Elections and electoral reforms in India / edited by Subhash C Kashyap

Electoral process and apparatus are basic to the design of a consti tution and the quality of government in a democracy. The electoral system is a determinant as well as a concomitant in modern democracies; it provides the institutional workshop for hammering out a government on the anvil of popular choice. It behoves us to ensure that this work shop operates efficiently and purposefully.

The history of electoral reforms reflects in a broad sense the up surge of public opinion as a decisive factor in the political processes, carrying in it the seeds of increasing politicization and democratization of the electorate. Pocket boroughs and restricted suffrage may seem to the British electorate today to belong to a distant past, but the truth is that the British people have only been progressively enfranchised by a series of reforms which began as far back as 1832 and which culminated as late as 1948 in the full and final establishment of the principle of "one adult, one vote,"