Anubhuti Raje

India’s blanket ban on prisoner voting under Section 62(5) of the Representation of the People Act, 1951 (“RPA”), is facing renewed constitutional scrutiny in Sunita Sharma v. Union of India & Anr., W.P. (C) No. 909 of 2025. According to the Prison Statistics India by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), India houses over 450,000 undertrial prisoners, accounting for nearly 77 percent of its total prison population.

A mandarin picked in Nagpur does not become an export success at the orchard. It has to survive the 'mandi' (wholesale agricultural market), the trader, the grading table, the truck, the cold chain, the inspection desk and the port. At each stage, time is lost. By the time the fruit is ready to leave India, part of its value may already have dissipated. This is the lesser known problem behind India’s limited presence in global citrus markets.

As a student of law who always found political science interesting, I was taught how elections in India, more often than not, were battles of ideology, of competing visions of statecraft, of economic philosophy, and of constitutional direction. Increasingly, however, they resemble something else, what increasingly resembles catalogues.