Question

The right to vote in elections in India is a:

• A. Fundamental right
• B. Constitutional right
• C. Statutory right
• D. Customary right

Answer 1

The Correct Option is B

The Correct Option is (B):Constitutional right

Answer 2

This question asks how Indian law classifies the entitlement of a citizen to vote in elections, a point that has been argued more than once before the Supreme Court.

1. Fundamental right: the right to vote does not appear in Part III of the Constitution among the fundamental rights, and the Supreme Court, going back to N.P. Ponnuswami v. Returning Officer (1952) and repeated later, has consistently held that it is not a fundamental right. So this option does not fit.
2. Constitutional right: Article 326 itself provides that elections to the Lok Sabha and to the state Legislative Assemblies shall be on the basis of adult suffrage, entitling every citizen who is not less than eighteen years of age, and who is not otherwise disqualified, to be registered as a voter. Because this entitlement is created directly by a specific provision of the Constitution, and not merely by an ordinary law that Parliament could have chosen not to pass, it is commonly described as a constitutional right, even though the Representation of the People Act then regulates how it is exercised in practice, such as the process of registration and the grounds for disqualification.
3. Statutory right: some judgments, including Jyoti Basu v. Debi Ghosal and Kuldip Nayar v. Union of India, have described the right to vote as a creature of the Representation of the People Act and called it a statutory right, since the mechanics of registration, eligibility and disqualification are all worked out in that Act rather than in the constitutional text itself. This shows the classification has genuinely been debated across cases, but the source of the underlying entitlement to adult suffrage remains Article 326 of the Constitution.
4. Customary right: a customary right arises from long-standing practice or usage recognised by law over time, which does not describe universal adult suffrage in India, a right that was consciously and deliberately built into the Constitution in 1950 rather than inherited from custom.

Because Article 326 is the specific constitutional provision that confers the entitlement to vote, with the Representation of the People Act only regulating its exercise, the right is best classified as flowing from the Constitution itself.

So the correct answer is Constitutional right.