Participation is often reduced to answering an adult’s question. This was a different proposition.
Bal Adhikar Manch groups across six villages held elections. Thirty-six children stood as candidates. Five hundred and eighty-three cast votes. Monthly meetings were to continue afterwards.
The process asked participants to think about who should represent them. It asked candidates to communicate with peers. It asked the groups to accept a collective result they had not each individually chosen.
What matters is not that it copies an adult political system. It is the habits: taking turns, listening to disagreement, telling a shared concern apart from a personal preference, expecting your representative to come back and report.
The elected children discovered the other half of it - that holding a title does not produce leadership. They had to notice issues, convene the discussion and carry back what the group decided.
DEHAT facilitated rights and life-skills learning, helped organise the election and supported the recurring meetings. The children supplied the legitimacy. Schools, parents and community actors created the permission that let the groups function at all.
Six groups, one common process, hundreds of children experiencing a formal choice. Democracy became something done rather than described.
Democracy became something done, not described in a textbook.
Practise It Early
A children’s forum with a real election and a monthly meeting builds the civic habits that adult institutions later assume people already have.