Did the British Empire resist women’s suffrage in India?

The US took 144 years to give equal voting rights to women. Suffragettes in UK took nearly a century to win the vote. Women won the vote in some cantons of Switzerland as recently as 1974. But Indian women got the right to vote the year their country was born.

Ornit Shani, author of an excellently researched new book on how India received universal adult franchise in 1947, says the move was a "staggering achievement for a post-colonial nation" in the midst of a bloody partition that killed up to a million people and displaced 18 million others.

In independent India, the number of voters leapt more than five-fold to 173 million people - nearly half of the total population - and included 80 million women. Some 85% of them had never voted before. (Unfortunately, 2.8 million women voters had to be excluded from the rolls because they failed to disclose their names.)

But, as Dr Shani's book, How India Became Democratic: Citizenship at the Making of the Universal Franchise, shows women's suffrage, unlike under colonial rule was not questioned.

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British officials had unfailingly argued that the universal franchise was a "bad fit for India," says Dr Shani. Elections in colonial India were exercises in restricted democracy with a limited number of voters casting their ballots in seats allotted along religious, community and professional lines.

In the beginning, Mahatma Gandhi did not support women gaining the vote, and urged them to help men fight the colonial rulers. But, as historian Geraldine Forbes writes, Indian women's organisations fought hard to demand voting rights for women.

source:www.bbc.com