When Gandhi Contemplated All Aged 21 or 18 Years To Have Voting Right and Possess Voter ID Card

WHEN the country is celebrating the  birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi on 2^nd October 2026 it is of crucial significance to hark back to his vision articulated in 1937 that voting age in India should be fixed for all eligible voters at the age of 21 or 18. After the Constitution came into force on 26^th January 1950 and India emerged as  a Republic universal adult suffrage, as mandated by Article 326,  became the basis for electing the MPs to Lok Sabha and MLAs to Legislative Assemblies of States and Union Territories.

It is well known that voting age in India was reduced for all voters from 21 to 18 by Rajiv Gandhi Government in 1988 when The Sixty-first Amendment of the Constitution of India, officially known as The Constitution (Sixty-first Amendment) Act, 1988, lowered the voting age of elections to the Lok Sabha and to the Legislative Assemblies of States from 21 years to 18 years. This was done by amending Article 326 of the Constitution, which concerns elections to the Lok Sabha and the Assemblies based on adult suffrage.

But the vision for  providing right to vote for all the 18 year old citizens can be traced to a letter Mahatma Gandhi wrote  to Mathuradas Trikumji  on September 28, 1937  stating, “If we think of the Congress policy in regard to franchise, all men and women aged 21 or 18 years should have a right to vote. But I see no harm if for some reason we have to adopt a middle course. I do not see any particular justice or merit in granting voting right only to the literate persons.”

It is thus quite clear that Gandhi envisioned voting age to be fixed at 18 as well.

Gandhi’s 1939 Advocacy for Voter ID Card  

“I should have thought that every voter had to produce an identification card before being allowed to register his vote.” Any body reading the sentence  would think that those were the words uttered by late Chief Election Commissioner T N Seshan who during his tenure spanning six years from 1990 to 1996 introduced several measures including photo identity cards as a vital step to clean up election system. But it is eye opening to note that those words are that of Mahatma Gandhi, the father of our nation.

On the occasion of the celebrations of his  birth anniversary on October 2, 2026, it is of seminal importance to recall those words articulated in 1939 by Gandhi. It is well known that there has been nation wide concerns expressed about the purity and integrity of elections and electoral process following the Indian Express Expose on the numerous infractions of rules and even the Constitution by Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar while conducting SIR across the country. It is well documented that the  purity and integrity of elections have been compromised by the conduct of Kumar and the issue of the erosion of independence of Election Commission has emerged as a issue of national concern.

That is why on October 2^nd this year opposition parties are organising country wide protests to uphold the purity and integrity of elections and electoral process.  

On this occasion it is important to remember Mahatma Gandhi’s article “Internal Decay” published in the Harijan on January  28, 1939. In it he referred to an election  organised in Tripuri to elect Congress delegates and invoked the complaint of some Congress leader who stated that he could not cast his vote as someone else had voted in his name. Such impersonation Gandhi characterised as “Internal Decay.” He stated that the person who was impersonated asserted with emphasis that  the  impersonation business was regularly organized and practised on a mass scale as soon as the polling had started. He suggested a measure to prevent impersonation and remarked that “…unless we  introduce the system of asking the prospective voters to produce their membership cards to be duly stamped by the issuing officers before slips are issued to them, nothing will do the trick . . . .”

But Mahatma Gandhi while describing the above suggestion as sound stated, “I should have thought that every voter had to produce an identification card before being allowed to register his vote.” He was prescient to foresee the problem which has been compounded since 1939 and so his  prescription for issue of a voter identification card more than five decades before T N Seshan did brought out his robust and profound vision to deal with a festering problem plaguing electoral process across the country.