Election Petitions and the Meaning of the People’s Sovereignty

The Preamble to the Indian Constitution (1950) begins with a classic invocation of the sovereignty of the people:  “We, the People of India.”  But the meaning of the “people” as a foundation for sovereignty remains—in India as elsewhere— an elusive concept.  This paper begins with the assumption that an important key to unpacking the “people’s sovereignty” as a concept lies in the meanings attached to voting as a simultaneously individual and mass act.   The tensions attached to the meaning of voting in this context are perhaps nowhere more clearly in view than in the history of election petitioning, a practice in which petitions are used to contest on legal grounds the political results of election contests.  The filing of post-election petitions is a practice which first came to India from the UK in the late colonial period, and which soon became a robust feature of Indian democratic practice.  There are, in fact, few democratic countries in the world that have had as vigorous a tradition of post-election legal petitioning as India.  This paper will trace the introduction of practices of election petitioning in the late colonial period, and explore its evolution into a central feature of India’s democratic practice.  It will then more speculatively trace the ways that election petitioning in post-1947 has both shaped, and provided clues to, the distinctive ways that the idea of the “people’s sovereignty” has been framed at the intersection between law and politics.