Municipal elections there had been in India for a long time past, and elections for the Councils since 1909, but on a very restricted franchise or by indirect processes.  To provide a real measure of popular representation, and even to secure the usefulness of the reforms as a means of political education for the Indian people, the franchise was now placed on as broad a basis as possible, whilst in mapping out the constituencies the principle of separate representation for particular races and creeds and special interests had to be taken into account.  The territorial basis prevailed largely, and rural and urban constituencies corresponded roughly to county and borough constituencies in this country, but besides the “general constituencies” for all qualified electors indiscriminately, “special constituencies” had to be created wherever required for “community” representation, whether of Mahomedans, or, in the Punjab, of Sikhs, or, in Madras, of non-Brahmans, or, in the large cities, of Europeans and of Eurasians, besides still more specialised constituencies for the representation of land-holders, universities, commerce, and industries.  There was no female suffrage, and no plural vote.  No elector could vote both in a “general constituency” and in a “special” one.  The qualifications laid down for the franchise were of a very modest character.  Illiteracy was no bar, as to have made it so in a country where barely 10 per cent of the adult males attain to the slender standard of literacy adopted for census purposes would have reduced the electorate to very insignificant proportions, and many Indians who cannot read or write have often quite as shrewd a knowledge of affairs as those who can.  The franchise varied in slight details from province to province, but generally speaking was based on a property qualification measured by payment of land revenue or of income-tax or of municipal rates.  Military service counted as a special qualification.  Under these regulations about 6,200,000 electors were registered, or nearly 2-3/4 per cent of the total population throughout India under direct British administration, excluding the areas to which the Act of 1919 was not to apply.

The regulations, however, merely supplied the rough framework; the task of compiling the lists of qualified electors devolved upon the Government officers and special election commissions appointed ad hoc throughout the country, and to the much-abused Civil Service mainly belongs the credit of having made it possible to hold the elections within less than a year of the passing of the Act.  In the Bombay Presidency, for instance, where I had my first opportunity of seeing the new electoral system at work, the electoral rolls finally included some 550,000 electors out of a population of about 20,000,000 of widely different races and creeds, speaking three absolutely different languages.  Even more laborious than the compiling of voters’ lists was the task of explaining