of the making of India’s electorate and tells an extraordinary tale of democratic imagination on the part of unelected bureaucrats, who took it upon themselves to make Indians voters even before they became citizens.
In the immediate post-partition period, the Constituent Assembly Secretariat (CAS) was tasked with registering all Indian adults in the country’s first electoral roll. The challenges were immense, as India was still grappling with the consequences of its independence: millions of refugees pouring in from East and West Pakistan, and in a vast territory that was not yet fully integrated at that. Besides, the state had to convince a largely illiterate population with no means of proving their identity to sign up for a democratic system that was yet to be put in place. To complicate matters further, the State Constituent Assembly had yet to agree on a definition of citizenship.
In six well-delineated chapters, Shani dissects the process adopted by the CAS, which she characterizes as one of India’s first state-building exercises. The first chapter analyses the process of designing the procedure and instructions to register voters, and how the registration process of all citizens imbued India’s bureaucracy with a sense of equality and universalism. The second chapter examines the question of the inclusion of refugees and the handling of petitions and contestations from a variety of citizens’ organizations, which appropriated the constitutional language to submit their position on who should or should not figure on India’s electoral roll.
The third chapter—the most original, and decisive to Shani’s argument—touches upon how the CAS succeeded in capturing the popular imagination by making the process of voter registration public, consultative, and even deliberative, creating a space where citizens, provincial governments, and interest groups could contribute to the CAS’s objectives. The use of press notes, which not only detailed the practicalities of registering voters but also told real-life stories of people registering and what the act of registering as a voter meant to them, turned a bureaucratic act into a serialized epic that stirred interest and ensured wide adhesion to the project of building a democratic society, and contributed to making India a unified territory in the minds of the people.
The subsequent chapters deal with the question of territorial integration, the impact of the exercise on making the Indian Union a concrete reality, the contributions from below to the making of the constitution, and, lastly, the limitations of the entire exercise, and the early disenfranchisement of citizens in Kashmir and in India’s Northeast.
Shani argues that building the electoral roll constituted a rehearsal for the setting up of India’s federal structure. The preparation of the rolls was a state-building exercise on the largest possible scale in terms of population and territorial reach. It made the integration of states concrete, sometimes before territorial integration actually happened. It created a de facto constitutional and administrative template for the Indian federation.
Shani’s book is primarily interested in the materiality of the act of making Indians voters. This is a book about how India operationalized its democracy, a story that, astonishingly, has not been told before by historians. To support her arguments, Shani relies on the exceptionally rich archives of the Election Commission, which have never been so comprehensively examined.
How India became Democratic speaks across disciplines and makes a number of significant contributions—namely, to the literature on India’s democratic transition. Most scholars have highlighted the continuities between the colonial and the postcolonial state as an explanatory factor for the rooting of democracy in India—continuities in constitutional architecture, bureaucratic structures, and bureaucratic practices. Shani shows that while there were indeed elements of continuity between the colonial and postcolonial bureaucracies, there were also bureaucrats capable of breaking away from colonial practice, capable of imagining, and therefore anticipating a democratic framework of bureaucratic functioning.
The book usefully reminds the reader that building a democracy is a process that relies on a complex machinery as well as on ideas and visions. The role of bureaucrats has been overlooked in the democratization literature. This book should inspire political scientists and anthropologists to pay more attention to the lower ranks of state actors in India.
A second contribution concerns the process of constitution-making. Far from being an exclusively elite-driven top-down process, Shani shows that the Constituent Assembly was open to facts and information from below in the conduct of its proceedings. As such, she opens new avenues for research on the history of bureaucratic and legal practices.
Finally, Shani sketches the portrait of an Indian administration that we hardly recognize today: professional, humble, consultative, effective, democratic in its way of functioning and pedagogical about the objectives it pursues. By the accounts we have of its functioning today, India’s top and ground-level bureaucracy seem to be better defined by opacity, arbitrariness, authoritarianism, unaccountability, and lack of imagination.
In her conclusion, Shani does not, however, address the question of the legacy of this crucial transitional episode and why the success of this inclusive and participatory bureaucratic exercise did not set more of a precedent. That minor limitation aside, How India Became Democratic sets a model of how the early decade of India’s experiment with democracy should be revisited, and will undoubtedly help generate new explorations and ideas about democratic transitions across South Asia and beyond.
Gilles Verniers
Ashoka University, Sonepat, India