The recent 2019 general elections in India elected more than 500 representatives to the Parliament: one did not have to belong to a particular gender, race, class or caste to vote. All Indian citizens who are otherwise not disqualified can elect their representatives. With the Constitution coming into force in 1950, unlike other countries, at one stroke India provided for a universal adult franchise. Its instant arrival, according to Khosla was ‘arresting given democracy’s troubled history in the decades preceding the end of British rule’. Many observers of that time argued against throwing open voting rights to all. The British Prime Minister Clement Atlee was sceptical of the democratic arrangements that India was heading towards. He wrote to Nehru: “The Asiatic republics are few and of recent establishment. Their record is not very encouraging. They tend to degenerate into dictatorships or oligarchies. They offer a prize for the ambitious authoritarian individual”. Ivor Jennings, English lawyer and academic, noted: ‘it may be possible to minimize the risks by creating a limited franchise or by balancing representation…narrow franchise, indirect elections, tribal representation may all be colonial conditions…merely because they are regarded as primitive in the Conservation Party Headquarters or Transport House’. Jennings conception of independent, democratic India was not rooted in the universal adult franchise. Forceful voices against the universal adult franchise did not deter India’s will to enfranchise all. This essay revisits how universal adult franchise appeared and was finally adopted in Indian political and constitutional history: a measure that forged a new political and democratic path for an independent India. The first part focusses on a franchise under British rule and the demand for the universal adult franchise within the freedom movement. The second part examines the Constituent Assembly debates around the adult franchise. This essay does not look at the operationalisation of the universal adult franchise: an exercise that began even before the Constitution came into force. Ornit Shani’s work in How India Became Democratic gives an illustrative account of how democracy was institutionalised through universal adult franchise. She examines the practical measures undertaken by the Constituent Assembly Secretariat (CAS), between 1947 to 1950, to make the universal adult franchise a reality. After the Constituent Assembly, in 1947, signalled the adoption of universal adult franchise, the CAS began preparation of the electoral roll: 173 million citizens were enfranchised. Shani claims that ‘the first draft electoral roll on the basis of the universal franchise was ready just before the enactment of the constitution. Indians became voters before they were citizens’.