India, April 4 -- When India stepped into freedom in the autumn of 1947, democracy was deemed by many to be a doomed project - nowhere had such an impoverished country managed to even feed its own people and staved off external aggressors. Yet, that anxiety didn't stop India's founding fathers and mothers from bestowing unto the country an extraordinary promise of universal adult franchise. The residents of the young nation became voters before they became citizens. Beginning November 1947, bureaucrats in the Constituent Assembly Secretariat (CAS) worked under the guidance of BN Rau to realise the dream of universal suffrage.

It was an audacious experiment. Britain took nearly three centuries to extend the vote to all its adults. The US ...