Gandhi's First Political Fight: The 1894 Struggle for Indian Voting Rights

What was Gandhi's first political campaign?

In 1894, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, a lawyer working in the British colony of Natal, launched his first organized political campaign. Its target was a bill in the Natal Legislative Assembly designed to remove Indian residents from the colony's voters' roll, according to Wikipedia's entry on the Natal Legislative Assembly Bill. The campaign came three decades before Gandhi returned to India to lead the independence movement.

Natal law already limited the franchise mainly to men who owned immovable property worth 50 pounds, the news outlet The Leaflet reported. The new bill singled out Indians specifically: according to South African History Online, it exempted Indians who were already on the voters' roll, but it permanently barred any other Indian resident -- regardless of property or qualifications -- from ever registering to vote.

How Gandhi organized the opposition

Gandhi helped draft and circulate petitions against the bill. One petition addressed to the Natal Legislative Assembly gathered signatures from about 10,000 Indian residents, according to Wikipedia. A separate appeal to the British Secretary of State for the Colonies, Lord Ripon, was formally submitted around 14 July 1894 under the names of Hajee Mohamed Hajee Dada -- who would become vice-president of the Natal Indian Congress -- and sixteen others, according to South African History Online. The petitioners rejected the claim that Indian voters would overwhelm European ones, noting that Natal had roughly 45,000 European and 45,000 Indian residents at the time.

Gandhi went on to help found the Natal Indian Congress in 1894 to continue the campaign beyond the initial petition drive. Hajee Mohamed Hajee Dada, who had helped lead the appeal to Lord Ripon, became the new organization's vice-president, according to South African History Online.

Did the 1894 campaign succeed?

The Natal Legislative Assembly passed the bill on its third reading on 2 July 1894, South African History Online reported. The British Crown initially disallowed the measure, partly because it named Indians explicitly, according to The Leaflet. After Natal received self-governing Responsible Government status, the colony passed a new law, Act 8 of 1896, that achieved the same disenfranchising effect without naming race directly. Indians in Natal lost the parliamentary vote, Wikipedia states.

Gandhi kept writing about the issue after the bill passed. On 16 December 1895 he published a piece titled 'Indian Franchise,' challenging colonial authorities' demand that Indians prove they had already been registered voters in India before qualifying in Natal.

From a colonial franchise fight to universal suffrage in India

The Natal campaign sought to preserve a narrow, property-based right to vote for Indians who already qualified under colonial law -- it was not yet a demand for universal suffrage. The idea that every adult citizen, regardless of property, education, gender or caste, should have one vote developed over the following decades inside the Indian nationalist movement. The Constitution of India Bill of 1895 had already proposed giving every citizen a single vote, according to the legal research site Constitution of India; the Indian National Congress's Karachi Resolution of 1931 later demanded that any future constitution rest on adult suffrage, the same source states.

A 1946 publication titled 'Gandhian Constitution of Free India' called for universal adult suffrage, Constitution of India's historical account notes. India's Constituent Assembly adopted the principle largely without debate in 1949; it became Article 326 of the Constitution, which provides for elections based on adult suffrage. The first general election held under that rule, in 1951-52, registered about 173 million voters, with Sukumar Sen serving as India's first Chief Election Commissioner, according to Constitution of India and the Hindi-language outlet Usthadian.