Abstract
How Gandhi viewed elections? Scholars studying Gandhi have focussed on his strategies of ahimsa (non-violence) and satyagrah (insistence on truth), which produced conditions for mass mobilisation leading to successful decolonisation efforts in India. Though Gandhi recorded his views on franchise beginning with his petition to Natal Assembly in 1894, the researchers have not made much attempt to explore its nuances; those shaped Gandhi’s evolution as a democratic crusader in the context of India as a nation. His engagements with the issues of the franchise question in Natal connected him to traditions of elections in India, and his observation of suffragette in England made him conscious of the challenges of struggle in the manner of engagement with a powerful state. This article focuses on Gandhi’s engagement with various facets of elections in his early political days and argues that the ‘franchise question’ allowed him to understand India as a political possibility and the ‘suffragette’ informed his methods of mass engagement with the imperial powers.
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