Independent India’s first elections were held from October 25, 1951 to February 21, 1952. To commemorate that monumental exercise, The Wire is publishing a series of articles exploring various aspects of the first ever general election in independent India. Read it here.
Democracy in India is a source of immense national pride, and a cornerstone of the identity of this country. It did not, however, have a smooth start. Immeasurable struggle and the indomitable will of India’s nation builders and people combined to make the second most populous country the largest democracy in the world.
The foundation of all democracies is free and fair elections. The first Indian elections were held from October 25, 1951 to February 21, 1952, with an astronomical 173,212,343 registered voters of whom 105,950,083 exercised their newly acquired voting right. The geographical vastness of India, which even today poses a formidable challenge, was deemed insurmountable in the 1950s by most observers and experts.
Interestingly, the backdrop of the 1952 elections was as much a strategic consideration as it was a political one. While India became independent in 1947, it remained a dominion. A British governor general remained at the head of the Indian political system, greater in stature than the prime minister. As the Constitution, promulgated on November 26, 1949, came into effect on January 26, 1950, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was anxious to get the elections underway as soon as possible. Democracy and the establishment of the will of the people were the main premises on which the struggle for independence was waged, and without elections that premise would remain unfulfilled. The man this mammoth task was entrusted to was Sukumar Sen, an unsung hero of Indian democracy.
Sen, an ICS officer, was the chief secretary of West Bengal when he was called to be the first chief election commissioner of India. A month after he was appointed in March 1950, the Representation of the People Act was passed in Parliament, which provided the framework for the elections, mainly the electoral rolls. A year later, the Representation of the People Act, 1951 was passed dealing with all the remaining matters about the conduct of elections. It is not clear why the two Acts were given the same name.
It was decided that the electoral process would be started as early as 1951. It was mandated that any Indian citizen 21 years or above of age residing in a particular constituency for more than 180 days would be eligible to vote from that constituency.
It is significant that poor and backward as India was, it still gave its people, men and women, an equal vote, while it took the so-called greatest democracy, the US, 144 years and the UK 100 years to give equal voting rights to women.
In a country with a massive illiteracy (84%) with key identification documents missing from lakhs of residents due to the turmoil of the Partition, this was perhaps a significant challenge. But at the same time, the step was a befitting homage to the ideals of democracy and representation that had fuelled an independence struggle spanning over half a century. In the heralded democracies of the West, such as the US or the UK, elections are held with two or at best three competing political parties. In India, however, the first elections saw 53 registered political parties (including 14 national parties) competing for 489 seats for the Lower House of Parliament.
At the time of independence, there were 17 provinces of British India which were reorganised into states, and then there were princely states, 565 of them, dotting the country. These had to be reconfigured into the existing provinces, which ultimately led to 14 new states and six union territories which formed independent India. This reorganisation was the first challenge the Constituent Assembly Secretariat (CAS), the body in charge of preparing the electoral rolls, faced, before the Election Commission of India was created and took over the task.
The second challenge it faced was the aftermath of Partition riots, refugees and rehabilitation. The Bengal and Punjab borders were virtually porous, with refugees coming in almost every day throughout the later months of 1947 and even after. There was widespread confusion amongst both administrators and the masses regarding where exactly the international borders between India and Pakistan were. It was in the midst of this confusion that the CAS undertook the task of preparing the first electoral rolls for registering 173 million first-time voters two years before the Election Commission came into existence. This made the formidable task of Sukumar Sen easier.
Not to be missed in this exercise is the foresight of the bureaucracy of the Constituent Assembly Secretariat led by B.N. Rau, the Constitutional Adviser (CA), to start advance action. The other staff members who were directly and continuously involved in the work of the preparation of the electoral rolls, in what came to be known as the Franchise Section, were the joint secretary, S.N. Mukerjee and under secretaries, K.V. Padmanabhan and P.S. Subramaniam who joined in late 1948 and then took over from Rau. Interestingly, as Ornit Shani observes, the CAS made the Indians voters before they even became citizens.
A voter during the first elections in India scans symbols before casting a ballot. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
The Election Commission of India (ECI) was created as an independent autonomous constitutional body. While introducing draft Article 289 (which later became Article 324 in the final Constitution) on June 15, 1949, in the Constituent Assembly, B.R. Ambedkar, the chairman of the Drafting Committee, explained the rationale for an independent central and federal Election Commission. Thus, an independent Election Commission was constituted which was vested with the superintendence, direction and control of preparing electoral rolls and the conduct of elections to Parliament as well as state legislatures and to the offices of the president and vice president of India.
The first elections of 1952 under Sukumar Sen were pivotal, because they set the standard for all subsequent elections. Sen started from scratch. There was no staff, permanent or temporary, no infrastructure, no training facilities, no institutional memory, as a large number of the staff who had conducted the 1944 assembly elections had either migrated or were killed in the riots. Sen started with a clean slate.
Of the 489 parliamentary constituencies, 314 were single seat constituencies, 172 were double seat constituencies (including one general category candidate and one SC or ST candidate) and three were triple seat constituencies (containing one candidate of each category). A total of 1874 candidates, including 533 independents, contested.
Ballot papers were printed at the Govt Security Press, Nasik. A whopping 1,96,084 polling stations were set up, of which 27,527 were exclusively for women voters. Each candidate was allotted a coloured box with his name and symbol painted on it. The turnout was 45.7%, which was considered quite decent under the prevailing circumstances. However, as much as 80.5% voter turnout was recorded in Kottayam district in Kerala, a testament to the enthusiasm of the Indian people to exercise their franchise.
These elections proved to be a benchmark for future endeavours, taking care of every minute detail to make the election a success.
Transport to the remotest parts of the country was arranged by any means available, including camels and elephants. Ballot sheets, ballot boxes and indelible ink were prepared, political party symbols were designed and allotted to make things easier for the mostly illiterate voters. Attention to detail was given regarding every possible factor, including the weather. In certain tehsils like Chini in what is now Himachal Pradesh, locals went to polls earlier than the rest of the country as the winter snow would make the passes leading to the tehsil impassable. In village Kalpa in Kinnaur valley, a young man called Shyam Saran Negi became the first known voter to cast his vote. He hasn’t missed a single election ever since and is now, as the oldest living voter, a media celebrity.
Interestingly, the polls were held in 68 phases.
What makes the first Indian elections even more extraordinary in context is the international situation at the time. When India was going to polls in late 1951, Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan in neighbouring Pakistan had just been assassinated, pushing the country towards the first of its many military dictatorships. The government of South Africa had just disenfranchised the Cape Coloured people, the last non-white people who had had voting rights in the country. Vietnam had plunged into war against the French, and the prime minister of Iran was assassinated. It was amidst this chaos of war and violence that a fledgling nation fought to establish and uphold its democratic values and its promise to a colonised people who had fought for decades to gain their independence.
Today, after over seven decades, the great Indian election has become a global benchmark for free, fair and credible elections. Although there have been several electoral reforms during this period, the most prominent of which is switching over from the individual coloured ballot boxes, to ballot papers and eventually the electronic voting machines, perhaps 80% of the system remains what its founder, Sen, had created from scratch. In absence of mass media exposure, he did his job also discreetly. He remains an unsung hero of Indian democracy.
S.Y. Quraishi is the former Chief Election Commissioner of India and the author of An Undocumented Wonder: The Making of the Great Indian Election.
