 Hi, everyone. Nice to see all of you here on this rainy afternoon. Thanks for coming to Carnegie. Nice to see so many familiar faces. My name is Mila Inveshanov. I'm a senior fellow and director of the South Asia Program here at Carnegie. We're here today to commemorate two milestones. First is that this is the inaugural event in a new Carnegie initiative that we're calling India Elects 2019. The aim of this initiative, I think, is fairly obvious. But the idea is to provide expert research and analysis on India's general elections, which will take place next year, and examine their impact on the country's economy, domestic policy, foreign policy. It will bring together insights from Carnegie's experts here in DC, in New Delhi at Carnegie India, and hopefully around the world. Those of you who were around last election cycle in 2014 and 2014 may recall we conducted something similar last time called India Decides 2014. Our hope is that this edition will be even bigger and better than the last iteration. Two weeks ago, we published the first essay in this series, an essay that I authored, called From Cakewalk to Contest, India's 2019 General Election. In it, we try to highlight four major structural drivers we think are going to shape the contours of next year's race. For those of you who haven't seen it, there are copies outside. Hope that you'll pick up a copy, share this analysis, provide us with your feedback and your thoughts. We're already working on subsequent pieces in the series. Our hope with this initiative is to go beyond the headlines and try to focus on what we think are some of the interesting underlying structural trends in Indian domestic politics. The second milestone that we're commemorating today is the release of a fantastic new book by Ornith Shani, titled How India Became Democratic. Here's what the cover looks like. Citizenship and the Making of the Universal Franchise. I want to welcome Ornith here today to Carnegie. She's a senior lecturer at the Department of Asian Studies at the University of Haifa in Israel. She's a highly regarded scholar of contemporary India who has worked on Hindu nationalism, identity, caste politics, communal violence, all small subjects that have no contemporary relevance whatsoever. Ornith's new book, which we're going to hear more about in just a second, shares the untold story of how India decided to grant universal suffrage from the get-go, which remains today an unprecedented radical democratic experiment. As the first event in our 2019 series, we thought what better way to kick-start a new initiative like this than go back to the very beginning. I don't want to steal too much of her thunder before you've had a chance to speak. But in a nutshell, the book takes advantage of archival material that has truly never been seen before by anyone, including people who are at the Election Commission, to explain exactly how it is that India, in the wake of partition and the tremendous challenges that newly independent India faced, managed to pull off its first elections to create its first electoral role, and Ornith's going to walk us through a little bit about some of the book's core messages, and then we'll have a bit of a conversation, and then take your questions and comments. Before we start, I just want to make two programming notes. One I have to sort of say in the air of social media, which is, if you're tweeting about this event, you can use the hashtag IndiaLex2019. But secondly, our next installment in this series is going to be on Tuesday, May 8 from 3.30 to 5 here at Carnegie. We're going to use that opportunity to assess the Modi government's performance as it nears its four-year anniversary in office and talk about some of the implications for 2019. So this is going to be kind of a wide-ranging conversation on economics, on politics, on foreign policy. And I hope that all of you guys can join us for that. That's May 8 from 3.30 to 5 in this same room. And more details will be sent out to all of you if you're on your mailing list in the next coming days. Without further ado, I'm going to hand it over to Ornith Chani. I don't need it. OK, OK. So thank you, Milan, for this very warm and kind introduction. And thank you. Thank you, everyone, for coming. So from November 1947, India embarked on the preparation of the first draft electoral role on the basis of universal adult franchise. A handful of bureaucrats at the secretariat of the Constituted Assembly initiated it undertaking. They did so in the midst of the partition of India and Pakistan that was tearing the territory and the people apart. And while 552 sovereign princely states had yet to be integrated into India, turning all adult Indians into citizens over the next two years before they became citizens with the commencement of the Constitution was a staggering operation. And it was against many odds. It needed an immense power of imagination. Doing so was India's stark act of decolonization. Indians, this was no legacy of colonial rule. Indians imagined the universal franchise for themselves. They acted on this imaginary, and they made it their political reality. By late 1949, India pushed through the frontiers of the world's democratic imagination and gave birth to its largest democracy. In my book, How India Became Democratic, explores that great experiment in democratic human history. So India's founding leaders were determined to create a democratic state when the country became independent in 1947. But becoming and remaining democracy was by no means inevitable in the face of the mass killings and the displacement of millions of people unleashed by the subcontinent partition in August 1947. Moreover, the creation of democracy had to be achieved in the face of myriad social divisions, widespread poverty, and low literacy levels, factors that have long been thought by scholars of democracy to be at odds with the requisite conditions for a successful democratic nationhood. So how against the partition, the context of partition, did democracy capture the political imagination of the diverse peoples of India, eliciting from them both a sense of Indianess and a commitment to democratic nationhood? And how in this process did Indian democracy come to be entrenched under such circumstances? And what I argue, I argue that it was through the implementation of the universal franchise that electoral democracy came to life in India. The adoption of universal franchise was agreed at the beginning of the constitutional debates in April 1947. The first general elections took place later, between October 1951 and February 1952. But the overwhelming preparatory, complex work for the elections, in particular the preparation of the first list of voters, the first draft electoral role on the basis of universal franchise, had begun in November 1947. This is really in the midst of the partition. This colossal task was managed by the Constituent Assembly Secretariat before it was handed over only in March 1950 to the first chief election commissioner of India. So my book explores the making of the universal franchise in India between 1947 and 1950. And I tell the story of the making of the Indian electorate through the preparation of the first draft electoral role for the first election under universal franchise. And it's very important to note that this work was done in anticipation of the Indian constitution, right? While the constitution is made. And just generally, what we've learned until today is that how India became democratic, we have two stories commonly. One is to say it's a result, it's an inheritance of the British Raj, or it's the gift of the elites to the Indian masses. And the archival materials I discovered and on which this book is based tell us a different story and reveal a different picture. It shows us how the making of India's democracy was an ingenious, the Indian making. It was no legacy of colonial rule. It was largely driven by people often of modest mean. And of course, it was the largest democratic state building operation in terms of its scales. What I'm arguing is that in India, the institutionalization of electoral democracy preceded in significant ways the constitutional, the constitutional deliberative process. And that ordinary people had a significant role in establishing democracy in India at its inception. By the time the constitution came into force, in January 1950, the abstract notion of the universal franchise and the principles and practices of electoral democracy were already grounded. The first electoral role on the basis of universal franchise was ready just before the enactment of the constitution. Indians became voters before they were citizens. This process produced engagement with shared experiences that Indians became attached to and started to own. The institutionalization of procedural equality for the purpose of authorizing a government in a deeply and a hierarchical and unequal society as India, ahead of the enactment of the constitution, turned the idea of India's democracy into a meaningful and credible story for its people. Now, early in the book, I show how the design of the instructions for the preparation of the electoral roles began cultivating among administrators the democratic dispositions and imagination that was needed in order to build the institutional infrastructure for the notion of procedural equality in relation to voting. I tell the story of how the notion of procedural equality was bureaucratized. I'm not gonna talk about it now, but I'll just say in two sentences that the interesting thing about how they devised the instructions, it wasn't like let's put clever bureaucratic instructions from top down and send it to the provinces and the state. It was done as a result of four months of ongoing consultations with bureaucrats at the states and the provinces before these instructions were devised. But it would not have sufficed for a democratic vision based on adult franchise to become embedded merely in the institution of electoral democracy. It needed to become a meaningful political order in which ordinary Indians would believe and to which they would become committed. The vast majority of the prospective Indian electorate of over 173 million people who were poor and illiterate never voted for a political representative in a legislated body. So how then did the principle and institution of universal franchise attain meaning and enter the political imagination of Indians? And my talk today will only focus on this question to give you a bit more flavor of the materials of the book. And I suggest that it was the way in which the preparation of the first electoral role on the basis of adult franchise became part of popular narratives that played an essential role in connecting people to a popular democratic political imagination. In pursuing this proposition, I draw on Robert Cover's contention that no set of legal institutions or prescriptions exist apart from the narratives that locate it and give it meaning. Cover argued that once understood in the context of the narratives that give it meaning, law becomes not merely a system of rules to be observed, but a world in which we live. Thus the rules and institutions that would constitute the normative universe of universal franchise would not be sufficient for people to truly inhabit it. These normative world is also composed of the stories individuals make of it for themselves. And in what follow, I'm exploring this process of the concretization and the personalization of the universal franchise. I examine narratives of how the preparation of roles in adult franchise came to be and how Indians began to own the principle of adult franchise and to conceive of themselves as the protagonists of these stories to insert themselves into this narrative. So I look at the way in which narratives of the preparation of the roles made imaginable and personal the definitive historical transformation that the universal franchise wrote. And to do so what I do I'm studying key press notes, newspaper coverage and a range of letters on the preparation of the roles that Indians and some social and political organizations sent to the secretariat. As well as gripping Indians political imagination these narratives grounded the constitutional principle of adult franchise making it a convention ahead of the enactment of the constitution. So narrative accounts about the preparation of the roles or about the actualization of universal franchise that is to say the registration of voters connected with the lives of Indians the persons described in the press notes and the press were like them. And the narratives did not simply represent the order of actions of making adult franchise but also implied its meaning. In this sense the dynamics of narration by the secretariat and in the press had the effect of turning the story of the preparation of roles into an epic which in turn stimulated the engagement of people in various social and political organizations with making adult franchise. Storytelling the preparation of the electoral role not only made it more meaningful and conceivable to India's would be citizens who individually experienced its making it also gave rise to a collective passion for democracy thus contributing to the democratization of feelings and imagination. And so what I'll do I'm going to first discuss briefly the press notes of the secretariat and how they had a storytelling effect. And second I'll suggest how reporting in the press turned the story of the making of the role into a series of episodes of prolonged episodic narrative which generated discussions and interest in the meaning of the right to vote and democratic citizenship. This process deepened as people began to incorporate the story of the preparation of roles into their lives and to show a growing interest and commitment to it and the letters, the contents of letters that people sent to the secretariat evidence this and I'll talk about it in the final part of my discussion. So it was at the beginning of the secretariat's discussion on the question of the enrollment of partition refugees in June 1948 that a member of the secretariat suggested the issuing of a press note to allow the fears of the refugees in general and to clarify the position after final decision has been taken in their matter. So they distribute the instructions across India but the first challenge when they start to prepare the roles is the registration of partition refugees. There are 18 million refugees in India. Why is this a challenge? The criteria to be on the electoral role were very simple and universal. You had to be 21, you had to be a citizen and you had to have 180 days residence in the place where you're being registered. But of course who is an Indian was not unknown. It was the most contested question at the time and of course for refugees it was most contested, right? And there were only citizenship provisions in the draft constitution. The citizenship clause is determined by the Constituent Assembly only in August 1949 when the roles are in principle almost ready. And the other criteria of 180 days, the refugees didn't have it. Most of them came in September. They wouldn't have 180 days and it was clear if there's no solution to the registration, all these millions of people would be left outside. I'll tell you now that the solution ultimately was a very liberal solution. They decided to simply register all refugees on the mere declaration by them that they intend to continue residing in the place where they were registered. But that is the context when the secretariat realized that there's a lot of discontent in the public. There are problems and we should tell people what we're doing. By early July 1948, a draft press note regarding the preparation of electoral roles was placed before the Joint Secretary of the Secretariat for approval. The drafters commented that the note reproduces almost in full the general instructions which we have been issued to the provincial and state governments. But what was written originally as general instructions as a common bureaucratic ground for the preparation of electoral roles on the basis of adult franchise was now redrafted and presented as a kind of a storytelling, narrating the preparation of roles from its beginning. The press note provided a coherent narration of the preparation of electoral roles in a sequential order. Chronicling, what happened first? What happened next? Were things stand and what should be expected at later phases? The account was posited as responses to inquiries from the public as part of a dialogue. The secretariat recounted for the people the backstory of the decision to start the preparation of roles saying the need to have general elections as soon as possible after the constitution coming into effect. And the plot laid out how the people were to become the holders of the universal franchise. It said the registration is to be on a house-to-house basis. That is to say, and officers will be deputed to visit every house and to prepare the registrar. The need for holding fresh elections as early as possible after the new constitution comes into force provided the clear sense of an ending to the narrative. The secretariat interwoven into the narrative the content of their instructions that they sent three months earlier to the provincial and state governments, including even a copy of the electoral role form in making it authentic. Moreover, the secretariat's narrative depicted a preparation of roles that enabled the reader to conceptualize India as a unitary space. This was not at all obvious, right? Sorry, the territory was in great flux, not just because of partition, but also because of the integrating states. India was divided into many-fold electoral units, marked by village, town, ward, and local post offices. These spatial markers lay within the immediate imagination of people. These electoral units and the unitary roles prepared for them were ultimately to be reassembled into territorial constituencies, constituting the body of voters to the central and state legislatures. Such a portrayal evoked a concrete image of the voter citizen of the new Indian Democratic Republic, the depiction of the steps that have already been taken and the progress that was made in some of the provinces and the states, like Tashildars have already instructed patoisries to go through the villages, or the depiction of the numbering of houses for the registration gave credence to that spatial visualization of the roles as a basis of India's electoral democracy. A month after the publication of this press note, the undersecretary suggested that we should now collect the material for another press note on the work of preparing electoral roles. We should keep the public informed that the work is going ahead. The secretariat had begun thinking about the importance of continuing telling the public what happened next, and indeed by 25th September, the secretariat published another second, very comprehensive press note. And that next chapter recap what was done until now and then tell people what has been done subsequent to the previous press note. So for example, the secretariat tells the public about the problems that arose with the registration of refugees and how they devised the uniform definition of refugees across India for the purpose of preparation of roles and about problems that appear in the provinces. For example, the reforms commissioner of Assam decided suddenly to take money from refugees for the declaration that they are going to reside in the place where they registered, even though there was no intention to take money from people. So all that was shared with the public. So the secretariat became the omniscient narrator of the preparation of the electoral roles. Though not omnipotent, it openly shared drawbacks, complaints and representations from the public, as well as the ways these were redressed and fixed. In that sense, the secretariat story created a real place for people in it, right? Because they shared all the problems. Moreover, the release of the press notes began a process of serialization of the story. Newspapers covered the enrollment with their own stories. This was complimented by further press notes issued by provincial and state governments at the local level in vernacular languages. Consequently, the story of the preparation of roles turned into a series of episodes and connected events that augmented the core story of the making of the universal franchise like an epic of India's democracy. Now, stories about the preparation of the electoral roles in the press contributed to the process that enabled Indians to conceive of adult franchise as a concrete basis for the evolving new political world which they inhabited in three main ways. One, the press formed a channel of communication with the public, a way of keeping visibility to the process, informing the public and sometimes officially even reached the public through the press. Second, newspaper accounts of the preparation of roles in the provinces and the princely states also fostered a sense of interconnectedness between the dispara territorial parts of the country. The repetition of similar stories about the preparation of roles from different places created a temporal and spatial unity of the making of adult franchise as well as a new way of imagining the unified territory. And third, and here I'll say a little bit more, press reports generated opinion pieces and discussions about the meaning of the right to vote and of democratic citizenship which elicited from the public interest in the universal franchise, right to vote, et cetera. So to give one example, a passionate article on the power of your vote published shortly after the publication of the secretariat press note on the preparation of roles implored the readers to think about the precious possession they have got in their vote. By your vote, the author explained, you have a voice in your government. It empowers you directly or through a representative of your choice to be a party to the framing of the law. The author made the connection between an individual's vote and the cabinet ministers that would ultimately constitute their government. It conveyed the momentous character of the vote as one that could quote, help materially to transform the structure and the quality of your government and consequently also the nature of society of which you are not an insignificant part. There were also public doubts and public expressions of doubts about the granting of the universal franchise. So early in the process, some industrialists like Eddie Sharoff were against it. They said it should be far more gradual. India is not ready for other franchise. The RSS was against it. Just before the draft constitution of February 1948 was brought to consideration before the Constituent Assembly in November 1948, the Times of India editorial stated, certain principles embodied in the draft constitution have been called into question since their adoption by the Constituent Assembly or its committees. One of these is adult franchise. There is growing evidence of anxiety less than the present state of the masses education, the vesting of this powerful political weapon in the entire adult population should lead to the abuse of the democratic system. No less than Dr. Rajendra Prasad, the president of the Constituent Assembly has given expression to hesitancy in this behalf. Constitutional pundits ask, are we going to be governed by the ignorant, the unwise, the thriftless? A reader's response to that editorial suggested that the real danger lies in entrusting the precious right to vote to our raw young men swayed by temptations deliberately placed in their way by those who seek their suffrage during the hectic days of electioneering. The reader proposed raising the age of voters to 28 instead of 21. The age level, and I quote, where young men and women are faced with the cruel realities of life and are expected to get a little bit more sober. Opinion pieces in the press and the ongoing reporting about various aspects of the preparation of electoral roles and its effects continue the process of narrating the role, capturing the stories component in its whole. Thus reporting in the press, despite its fragmented nature, provided the narrative of the preparation of roles with some sustained coherence, the reproduction of parallel stories from different parts of the country also provided, as I said, a new way of thinking of N-India. It was very difficult to think of that concept at that time. The prolonged serialization of the story, the narration about the preparation of role in relatively regular installments in the press ultimately recounted the ambitious journey of India's transition to democracy. It was a story of monumental significance, grand in scope, and therefore, as I suggested, like an epic of India becoming a democracy. The public, as already indicated by the reader's response I just read to you, were not passive readers of the secretariat's press note or the stories that appeared in the press about the preparation of roles. As the future bearers of the right to vote, people started to think about adult franchise and their place on the role from their personal perspective but also from the perspective, from the grand viewpoint of the nation. They wrote to the secretariat with a variety of suggestions and complaints. Their letters manifested a kind of inventiveness which suggested that they were busy imagining their place in the new Indian polity based on universal franchise. One prevalent concern, like of these readers, response was indeed the age of voter. So Mr. Srinivasan from Puna, for example, who wrote a four-page handwritten letter to the president of the Constitutional Assembly Rajendra Prasad entitled Suggestion for Adult Franchise. Sir, the definition of adult ideally requires revision. The present age limit of 21 goes for both the sexes is arbitrary and has no psychological basis behind it. It should rather be 25 for men and 20 for women. These are considered to be the proper ages for marriage and it may as well serve as the age for voting. After all, there is not much of a difference between choosing a mate and choosing a legislature. Another prevalent concern was education, right? There were lots of concerns, concerns with caste, with education, there were even concerns with, speaks to your work, Milan, about the system and its potential for corruption, for money in election, et cetera. So one thing about education, there were representatives of different organizations and people who raised concerns about this. So one, the secretary of the East Kandesh District Congress Committee wrote to the secretary, the success of democracy and the development of the nation depends on the civic and the patriotic sense of the voters, well-educated and beautiful. He explained at length the importance of making the voters literate and understand the rights and duties of a voter. He informed the secretariat that he therefore approached the premier of education minister in the government of Bombay with a scheme of voters education and voter test examination and asked the secretary to help to build a curriculum for this test and for this examination. But most significantly, people began recognizing their power in ensuring the success of the operation. The government of Madras planned to conduct the enumeration on 8 and 9 October 1948 and declared these two days as public holidays. It appealed to the public to stay in their homes on these days until they are enumerated. But some firms as in the Madras Chamber of Commerce notified their employees that these days would not be observed as public holidays. Some labor unions protested and wrote in the matter to their employers, the premier of Madras and the president of the Constituent Assembly claiming that this is against the spirit of the press not published by the government and the principle of adult suffrage enunciated by the Constituent Assembly of India. One union wrote, it will be a waste to the government, both financially and politically if we do not actively extend our cooperation in their attempt for preparation of electoral roles based on adult franchise on which depends the fate of toiling millions. We request you to declare both the days of enumerations as holidays to enable us to enlist all the members in our families as voters, lest we should forfeit our citizenship. So people wrote to the secretariat with their personal cases and suggestion which demonstrated that they made a place for themselves in this new Indian constitutional polity based on universal franchise. They also, as I just suggested, recognized their potential power to shape this world. Now typically, people's letters arrived to the secretariat within five days from the date that the letter was sent. The secretariat answered at most within two weeks but often far more quickly. Within less than a week they answered every letter. The exchange of letters between people and the secretariat contributed to connecting the personal, the local, with the national. The fact that the secretariat replied relatively promptly to people's letters was even more significant. From the perspective of people getting a letter with the inscribed symbol of the Constituent Assembly secretariat, I can safely assume was not an ordinary matter. It was more like, if I'll think through, Tagore's played the post office, it was as splendid as getting a letter from the king. Moreover, the experience of having in effect no degree of separation from the secretariat of the Constituent Assembly intensified and personalized the sense of interconnectedness. The resulting collective passion over adult franchise was indispensable for the democratic imagination to resonate in the minds of Indians. So to conclude, storytelling, the preparation of the roles contributed to embedding the abstract principle of universal franchise in the imagination of people and thus to creating a legal meaning for it in three main ways. First, the iterative stories about how the preparation of electoral roles came to be, and more importantly, how it came to be owned by people, concretized the vision of adult franchise. It was now understood to borrow Robert Cover's construction in the context of the narratives that gave it meaning. Cover argued that for every constitution, there is an epic. The dynamics of narrating the role produced in some sense an epic for India's constitution, which was still in the making. Second, accounts of the preparation of roles did not simply allow Indians to narrate the passage of the universal franchise. These narratives fostered among people a sense of commitment to the normative vision that universal franchise entailed. As evidenced by the content of the letters, people began to show dedication and a will to protect it. Their name on the voter's list was not just a procedural site that marked a right. They began identifying with it and conveyed a sense that it belonged to them. A place on the role was their title deed to democracy. Finally, the secretariat storytelling of the preparation of electoral roles and the ensuing narratives in the press from across the country contributed to connecting the local, the regional, and national into a single coherent story epitomized in a joint one list of voters. In the same way that the repetition of similar stories about the preparation of roles from across India created a temporal and spatial unity of the story of making adult franchise, the correspondences compressed time and space. And in doing so, storytelling the role enabled the possibility of imagining a new spatial setup for India. Thank you. Thanks. Thanks. So I have a bunch of questions, but I won't monopolize the entire time because people here have several as well. But I wanna just ask you a bit to step back because part of the most fascinating part about this book is how you got the material to do the book. So I was wondering if you could just share with the people here a little bit the story of how you stumbled on this treasure trove of material that literally besides you, I'm not sure anybody has ever seen. Okay, so this book and this adventure of trying to find these materials was a result of a question I've been asking for a long time and didn't get a good answer to and became obsessed with it. So the question I've been asking for a long time senior election management officials in India and former chief election commissioners, I asked them how India prepared the first electoral role under universal franchise. And the question came because I was at the time working on citizenship and Muslim citizenship at the time of partition. I knew election would come quickly and I knew in India they gave the vote in one stroke to everyone basically, poor, rich, men, women. So I asked, how did you do the first list of voters? No one gave me an answer. They said, oh, go and read the report. The official report will tell you everything. I went to read the official report and this thick official report on the first elections mentioned over one and a half pages. So it mentions that in November, 47, the constituted assembly secretary took some steps on the basis of decisions by the assembly. I went to the constitutional debates. Nothing about it in November, 1947 or anywhere before January, 1949, right? Nothing. So I then became obsessed with the list. Where is the list? How they prepare the list? And where are the records of the constituted assembly secretary? I tried to look for it in many, many archives to no avail. And then I just convinced the election commission. I said, maybe by chance, please let me see if it's in your record room. And they ultimately gave me the permission to look. And the files were at the back of the record room on the floor. There was a bunch of row of files covered in thick dust. And it was these files. And as you say, they were not seen the light of a finger of a person a day. And how long did it take you to convince the election commission to give you access? I mean, I don't think it took too long because actually, I've been interacting with these election commissioners over the last ongoing and coming election commissioners over almost 16 years. As part of a conference I'm taking part in for now 16 years. There's a conference on electoral democracy in the Conmouth in Cambridge. And I've been there from the start. So I got to know them. So they were exposed to the work. So it was on the basis of, you know, so it was, it took time to give the permission. But the important thing to say is that once I discovered these files, I told the National Archive, the director at the time. And these files were all transformed to the National Archive of India. And it's open to anyone to see these files. Right. Thanks to your intervention. I hope that's a contribution. So there are several interesting things about this book. But one of the most interesting aspects is it completely transforms the kind of received wisdom that I think a lot of us, at least I, have had about the bureaucracy, about the constitutional moment, about the role of elites, about civil society. So I just want to probe you a little bit further in a couple of these. Starting first with citizens' engagement, right? There are a lot of people who argue that civil society in India is quite weak. It's been called a democracy without associations. And you mentioned just now in the talk, and it's there in the book, that citizens weren't just passive recipients of these circulars and these press notes issued by the constituent assembly secretariat, but they were engaged, right? I mean, you quote dozens, hundreds of letters in your book from the Bhojpur district committee and the West Bengal State Committee. And I mean, just pouring in. So have we gotten this story wrong? That civil society, in fact, was sort of present at the creation and very much robustly engaged in the democratic sort of making of India? So I think that as far as making electoral democracy, yes, we have. Because indeed, the book shows and how, especially not in the context of what I presented to you now, but especially in the context of attempted disenfranchisement, disenfranchising people. Because of course, once the registration starts, there's so many attempts to disenfranchise people. Why would bureaucrats at the local level suddenly would register Dalits and tribal people and women? You know, it doesn't change overnight those things. There were also incidents of breaching instructions and the thing that actually drives the success of the operation is the fact that people complain, organize themselves, send letters to the secretary to Delhi, complain about specific officers, et cetera. Now, we have here a situation that, and this is especially manifest with partition refugees. I already told you, India was in a state of great flux, both in terms of the movement of people and the territory. And when there is great uncertainty and who is an Indian is not clear and very contested, a place on the electoral role was at the time the most concrete way of being a citizen. Why? To be on the list, you had to be a citizen, right? Everyone was 21, who was a citizen. There was no citizenship, but still enrolling people meant that it's like they're citizens because that's the criteria. So people understood at the time that the place on the role was their most concrete and sure way of belonging, of having a stake on the state, of having membership. And people understood the importance of not being stateless, of actually having a state to come and, you know, make demands on. So it is totally driven, the impression you got from reading, yes, it is very much driven by people who go into all these numerous interactions with administrators at all level to ensure they are placed on the electoral role. And in that process, in effect, they become de facto citizens. Now, in what way as well, how do they do that? They don't just complain, we were not enrolled, please enroll us. They actually, in their letters, they use the language of the draft constitution. They read the draft constitution. They read the draft citizenship provisions. And they write letters using the language of these provisions. So they become, you know, they start to use the language of the constitution. They even, in West Bengal, we have a few organizations that read the provisions on citizenship. And on that basis, they issue forms of registration of citizenship according to the provisions of the draft constitution. They write to the constitutional advisor, B. N. Rao, a letter saying, we already, we issued such forms on the basis of the draft constitution. We enrolled 100,000 people already, 100,000 refugees on the basis. We're just writing to you to say, is it OK? Are you approving of this? And they say, no, we can't approve that, because forms can be issued only once the constitution comes into force. That's, by the way, why the citizenship provisions and election provisions were enacted in November 49, unlike the whole constitution on 26 November, January 1950, to enable this time to register people as citizens on the basis of the constitution. So people really understood it and fought for it. But, I mean, citizen engagement is one part. But the second part is government responsiveness, right? Now, most of us in this room, I wager, have had some interaction with the Indian state. And responsiveness is not necessarily the first word that comes to mind. But you sort of write about, I mean, you mentioned it today, I mean, right? I mean, often the CAS would get these letters. And within two weeks, there'd be a response by post. And how did it work with such efficiency, with such accountability, with such responsiveness, right? I mean, again, these are not necessarily hallmarks of the Indian state writ large. But there was something going on that was particular to this unit that allowed them to work outside of the normal constraints that we normally associate with the bureaucracy. So this is the question of how come these bureaucrats did this? We're so good. Yeah, we're so good. This is a huge question. And let me say the following, OK? So let me tell you who are these bureaucrats just for a second. So this constituted assembly secretariat franchise branch who run this show. They're guided by B.N. Rao, who was the constitutional advisor, who was just a genius legal mind. But then it's a group of another five people, the joint secretary, the undersecretary, few research officers. It's a really very small group of bureaucrats. What is clear is the following. These were extremely competent people. B.N. Rao, the joint secretary, S.N. Mukherjee, was actually the chief draftsman of the Indian Constitution. He actually drafted most of the clauses first drafts of the Constitution. These were very competent people. But what they had as bureaucrats is the following. They had a lot of autonomy. So rather than when I seek permission to do a zero-scope in the archive, 25 people have to sign on the form. So the responsibility is split between 25 people and no one takes responsibility. These people had autonomy to make decisions. Now, they didn't just arrogantly make decisions. When they had the problem of the refugees, they didn't think that they immediately they thought they looked for international precedents. They were doing research about questions that came before them. So it's really wonderful about the refugees. They look at what happened when the Ottoman Empire was partitioned, how did they deal with that? Then they realized that they can't find any case where this minute question of registering people for the purpose of election was dealt with and then they come up with their own very liberal suggestion. So they had a lot of autonomy. They had a lot of competence. They were very transparent. They realized that the success, this is a reform, right? Think about it as a state reform. They realized that to do successfully reforms for a reform, in this case universal franchise, not to stay simply on paper, it actually depends on the cooperation of people. So they understood that they have to not just reach people and explain, but to be accountable to people. So the fact that everything is transparent when they write letters to people, they verbatim, right? Reproduce their own internal discussions and letters to officials in the provinces and states. So this is very authentic, very transparent. At the same time what they do, they don't just give top-down instructions. They actually mentor local bureaucrats. So when you have local bureaucrats who breach instructions, sometimes they invite them to Delhi and they do a one-day discussion and explain to them. Then they even write for them a letter of response to people and say, here is what we suggest that you do. You can use this, tell us what you did. So they kind of, you know, word it for them and raise the skills of local bureaucrats. Definitely the accountability of answering everything. So there was an ongoing mentoring and the fact that this group of people in Delhi actually were so accountable and everything I described had a critical role. Now when you think about the broader question of these bureaucrats, because the bottom line is A, not every obstruction in bureaucrats from the 30s and 40s suddenly became, you know, ideally democrat because India decided to do universal franchise. And in fact, at the same time that these bureaucrats are doing this incredible thing, other bureaucrats knock on Muslim houses' doors and tell them, we're taking your house because you're an intending evacuee. So other parts of the bureaucrats did something else. What I think, what I came to realize that we need to look into more, which we haven't, is that in fact we don't know what makes, we don't know fully what makes it exceptional for the following reason. This was a temporal body. They knew that they are a temporal body only until the constitution is coming into force. I think that allowed for the predominance of the norms of values that they were pursuing to predominate over the basic thing of any institution, which is to perpetuate its existence. And I think that maybe there's a need to do some more historical research on other secretaries at the time. Think about the Secretary of State. At the end of the day, Indian Federation is a success story. India remained one federation. We changed it inside and all that, but it is. Is there's no history of the Secretary of the Ministry of State? So I think this is a moment where these temporality, the fact that these institutions were temporary was also something that enabled these autonomy, et cetera. I mean, the last thing I want to mention and sort of link to this is there's two main protagonists in the story, right? One of the sort of these mid-level bureaucrats who we didn't know about until we read them in your book. And the second are these ordinary citizens, you know, elites, I mean, I just checked the index. Nehru shows up, I think, 10 times, right? So- No politicians in my book. Very few politicians, but I mean, all of the stories sort of tend to focus on, you know, the giants, right? Ambedkar and Nehru and their cohort. What was their involvement in this particular process of drafting the electoral? Because again, they don't feature as prominent players. Were they in fact not really aware of what was happening kind of inside this little office and the exchange going on? I mean, what was there? How would you characterize that dynamic? So, you know, the whole thing starts with a letter to Rajendra Prasad by K. T. Shah, a member of the constituted assembly secretary who was already in the, was in the planning commission. And he actually writes to Rajendra Prasad and he says the assembly in April, the assembly decided universal franchise. I'm in the planning commission. We need a lot of data. How about doing the census early and we'll catch these two birds with one stone, we'll do census, we'll enroll people because this will take a lot of time. And Rajendra Prasad reads this two, three page letter and passes it on to the secretariat and they look at it and they take it on and they take it on and they decide that the census and this should be totally divorced from each other. But then they say, this is going to be a lot of work and they let's start it. On the assumption that this is going to be the part of the constitution, let's start the work. So it would be ready. So the only politician that kind of oversees it closely is Rajendra Prasad. The whole time, B.N. Rao says I'm writing to HP to basically to Prasad to tell him that that's what we're doing, et cetera. So Nehru and Ambedkar, it's not that they do not know but there's no involvement until a very particular point. The first time that there is involvement of the politicians is in December, 1948 when many of the provinces already were about to finish their first draft rolls and the question of printing and the question of provinces and state demanding reimbursement of the costs. They say, okay, we did this. Now we want you to pay us back the money. It was a lot of money to recruit all these people to do it when they said, okay, now we need Nehru. So this is where the first time the ministry of Nehru comes in when Prasad sends him a letter and say, this is what we've done. We now need to pay, what about that? How we should do that? And this is the first time that there is an intervention and then within a month in January, 1949, it's the first time that a motion on the preparation of electoral roll is coming before the Constituent Assembly of India. And members of the assembly realize that but you've already done it. We have to, because the motion is that the preparation of rolls should start forthwith. And in effect, so many of the issues that members of the assembly bring up. What will happen with the refugees? What will happen with them? Nehru said, no, no, that was dealt with. That was dealt with. We did that. We looked into that. So they are being, obviously by then, they're very much informed but as a day-to-day basis, it's clear that in fact it was totally done by the secretariat without their involvement. And then another thing to say about that is that a huge change in the constitution in electoral provision was pushed by the secretariat but of course, to Ambedkar, right? To the drafting committee. But other than that, there's not, no, no. Why don't we turn to your questions and we'll just wait for the mic and just if you could just identify yourself and just keep your question short so we can take as many as possible. Right here, in the blue. Or one sec, one sec. Hi, my name is Fiona Shrikhande and I'm going to sound like a real ancient but to add a little bit to this discussion, the people you talked about who made this change possible, I think India was lucky. I happened to know them personally so this is really, but Mr. Bien Rao or K. D. Shah, they were exceptional people. There was a great deal of personal pride in what was happening and a great deal of commitment to make it happen. So I think we were exceptionally lucky as a country to have those particular people in power. I think even if you tell the other names, I mean, they really were, I mean, they were fine, committed, exceptional, tremendous intellects that were working there and saying, how do we do this? And I think there was a great deal of pride in being able to take initiative and respond independently to these issues. You know, I want to add to what you're saying in the following sense. I think these people had real professional pride. I mean, in their profession, they took the profession seriously. So one of the things I show in the book is that when they devise the instruction, they do that. They don't talk about their pros. It's very dull. They don't say, we're implementing democracy. It's now we fulfilling nationalist dream. No, there's no such thing. We're preparing a list and the list has to be as accurate as possible and that's why you should visit people early morning or later in the evening when they're home and not in between. So it's very, let's do the job well. So there was something which cannot be taken from these specific individuals and I tried also to frame it within the fact that it was an interim body so much so that some of them were head-unted for the foreign office or other places in this process. But again, it wasn't inevitable and it wasn't obvious because there were other things going on as well but this professional pride, I think, of doing the job and the fact that they were trusted. They were given a lot of autonomy. Maybe we should think about the importance of being a bee. Think about us as human beings when we are given more autonomy and freedom to do what we want to do. We do it more seriously and more courageously and et cetera. There was something about this moment as well, of course. As individuals, I know that from the personal connection. Let's take a few more. So we have Tom and then Vijay, why don't we start here, yeah. Tom Timberg himself. First, thank you for not only what sounds like an exciting book but a very impressive presentation and two things, but there's a thing that struck me which is in fact the continuity with the Indian census which is the bureaucratic prototype and the kind of things that Madras did that's precisely what people did in the old census which is holiday for two days. Everybody has to stay in their house until they get enumerated and so forth. But I had two very specific questions which arose. Were all of the letters in fact drafted by people at the level of a joint secretary? There weren't any clerks for 5,000, 6,000 letters. What's the second question? And the next one, you said 552 princely states, the figures that I usually would hear was 560 for India and 572 for all. Was that intentional? So, Tom, we don't even have a list of districts in India. I mean, two government websites, one says 640, one says 670 in the year 2018. But I think I heard that perhaps the historical record that really says 560 is wrong. Yeah, yeah, I'll tell you exactly. So, ultimately, 552 princely states integrate, merged into India in three different forms of mergers. And what I'm saying is based on the white paper on the Indian state of May 1948 and the second one of 1950. The list, the white paper on the states of the last colonial white paper included more than 700 a list of state. So these are the 552 that I can tell you how they integrated, et cetera, as for that. But your first question, of course, the whole way it worked is that indeed the junior officers would, the way it worked is the following. People's letters came in, right? The junior staff looked at them and prepared notes on serial number one, serial number two on each letters. It would come to discussion and then they would decide how to respond. Now, of course, there was similar response to similar issues that arose. It was drafted by first by the junior people, but you see how the file goes and you see the undersecretary reads makes correction. It goes up to the joint secretary and in the end when it's a principal matter, ultimately to B&Rau and then there's a kind of template answer which the same thing is being addressed to 32 different organizations, et cetera. So yes, it is starting from below and not everything is by the joint secretary, so yeah, like that. And what, just a question on language, what's going on? Okay, so all the correspondence and internal discussions of the secretariat were all exclusively in English. They wrote everything, the press notes, everything in English. It's clear that they didn't know, maybe some of them knew South Indian languages. It's clear that they didn't even know Marathi or Hindi because there were a situation that I encountered that they get, for example, they followed what the press was reporting. So they get their stuff in Marathi from newspapers in Bombay being translated for them in English. So this is an English translation of this article in Marathi, da, da, da. This is an English translation from an article in Ordu. So they worked in English. They asked, everything else, they asked it will be in vernacular languages. They asked the provinces and states to send them copies of what they published in the vernacular and translations in English. So they followed it. But all of these letters which are coming from the ground presumably are in vernacular? So, I think maybe, maybe dozen letters, but less than that even, you know, less than 10 letters that I can recall were in Hindi. It was all in English. Many in very broken English, right? So, handwritten, many. And many that were written, it's clear that it was representing a lot of, you know, refugees in the middle of nowhere in Assam, right? But written by someone who was more literate, right? So on behalf of all, and many, many signatures on the letter. So, yeah. Vijay here and then we'll question them, yeah. Okay. Thank you for an excellent presentation. I never even thought of the nuts and bolts that went into making India down. Heidi, I had a couple of questions. One is, would it be wrong, would I be, would one be wrong in assuming that the public participation, citizen participation process was a direct result of there being the independence movement? So, pardon me. So, they felt a personal responsibility and accountability. Second one is that Nehru was such a towering figure at that time. And of course, he was for the democratic process. Had he wanted to, that no, it's going to be a different sort of a system, would that have happened? That's a very, let me start with the second one. It's a very important point that while my book is not a book about politicians and ideas, but it is about the practical implementation of making democracy, we have to remember that Nehru's personal commitment to the principle of adult franchise was extremely important. There is a moment where a gender of Prasad gets called fit, which I mentioned. And he calls B.N. Rao and he says, perhaps we should actually get off this universal franchise. We should have universal franchise at the village level. Electoral college that will vote for the federal government. And he brings this idea to Nehru. And there is a description in the oral transcripts of H.V. R.I. Ngar, who was the secretary of the secretariat and the secretary for Nehru. A description of how Nehru bangs the table and say, no way, universal franchise is the basic principle for me and there's not going to be any controversy or discussion about it. So this political will, right? Despite the non-intervention, this background political will you are right was extremely important in my view and you're right about that. As far as the first thing you're saying, obviously the nationalist movement and the mass movement led by Gandhi and then the 1937 elections despite an electorate of really 30 million people, right? Only 30 million people had the right to vote. This created expectation and people even if they didn't vote, there was a lot of celebration around it, a lot of activity. So of course it contributed to this atmosphere and the notion and then there was an expectation. But the fact is that there was a huge gap between an expectation and aspiration, a promise and actually putting it into practice where you actually have to enroll all those other 140 million people to still be enrolled, more than 140 people. So many of them live on encroached municipal lands in balconies because they're servants. So many of them are women who do not even recognize themselves as individuals but as wife, of daughter, of et cetera. So in that sense, I don't think there was something that in colonial or previous time that prepared for that kind of staggering operation. We're just up about five minutes so let's take a couple of questions. So you in the front and then we'll take. Howard LaFrancoe with the Christian Science Monitor. I'm wondering, we hear so much these days about sectarian politics, Hindu nationalism. And I'm wondering, at least you didn't talk about it much. So was it not a factor that they had to deal with or how was it overcome if it was? Okay, sorry. Should we take these two together and then respond? Yes, Howard. Hi, Rachel Berkovitz of the Journal of Democracy. Thank you for this very interesting presentation. I guess I'm curious about the overall, closer. It's on, I think, to speak up a little bit, yeah. I'm curious about the overall argument in your book that having this process of involvement through letters and other forms of communication in the preparation of these electoral lists that that is demonstrative of people connecting with India as a nation and feeling involved and connected to the democratic process. I mean, it seems like the letters are kind of a slim segment of the population at the time and a very, you know, more educated and literate segment that perhaps would be involved regardless of whether there was universal suffrage. So I'm wondering if there are other kind of arguments that you make for that point. Was there one in the very back somewhere? No? No? Oh, sure. And quickly, yeah. Following up on the sectarian politics. Yesterday the Financial Times had an article quoting a BJP legislator, Sanjay Patil, who said the forthcoming election is, quote, not about roads or water, but a battle of Hindus versus Muslims. What does that foreshadow about democracy in India? OK, thank you. So quickly to try and, so thank you, Howard, for your question. So attempts to disenfranchise were manifesting immediately as they start the registration, but not necessarily on the basis of ethno-religious lines of Hindus-Muslims. So one of the first kind of serious disenfranchisement is in Assam by trying to disenfranchise from the role Hindu Bengali refugees from Bengal who come to Assam. And the Reforms Commissioners say, we're registering only sons of the soil, Assamese. So it was on the basis of language, et cetera. So there were different kind of attempts to disenfranchise. The important thing about this, what give birth in India to caste identity, communal politics, et cetera, is paradoxically precisely the success of implementing universal franchise made it clear to different groups the power of making identity claims of the state. Now the scheduled caste, the scheduled tribes also became part of the compulsion of politics, and they understood this power. And this is happening immediately after the Constitution comes into effect. And when party starts the thinking of distributing tickets for the first elections, you see how all these groups began to organize and make such identity claims. So it's paradoxically the success that on the one hand shows us the deepening of democracy in India, because it's the involvement of those who were politically invisible previously. On the other hand, of course, this is partly what has challenged India over the years. About the question of the argument, it's not simply letters. The letters were about, no, it's really about, I'll say, the struggles for a place on the role and citizenship. In, as part of the struggle, people also wrote those letters. They didn't only struggle in that sense. They literally struggled for a place on the role. And a place on the role meant, A, it made them voters, and voters in that sense, before citizens, but it also made them engage with the notion of participation, of taking part, of what the Constitution meant, because, as I described earlier, to do so, they had to use the language and the provisions of the draft constitution. They also understood very quickly that the Constitution is not a piece of paper, abstract piece of paper to put on the shelf, but that actually, this is the tools, the everyday tools to negotiate with the state. This fantastic work book that will come out soon by Rohit Dehr that shows how people in India and people from the margins started to use the Constitution a month after its enactment, like prostitutes, butchers, et cetera. So, in fact, my work shows how people understood early on. So, you know, making democracy, in fact, is about, by the time the Constitution is enacted, these ideas of democratic citizenship is a convention. You don't have to, you know, so it's about the struggle. It's not simply about letters were means of, but that's, the big thing is the struggle of having a place on the role of being citizens of people also start organization when they say, we are now the citizens of Dubria Sam, and our organization is aimed to, and they, you know, they think about what does it mean to be a citizen in the new state? And all this is happening across the country, and all this is iterative, and numerous, numerous interaction, it's part of what makes this collective passion to democracy and the success of this operation. And about the last comment about the big challenge to democracy in India today, because of rising Hindu nationalism, you know, my hope is, and we talked about it earlier, I'm telling here a story, India became democratic really against odds, and it was not at all inevitable that this would happen. It's an unknown story, and I hope that by gaining new appreciation of this past, of learning about it, gaining appreciation of how Indians made their democracy, how people made it, it wasn't given by the British, it wasn't right, it's not a non-Western country ever did what India did. In France, women got the vote in 1946. In Switzerland, in some cantons in 1974. In this country, 69, 65, and look at the decent franchisement that is going on here. So by maybe gaining new appreciation of what Indian did, maybe it would be the source for some, you know, energies to cope with the challenges of the 21st century, which you just alluded to. So by making democracy so successful, it didn't mean that Indian democracy is better than other democracies, no, not necessarily. And it didn't mean that it won't have the same challenges that other democracies have. I would say the following. The fact that the way India made democracy was such that people, the electorate that India produced from the start is an electorate that is very vibrant, that ascribes a lot of meaning and importance to the right to vote. At least that suggests that in India there's more hope for change than in other places where voters are a bit more passive. So I'm finishing with the hope. All right, I hope you'll join me in thanking Ornith for this great presentation. Thank you for coming, thanks for meeting me. There's information about how to purchase the book outside. Look forward to seeing all of you here on May 8th for the next in the series. And I can't say enough nice things about this book. It's almost as if a black box has been opened up between the years 1947 and 1950 that there's just so much in here on every page. And I was telling Ornith before that you could sort of sense her own excitement as she was going through the archives, kind of coming out on the page. So thanks again for this and thanks for all of you for coming. Thank you. Thanks, Milena. Thanks for coming. Hi, Howard. How are you? So good to see you. Glad to see you. Talking about it. He started with coming out to India, Howard, and he contacted me the day I came. Oh, I was thinking the same thing. And I came to talk to him in a campaign in GK2 or whatever when I was like straight on the side, totally.