Well, first of all, thank you. And those who can't be here for asking me to come speak today,
I think I'm very grateful to you for giving me this chance to talk to a new set of people,
a few familiar faces, perhaps in the room, but basically it's a new set of people.
And to share some of the, I suppose, thoughts or that really William Goldeneye in the book that you just mentioned sought to explore.
So I'll just start off that.
So can I have a look behind you? But it may have stopped, so I may actually look at my watch to see how far how far through my stuff I've gone.
So I think it's a surprise to anyone in the room for me to say what I'm about to say,
which is that some say just transition from colonialism to independence in 1947 was undoubtedly, let's change the slide.
Undoubtedly, one of the most momentous global events of the mid-20th century, the 20th century as a whole.
I would suggest, not surprisingly,
bear for the early post-colonial years in the subcontinent now exercise a great pull for a whole range of historians who, put it very simply,
explore this period on the one hand to identify legacies, continuities, legal changes from the colonial era,
and will be able to identify developments that may help to explain processes at work that in the 21st century.
So as I just said in my paper today, I'll be drawing on the book and there is great boundaries of belonging that William Gould and I published,
the 2019, which itself came out of a project with which we and others it was a it was very much a collective project,
investigated the various transitions from subject to citizen,
from subject to citizen political citizenship that took place in the context of early colonial post-colonial role of South Asia.
Now we chose because of our own familiarity with them, but also because we felt that they work well together to focus on two localities.
We got the word locality into the title of our book, so on to localities where they say to do in India and the province of Sind in Pakistan.
And you can maybe just about make them out from the map, but it's probably a bit small.
For us, these hinterlands, as we think of them of partition,
provided us with an effective context for examining broader meanings of independence for India and Pakistan's new citizens.
What these places also had in common was that they were both located in close
proximity to where Central State power was directly exercised of the 1947,
namely the then federal capitals of Delhi and Karachi, Karachi being Pakistan's capital in those early days.
So I explore developments on both sides of this new 1947 border through the same lens was intended,
we hoped, would allow us to draw attention to how the state, in its various guises,
operated in these two new countries,
as well as what being a citizen could signify for ordinary Indians and Pakistanis during a time of undoubted flux and uncertainty.
The fluid and fluctuating links between Pakistan and India were epitomised brutally by continuing
connections between people moving back or moving from one to the other and sometimes back again,
together with the movement of information or sometimes misinformation in both directions,
all of which combined to directly affect conceptions of who belonged where.
Notions of citizenship. And along with this, what being a citizen in practice entailed.
Came to be closely linked with a politics of belonging, not belonging to the new states involved.
Moreover, during the early postcolonial years, ideas about and feelings of citizenship were created,
forged at stake by contingent processes of interaction between the state,
states representatives and institutions at different levels, different forum and society citizens in the making.
And much of this engagement was linked to interactions and experiences taking place at the level of the everyday things.
By which I mean specific local level configurations of governance,
governance practices and discourses and bureaucratic representations themselves
rooted in ongoing contingencies of power relations and social contexts.
This concept of the everyday state, which is now deployed across the humanities and social sciences,
had its basis in, I suppose, ethnographic approaches to the presence of the state in marginal areas,
but then became expanded to encompass both the strategies of the state to assert itself and the responses of the people concerned.
In other words, looking at everyday processes of state formation means looking at how actors in specific
localities are impacted by and react to efforts of state actors to reorder social,
political and economic life.
And when we get as well include and I first began this joint project that eventually resulted in this book, although there were other outputs,
as they call them along the way, we were very influenced by seeing, for example, this particular volume perhaps familiar to you.
Published in 2001, an edited volume in which Fuller and I famously argued that in contemporary what was then, I suppose late 20th century India,
state and society emerged in the daily lives of most Indians,
and the boundary between them was blurred and negotiable according to social contexts and position.
Hence their work focussed on how the large, amorphous and impersonal Indian state affected the day to day lives of ordinary citizens.
Or put another way, for many people living in South Asia.
The state perhaps represents all this. This is how people wrote about it.
A machinery through which things could get done. Even fixed with its formal rules.
Diverted or manipulated. Using the right context or influence.
So as that working the system to to to very big sense anyway.
So deploying this approach the history and let's say the historical specificities of South Asia now recognised as providing really an ideal space
and ample scope for investigating the distinct yet intertwined means through which the post-colonial state reconstituted itself after 1947,
alongside the development and the consolidation of different kinds of practices and also resistances to.
By exploring the state.
In this way, light can be shed on the complexity of both states society relations, as these reveal themselves in the everyday contexts of local life,
including specific considerations of full governance practices as well, as well as ongoing contingencies.
Power relations and social contexts.
Now political independence in South Asia,
not surprisingly heightened popular expectations as to how governance on the part of the state would operate.
After that 1455 August. Turning point.
Decolonisation will be the part, in short cultivated new public expectations about what the change would mean in people's everyday lives.
But often in practice, when we look at the period more closely, we find disconnections between what India and Pakistan as new citizens heard in
the lead speeches that could be relayed to them in the press or by word of mouth,
or if they attended a public gathering and what they experienced first hand at the level of the province or district
or the city or town in which they lived and where they interacted with that state and its representatives.
And these are just two photographs taken from those early, early years.
And on the left, you can only just about make them out. But at a public meeting held in Lahore in August 49, for instance,
of then Prime Minister Tony Khan asserted that everyone in Pakistan had the same light and he used the word rights to be provided with food,
shelter, clothing, education and medical facilities,
implying that the State recognised its responsibilities for providing run of the mill necessities, run of the mill necessities of life.
And a similarly paternalistic vein at the public meeting in New Delhi battalions was at the end of January 1948.
So around the time that Gandhi was assassinated,
the Indian counterpart to Nehru had identified as a major national problem the raising of 340 or 50 million people,
raising them economically, certainly raising them educationally.
So this kind of signalling really of the practical,
the game as the day to day meanings and expectations of rights of citizenship helped establish that broader context within
which Indians and Pakistanis engaged with the new realities of what it meant to be a citizen in the post 47 environment.
So my paper today is really focusing on the dynamics or some aspects of these dynamics between citizens and the everyday state as these unfolded.
And I'm going to take the whole business of elections really as the as the lens or prism through which to explore this and the elections,
whether they actually took place or not. Let's do that. Because they didn't always or didn't always take place when they expected.
So I'm going to be drawing on a chapter in that book by William Booth and myself,
where we look at Constitution making and the people's experiences of elections.
And in that chapter, we start off by, I suppose, quoting a very famous poem left by Rob Garrison, entitled Vacate the Throne of the People are Coming,
set to be written on the 26th of January 1950, the day when India's constitution became effective.
So here comes the biggest republic in the world. Prepare the throne for the 300 million people.
The coronation is not of the king today, is of the people.
We'll come back to that to get it. Now.
Road Day is 2018 book A People's Constitution The Everyday Life of Law in the Indian Republic.
I think it's done a great service by showing how the Constitution takes in the context of India,
rather than being a document just written in English created by the consensus of the little influence on India's greater population.
In fact, this is designed to transform really the daily lives of citizens in profound and lasting ways.
Indeed, the Constitution, according to day, came a line in the popular imagination.
So much so that ordinary people attributed meaning to its existence, took recourse to it and argued with it.
In other words, a day of use. The Constitution decisively made a difference in people's lives.
In the post-colonial period, particularly during the Nehruvian, is from 1950 to 1964.
Nor should we underestimate the amount of popular interest taken in the making of the Constitution itself on both sides of the border.
Indeed, the progress of India's constitution making was closely followed in Pakistan, albeit, I suppose, inflected by awareness.
The developments across the border in India were proceeding at a faster pace.
So in January 1950. Influential English newspaper, Dawn.
So the timing of what I'm about to share with you weekly coinciding with the inauguration of the Indian Constitution,
a limited series of three linked articles entitled Pakistan.
Those things appeared in them.
The author set out ideas about what constitutes a supposedly civil liberties.
And these are just some quotes from both those articles.
So civil liberties. It was all part a part, rather, of the rights of citizenship that an individual commands as a citizen of a state.
What you may ask, what is a citizen and what is meant by the rights of citizenship?
He also proceeded to answer the question by then, explaining that while some civic duties were imposed by law,
a good citizen, as he put it, realises the highest freedom in discharging all the moral and legal duties of citizenship.
Because true freedom implies existence for everyone of the opportunity to contribute,
of the richness of one's own experience to the furtherance of the common good.
And so for him, a good citizen should not be a passive instrument at the hands of government.
Rather, citizens should exert themselves to find out what is conducive to the welfare of the body of the body politic of which they are a part.
And one way in which Indians and Pakistanis anticipated that they could pursue their
newly acquired rights and responsibilities as citizens of these independent states.
Whether or not that constitution was in place and we shouldn't forget to mention people were well aware of this,
but it took until 1956 for Pakistan's constitution would be promulgated in contrast to 1954 India.
One of the ways of doing this was by taking part in elections, participating in elections.
So just to quote, because, again, the prospect of this of this participation of citizens in independent states,
free, free, independent states was was exhilarating.
So it's equivalent to give way. Listen to the thunderous roar of the charity of time.
They keep the throne and the people are coming.
But of course, elections meant engaging with the state, not simply the politicians that led it, but also the, say, the government servants,
the bureaucrats and different levels within the bureaucratic hierarchy who were responsible for organising the polls from drawing
up lists of eligible voters to making sure that there were enough boxes into which those same voters could deposit their voting,
says elections also offered opportunities for people to end frustrations with the second Brigade.
Very often it was their encounters with it at the everyday level with the frustrations that they had in these situations.
So again, turning to work, as others have done,
which coincided with with the project that William Gould and I were running in her 2017 study, How India Became Democratic,
which provides really a very detailed exploration of the preparations underpinning India's first general election over the winter of 1950 152.
Audit Shani argues that the drawing up of electoral rolls based on universal franchise ahead or
rather than following the promulgation of the Constitution because those roles will be put together.
The way before the Constitution was actually would being expended produced
debates about citizenship often driven from below by Indians of varying means,
but also including Indians of more modest means.
While tremendous political and administrative efforts went into the making of the
Universal franchise for what was the largest electorate in Democratic history,
the production of the actual electoral rolls themselves,
the paperwork that underpinned this exercise informed the process of constitution making really from the ground up.
So this is a very, I suppose, poor summary of some of the key elements in what all shiny sought to present in that book.
And from as early as November 1947,
a Constituent Assembly Secretariat had set in motion the preparation of those draft electoral rolls based on the universal franchise,
implementing what would turn out to be the first, I suppose,
constitutional promise to be fulfilled by the new Indian Republic,
namely the principle that every adult citizen would have the right to vote with the aim of
holding fresh general elections as early as possible after the new constitution came into force.
Moreover, during the putting together of the lists,
Shawnee argues that more Indians grew to conceive of their voting rights as a basic constitutional guarantee,
and hence various citizens organisations were established to safeguard the right to franchise that it promised.
Numerous other Indians, meanwhile, fought to get their names entered on the roll to ensure their voting rights as citizens.
As far as casting a vote itself was concerned.
When the first Indian general elections were held between October 51 and February 1952,
political figures across the spectrum expressed doubts about the readiness and
preparedness of India's largely ruled society for universal suffrage after all.
As people reminded others, please 85% of the electorate.
Could neither read or write. In addition, the size of the Indian general election was unprecedented at the global level.
There were to be in the figures also huge,
but there were to be around 25,000 candidates standing in or across central and state assemblies for something like four and a half thousand seats,
500 for the central parliament, the rest for provincial parliaments.
There were almost 225,000 polling booths with 2 million sealed boxes, ballot boxes made from some huge amount of tons and tons of steel.
As William dug out and, you know, there were 12,000 polling stations, 50,000 booths.
While it was estimated that around half of the state's total police force of 55,000 were engaged in the maintenance of law and order during this time.
Again, the figures go on.
16 and a half thousand class were appointed to collect the electoral rolls, nearly 400,000 reams of paper used for printing the rolls.
That was something like 56,000 presiding officers with a further 280,000 helpers and that 225,000 or so police officers.
The voting stations themselves were spread over more than 1 million square miles in the case of remote hill villages.
Even bridges had apparently had to be specially constructed to facilitate people getting to the polls to cast their vote.
Maybe not so surprisingly for one American observer.
This all added up to a challenge of colossal proportions.
The well-known British observer, Pindar Lu, for one, went so far as to suggest that it was an absurd farce,
watching millions of illiterate people registering their phones.
In the event, levels of participation prove to be encouragingly high.
There is election speeches were delivered to around 2 million people at something like 300 mass meetings in terms of turnout.
Bombay, the city with the greatest density of polling stations, saw levels of around 70% while in and cool coach in these reach nearly 80%.
Despite the often large distances involved and the inaccessibility of many villages,
some of which the participation rather of rural voters living in vast constituencies,
some of which have populations of over 350,000, was higher than in the towns.
As we all know what I think we will be familiar with election symbols,
what used to be a literate cast that Bongiorno will account for a party and for another a half a tree,
perhaps multiple ballot boxes, one for each party to use to prevent mistakes by voters.
And indeed, scientists have developed an indelible ink to foil impersonation that involves the use of some 400,000 files buildings.
So just the sheer size and quantity and extent and scope of this election related activity did I think a
great deal to necessarily familiarise but introduce in some cases the new state to its new citizen this.
Ahead of the elections. A documentary on the franchise and its functions and the duty of the electorate was shown in thousands of cinemas,
and many more voters were reached through broadcast from the Arabian posters and
emblems everywhere to be seen in shops and booths on the old colonial statues.
And for instance, it said that in Bengal a common practice was to paint votes for Congress on the backs of stray cows.
Indeed, such was the success of these elections,
despite inevitable complaints about electoral misdemeanours in due course that the new US ambassador to India trust,
the balls changed his view from initially thinking that the country would need a benevolent dictatorship for a period he came to believe.
Also, he commented that illiteracy was no ball to, quote, intelligent voting.
All the saying in places such as U.P.,
there were allegations in the run up to the elections almost well that were often rather centred on the choice and background of the candidates,
mostly linked with black markets activities of the kinds of use the MENA,
but also involving accusations of nepotism and alleged association with criminal organisations.
There was likewise disgruntlement expressed regarding how full the Congress leadership had become
distanced just in the short time since independence from the everyday concerns of ordinary citizens.
However, despite claims regarding the deterioration of India's principal political party,
there was a sense in the final months before the election that exercising the vote was an exercise in rights assertion itself.
Newspapers were filled with discussions of how to overcome the aforementioned structural challenges of the electorate.
So the literacy, the distances and extent of the electoral operation itself, and even knotty problems of election expenses.
So that in a sense, this is the situation in India.
That's just so I mean, I've been focusing on India. I'll turn my attention now to to Pakistan.
And let me turn our attention to to Pakistan. We see the events the events that.
Through the post partition years I'm holding and somewhat different.
Unlike Indians, Pakistanis did not have the opportunity to take part in a general election until 1977,
till nearly two decades after their neighbours had first gone to the polls as fully as full fledged citizens,
with a vote to cast direct comparisons with India as far as the experience of working people at a national level.
During excuse me the first decade of their dependents of tricky to draw.
All the same. People in Pakistan spent much of the 1950s actively anticipating elections, getting ready for them,
and occasionally even participating in the little provincial or local level.
So while the scale of Pakistanis experiments in democratic participation were considerably more tentative than their Indian equivalents,
the significance invested in these occasions in terms of hope and expectation, I would suggest, could be just as high.
But is for both the new Pakistani state and its citizens.
Simply preparing to vote became a rite of passage as far as what being a citizen promised,
with enormous emphasis placed on putting the necessary electoral scaffolding in place as a first necessary step.
I was in India, in Pakistan. Voting or voter registration rather assumed enhanced means,
particularly taking place as it did against the backdrop of the long term impact of politicians demographic upheavals.
Indeed to judge from available records. The authorities there,
the various levels expended a lot of effort during this period trying to work out who was living
where and in what precise numbers as part of wider public preparations in anticipation of voting.
From periodic hit counts throughout the 1950s,
driven by the need to quantify the whereabouts of displaced refugees in cities such as Karachi and elsewhere to the
more specific preparation of electoral rolls number counting assumed political even nation building significance.
So in a similar fashion to the challenge facing India in the run up to the 1950 152 national general election,
there is a drawing up of electoral rolls, whether it's city or province or optimistically, as it turned out, national level.
Repeatedly tested the Pakistan state's capacity to identify, verify and record those of its.
New citizens deemed eligible to vote in a number of cases.
Elections were postponed if not cancelled, ostensibly because the authorities were unable to make the necessary preparations in time,
but also thanks on occasions to official concerns about the elections likely wrong outcomes.
So if we take just some of some examples of this in the case of the elections to the Karachi Municipal Corporation,
so we're talking city level elections that were scheduled for early 1953.
The floors were all to evidence of council procedural maladministration, produced a storm of public protests,
leading one contemporary to comment that quote perfection in the use of one of the major instruments of representative democracy.
Free elections fairly conducted, has not yet been attained in Pakistan.
If the situation resulting from the recent balloting for members of the Karachi Municipal Corporation is any indication.
And despite all the talk beforehand about fair and well organised elections, quote, In many wards,
political polling arrangements were not ready in time, leading to many complaints about mismanagement and inefficiency.
Both independent candidates and Muslim League candidates complained say the
polling booths were either not in place or closed at the scheduled voting times.
So the practicalities left a great deal to be desired.
When Pakistan's first provincial election had been held, but was held in the Punjab in March 51.
So going back to before those Karachi elections, the shortage of housing, the high costs of rents as well as utilities and food,
unemployment and undisguised favouritism in the allotment of property was expected by many contemporaries
to produce widespread opposition to any one or any thing associated with the central government.
In due course. With the votes counted, the league emerged perhaps suspiciously victorious and the low turnout of only around 30%,
together with the party's unexpectedly clear margin of victory,
prompted widespread complaints that the election's being a farce, a mockery and a fraud upon the electorate.
Critics claim that more than 50 contestants had won their seats precisely thanks to their relationship with government officials.
And in many eyes, these kinds of, quote, illegal tactics constituted a blot on the face of democracy.
As a subsequent Electoral Reform Commission report flagged up, quote, government servants had to be unequivocally,
unequivocally directed to keep themselves altogether aloof from politics.
They must not be allowed to canvass or otherwise interfere or use their influence
in connection with or take part in elections to the legislative bodies,
except by way of freely exercising their right, the right to vote.
This apparent high moral stance will be retrospectively, however,
did not prevent the authorities themselves from playing a last minute trump card on the day before those polls or the polling itself started.
Bold newspaper headlines announced that an attempted coup and so you will be familiar with this history.
The Robert Kennedy conspiracy had been foiled.
So just that they feel these elections there was this shock horror headline that a conspiracy had been foiled.
And while newspapers refrained from explicitly calling on voters to support the ruling party,
the implication of this apparent coincidence was clear the nation had been placed in danger.
Pakistanis, in this case Punjabis, needed to back the party that had averted this crisis, namely the Muslim League.
On the other hand, perhaps surprisingly,
the election for Sydney's provincial legislative assembly eventually took place in May 1953 after some delays.
They had originally been scheduled for a year early put off.
Those elections impressed some members of the public by the extent to which they appeared to be more fair and impartial than many had been expecting.
The then election commissioner, Syed Hashim Raza, it seems and taken personal responsibility.
At least he took personal credit, I suppose, for ensuring that the administration would perform its duties, in his words, honestly and impartially.
He had told the province to, quote, set the election machinery in gear,
outlining the measures that included different coloured ballot boxes for the different parties so as to
assist the illiterate and strict orders to government officials were made to remain aloof from factionalism.
All the same, I think we should note the district local polls, which had been scheduled to begin in March that same year, were once more postponed.
So there's a continual sort of refrain of local elections at different levels being postponed on the grounds of,
quote, two elections and about the same time with overwhelm the administration.
Now, only one sixth of the voters in this Legislative Assembly election were women.
And this, I think, highlights or reminds us of the gendered realities involved in electoral participation at this time,
and also of the additional challenges facing Pakistan's female citizens in the making at the highest level.
Again, perhaps not surprisingly, the failure to include any women members in Pakistan's second constituent assembly in
mid 1955 triggered a range of responses from female activists who complained that,
quote, Women must have a voice in the lawmaking of the country, especially when the question of their rights is involved.
If at the very outset they are ignored, how can they hope to get justice in matters concerning them?
In 1956, when the assembly minus any direct female involvement had finished drafting the constitutional paperwork, it was in their capacity as, quote,
surprise and pain that citizens that these same female activists argued that the country's leaders had, quote,
called on us and called upon us many times over the past eight years to play our whole part in the life of the nation.
And yet they had not repaid this commitment by guaranteeing full rights.
Meanwhile, of course, the key provincial election in terms of wider Pakistan political impact was the one that
had taken place in changing the screen that had taken place in East Bengal in March 1954,
whose results rippled, I should maybe say, ripped across the country as a whole.
This poll involved some 20 million voters, of whom the vast majority had never participated in any election before.
Despite the rhetoric of East Bengal's incumbent Muslim ministry,
which repeatedly stressed its expected victory, one report reminded observers that, quote,
The ordinary man is made aware at every point of an administration and a political party,
which to him seemed to him to be full of individuals who are personally corrupt and feathering the openness at his expense.
As another contemporary commented, quote, The Muslim need to spare no effort on the organisational side to win this election.
Controlling as they do the electoral machinery, the administration, the police, the nominal funds.
They stand a good chance of pulling it off by hook or by crook.
The fact is that the election is not free and fair,
and the league commands infinitely greater resources of inducement and force and fraud than the United Front,
the opposition coalition which actually did lose those elections.
So my my last example today, I suppose, returns to my own personal comfort zone, namely the city of Karachi,
where, again, we're talking about municipal elections that took place in April 1958.
So towards the end of the 1950s, and which Karachi still being the federal capital,
were regarded by contemporaries as a crucial test of public opinion.
When national elections still appeared, we'll be able to mystically to be in the offing in the event these election results confirm the faction ridden
nature of the city's politics and public frustrations with mainstream politicians more than anything else.
So these Karachi level elections once again exposed the practical challenges involved in, say,
registering citizens to vote with the names of only around a quarter of that was about 450,000 of the city's eligible electorate,
having been included in those lists drawn up by the end of February that year.
Holding Pakistani nationality was still not at that time an automatic requirement or proof of voter eligibility.
Instead, with full one nationality still in many cases to be confirmed, the criteria were first adult food.
Secondly, a minimum of one years residence in the city.
And thirdly, appearing on the electoral roll themselves that as a victim, a sort of circular, circular process at work.
This meant, though, that people still living on footpaths, as many, many were in Karachi in the late fifties,
were restricted from voting as they had no officially recognised fixed abode.
So citizenship was this very sort of what was I was going to say sticky.
But I didn't mean that but. Fluid.
Fluid concept or reality is a better word.
Anyway, before the vote the polls took place. Forecasts suggested that the city would remain a stronghold of the Muslim League yet again.
That sort of optimistic expectation on the part of different forecasts is helped by support from Karachi's large refugee population.
As it turned out, the election results revealed a picture of political life that was far less cut and dried.
For a start, the elections demonstrated an urgent need for electoral procedures to be tightened up if the general election was going to stand.
Any chance of being free from charges of vote rigging and party organisation, generally speaking, was also going to have to step up again.
This was apart from having controls the league, the Jamaat e Islami outperformed expectations,
winning 18 of the 25 seats that it contested, as well as running a more tightly organised campaign.
Its manifesto offered a raft of practical solutions to Karachi's many problems.
On the one hand, it promised somehow to provide housing and improved hygiene facilities both needed.
On the other, it committed to bring about Karachi's moral uplift through a programme of education, abolition and prohibition.
According to Jamaat leaders, the party's success in these will be at this level,
elections hinged on voter disillusionment with established parties and politicians whose
failure to deliver on repeated provinces over the previous decade alienated voters,
or at least alienated a relatively significant proportion of them.
Either way, elections such as these in Karachi highlighted the frustrations of people living
in the city with the everyday circumstances that daily trials and tribulations.
While the authorities decision to dissolve, the corporation was presented as a relief to cope,
the 2 million exploited terrorists and displaced citizens of Karachi.
Others suggested that, quote, In the present democratic age, this is before the military had intervened and taken power.
The death of any democratic organisation at the hands of government cannot be considered proper.
Comments such as these, I suppose,
point to high levels of contemporary public concern regarding exactly what method of action over the long run would be taken to,
quote, reform the irregularities and make the corporation a democratic organisation.
The same questions put also to the country more broadly at what was a very delicate time.
That same in Pakistan's political storm.
So I'm really coming round to my conclusion now.
So this is not a hugely long paper. I hope that gives us more time to discuss the need to hear your own thoughts.
But I'll just I'll just put some concluding, put together with some pictures to look at in the backdrop.
So what I've tried to do in this paper is address just one aspect of what is clearly a much larger issue,
namely the process of people across South Asia getting their voices as citizens heard through the
mechanisms of elections at one level or another in the early post-colonial years across South Asia.
What citizenship meant remained a work in progress.
In this context, voting and equity not voting came to represent the degree to which to progress.
Let's put that in inverted commas. But each country was making as far as tiny people who had only been subjects under colonial rule,
very restrictive when it came to things like the franchise into bona fide citizens was concerned with that.
Right. The intrinsic inherent right to vote.
In India, as I've indicated, while the outcome of the first national elections proved to be more successful than some observers had anticipated,
the polls provide the people with the opportunity to vent their frustrations alongside engaging with the state in a new fashion or in a new fashion.
For the vast majority of them in Pakistan,
the deceptively simple act of casting a vote was less and less straightforward and ultimately a more unsatisfying process.
But elections that did take place there proved to be well-supported on the whole, at the local level, at least,
even if the various representatives of the state involved went to great pains to try to secure the outcomes that they desired.
In many ways, ordinary citizens in both India and Pakistan tended to share similar assumptions that exercising
their democratic democratic rights was an inescapable dynamic of political modernity.
Thanks to the ongoing interaction of a matter such as the preparation of those electoral roles,
we can see the idea of universal franchise becoming meaningful or at least more meaningful,
having some kind of meaning for both Indians and Pakistanis.
Even when elections failed to materialise in Pakistan or failed to keep to their original timetable.
I think we should not overlook the fact that they remain keenly anticipated and the
subject of much of the heated public discussion articulated in different forums.
So I suppose what William and I hope the study of boundaries of belonging would encourage
was further thinking about the changing modes of active political citizenship,
which was shaped by forms of political engagement in Pakistan and India in the late forties and fifties.
In the first five years, let's say after independence, both new states faced in many ways comparable public complaints regarding everyday governance,
which were, to a great extent, interrelated and closely connected.
In both. The everyday problems that people encountered, however,
did not create a sense of fatalism about political redress or undermined popular belief in the importance of representation.
Even though factional politics quickly mapped onto the patrician patronage networks of resource allocation,
accusations of maladministration, corruption and the like,
it would seem did not hinder Indians and Pakistanis from exercising or seeking to exercise what makes what
they saw as their hard won democratic rights as citizens of new states excited about what the future holds.
So that's where all things I just put some slides up at the end.
You might think you have these slides linked to anything she's just been saying, but I thought, well,
you know, the kind of a slide that at least gave you a glimpse of contemporary Pakistani elections.
Let me believe. Trust. So thank you. But aside.