The first Indians to cast votes in general elections were a group of Buddhists from the tehsil of Chini in Himachal Pradesh; they cast their votes ahead of others in October due to their valleys being shut by snowfall in January and February of 1952 when the rest of the country voted.
Once in every five years, each person in India is equally important. Once in five years, the magic of democracy is repeated and the impoverished, the rich, the malnourished, the obese, the literate and the illiterate sail in the same boat. The first general elections in India were nothing short of a miracle; to get at least some part of India’s humungous population to contribute to the establishment of a new republic. Strangely, for an event of such great importance, it has not received much attention from dilettantes or historians.
India is one of the very few nations which forayed into the realm of democracy arm in arm with the universal adult franchise; most countries like the UK and the United States reserved the right to vote for men of property and then men from the working class with the women excluded until a very long time. India championed voting rights for everyone [through the Representation of the People Act of 1951] even before the UN hosted the Convention on the Political Rights of Women in New York which released the first international law document to protect women’s political rights and suffrage. By initiating this emphasis and drive for inclusion, the government created an intricate mammoth task for itself. While inclusivity sounds rosy, in practice it is a very rocky ship to master. Including men and women of all classes meant accommodating 176 million people out of which approximately 85 per cent could not read or write which in turn meant that the election process had to be simplified greatly and was to become a process of assistance to the practice of democracy.
To handle this mammoth task, the mathematician civil servant Sukumar Sen was appointed as the Chief Election Commissioner on March 21, 1950. While proposing the People’s Representation Act, Nehru expressed a wish for election in as early as the spring of 1951. However, realising the herculean task and challenges in front, Sen deferred it by another year and the first general elections were held in early 1952 [voting had begun in some areas which would become inaccessible due to climate from October 1951].
Sen’s efforts in organising the elections were tireless; he personally visited every state in order to check the preparedness and attended at least one polling rehearsal in almost every state. He had realised the challenges that an election practice of such a monumental scale brought with itself. In his own words, the elections were “like re-joining of a historic thread that had been snapped by alien rule.”
Identifying and registering voters, the very first step in any election, was perhaps the hardest due to the remarkably low literacy level of the population. The voters had to be approached for information collection in every corner of this vast and varying country. However, this exercise was stupendously successful considering that only about seven million adults out of 176 million were left out; it must also be noted that out of these seven million, about 2.8 million people were women who refused to give their real names and wanted to be registered under the patriarchal possession epithets such as Wife of A or Daughter of B which led to their disqualification from electoral registers.
Party symbols, ballot boxes and ballot papers were prepared for a largely unlettered population. A rather unique feature of the Indian electoral process is the dazzling range of political parties that take part in it. The first elections saw a total of 26,120 candidates file their nomination papers, contesting from a myriad of parties such as the Indian National Congress, JB Kriplani’s KMPP, the Socialist Party, the Hindu supremacist Jana Sangh, Ambedkar’s Scheduled Caste Federation and the Communist Party of India. The candidates submitted a fee of Rs.50/- along with their nominations.
Another feature of elections which has remained mostly the same since the first elections is the process of campaigning; visual symbols and cues, door to door campaigning, large rallies and one to one canvassing appeals just as much to the illiterate populace as it does to the literate ones. Invoking caste and religious solidarities, painting symbols on cows, inter-party attacks and using specific iconographies to invoke a community feeling were used in the first elections to canvass votes, and these practices persist even after decades.
The voting process ended by the last week of February in 1952, and the entire election process concluded on June 4, 1952, when the West Bengal Legislative Council election was completed by the tireless efforts of numerous people. 16,523 clerks spent over six months in comparing the rolls with delimited constituencies, about 700,000 polling duty personnel and nearly 340,000 policemen were detailed for polling duties all over the country. 60 percent of the registered voters exercised their right to vote among many many magical tales of the people’s dedication to voting; from tribals coming to the booths with elephants and bows and arrows in Orissa to old frail woman 110 years of age in Madurai who came to vote propped by her grandsons on either side. India’s true magic lies not in its oriental mysticism but in the persistence of its people’s will to run a democracy.
Pavitra is a second year History student at Lady Shri Ram College for Women. She writes about culture, History and politics.
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