Recent controversies around the Election Commission of India’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise have cast renewed light on the constitutional origins and the ongoing debate over the Commission’s scope and independence. These debates echo the Constituent Assembly’s intense discussions in 1949 over whether State legislature elections should be supervised by independent State Commissions or centralized under a single national Election Commission. What was ultimately decided more than seventy years ago continues to frame present concerns about the balance between electoral integrity, autonomy, and federalism.
In the Draft Constitution submitted to the Constituent Assembly in February 1948, the structure of election supervision was more decentralized than what we know today. The central Election Commission was responsible only for parliamentary elections. Elections to State legislatures, by contrast, were to be overseen by separate State Commissions, each appointed by its Governor and operating independently of the central body. This was seen as compatible with India’s federal design, in which States would retain meaningful autonomy over their internal democratic processes.
This framework faced a substantive revision when Draft Article 289 came up for debate on 15 June 1949. At that point, B.R. Ambedkar, Chairman of the Drafting Committee, rose to move an amendment that fundamentally reshaped the scheme: he proposed placing elections to State legislatures under the jurisdiction of the central Election Commission. For Ambedkar, the move was not a matter of administrative convenience but of democratic survival.
Ambedkar’s Case for Centralizing Elections
Ambedkar explained that the Drafting Committee and the central government had received alarming reports from several provinces. Provincial governments, it was alleged, were “instructing or managing things” so that electoral rolls excluded groups who did not share the dominant racial, cultural, or linguistic identity of those in power. Such practices, if left unchecked, would disenfranchise minorities and fracture democratic legitimacy at the State level.
Ambedkar feared that State Commissions, being appointed and dependent on provincial executives, would not be strong enough to resist these manipulations. To guard against provincial misuse of power, he argued, State elections needed to be brought under the purview of a central, independent authority. The Election Commission, operating at the national level, could exercise impartiality and shield electoral processes from provincial bias.
Federal Concerns
Not all members of the Assembly were convinced. H.V. Pataskar directly rejected Ambedkar’s reasoning. In his view, if certain provinces were engaging in malpractices, the solution was to enforce accountability within those provinces, not to centralize election administration. For Pataskar, Ambedkar’s amendment was symptomatic of a broader pattern in the drafting process—a pattern that, he claimed, steadily eroded federalism in favor of a more unitary polity.
Kuladhar Chaila expressed similar reservations. To him, the debate was not only about electoral machinery but also about cultivating democratic habits in the provinces. “If you cannot trust the honesty of your own individuals you can never make a success of democracy,” he argued. Over-reliance on the central government, he warned, would leave the provinces perpetually dependent, unable to build local democratic capacity and more prone to unrest. In his federalist perspective, constant suspicion of provincial fairness threatened to undermine democracy just as much as electoral malpractice might.
Munshi’s Balancing View
K.M. Munshi took a more nuanced position. While he acknowledged the dangers of central overreach, he treated the problem of undemocratic practices with greater seriousness than Pataskar or Chaila. The Princely States, he noted, had scarcely any tradition of democratic governance, yet they were now becoming equal parts of the Union. For such regions, independent and credible supervision of elections was paramount.
Munshi pushed back against the claim that centralizing the election machinery eroded provincial autonomy. Elections, he stressed, were not about the relative power of governments but about safeguarding citizens’ political rights. State and central governments alike would have no role other than to provide administrative support to the Commission. Still, Munshi acknowledged that the Draft Articles, especially Ambedkar’s amendment, concentrated enormous discretion in the President of India. Such concentration risked exposing elections to indirect political pressures from the central executive. To mitigate this, he supported an additional amendment by Pataskar that subjected key electoral provisions to laws made by Parliament, thereby inserting a layer of legislative oversight.
The Compromise
In the end, the Assembly adopted both Ambedkar’s amendment (which placed State elections under the supervision of the central Commission) and Pataskar’s supplementary proposal (which ensured parliamentary oversight in certain areas). The compromise resulted in a hybrid system: elections were centralized under a single body designed to be insulated from government interference, while Parliament retained some power to shape elections.
This foundational compromise built the Election Commission of India as a strong, central authority, intended to secure uniform standards of fairness and impartiality across the Union. But it was also an arrangement with inherent tensions—between inclusiveness and federal autonomy, between independence and accountability, and between central authority and democratic habits at the provincial level.