The Supreme Court's decision last week to uphold a Haryana government law putting in place educational qualifications for those seeking elections to village panchayats has prompted widespread dismay. The Haryana law requires candidates to have passed class X while women and Dalit male candidates must have passed class VIII. Adding to the complexity of requirements, the ruling also came down in favour of the notion that candidates must have a toilet at home - a requirement also in Gujarat, Karnataka and Chhattisgarh. To bar citizens from seeking electoral office because they have not had the good fortune to complete middle school in a country with as many rigid inequalities as India seems a backward step. It is particularly pernicious to the cause of women's empowerment as the education of girls has lagged their male counterparts and continues to do so. Electing women panchayat leaders has helped give women political leverage in their villages. But such laws are by no means anomalies. Rajasthan, which requires that a sarpanch has passed Class VIII, goes further and disallows leprosy patients. Andhra Pradesh not only disallows leprosy patients but broadens the discrimination to exclude the hearing and speech impaired as well.
It could be argued that creating such preconditions for people seeking to stand for election is contrary to the vision the Indian republic's founders had when they took arguably the greatest gamble in history and advocated that India must have universal suffrage, despite a literacy rate of just 12 per cent. It is hard to imagine what they would have said in response to the bench's observation that "only education gives a human being the power to discriminate between right and wrong, good and bad." It is safe to assume they would have been dismayed as well, not least since they constantly rebutted these sorts of arguments when used by Western governments to deny India and other countries in Asia and Africa self-rule. Many educated people have shown a propensity for wrongdoing, and many uneducated people have shown a nobility of thought and action.
The ideals of August 15, 1947 are worth reiterating. To its very foundations, India's democracy was based on equality. It was a bold bet that one way to rapidly overturn Indian society's deeply ingrained hierarchies was to adopt universal suffrage in a way that neither the American nor French revolutions had the courage or the vision to do. Several decades on, to place minimum qualifications of education on electoral candidates is to dilute that ennobling aspiration.
