How India held its first Lok Sabha election in 68 phases

As the days to the 18th Lok Sabha election draw closer — the first phase of polling is on 19 April — it is worth remembering how India carried out its first election back in 1951. The election was marked by Jawaharlal Nehru’s remark, “Naya Hindustan Zindabad.”

Just years after gaining independence, India decided to hold its first election between October 1951 and February 1952. The prospect of holding an election in the country as vast and wide as India attracted a good deal of interest and attention in the country as well as abroad.

As we gear up for this election , let’s take a look back at how India carried out its first ever poll and the challenges that officials faced then.

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Registering voters for the polls

The office of the Election Commission was set up on 25 January 1950 and Indian Civil Services (ICS) officer Sukumar Sen was appointed as its chief in March of the same year. A month after he was appointed the poll body’s head, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru announced that the country would go to the polls in the spring of the same year.

However, this in itself presented a major challenge. Firstly, neither the government nor the people had any experience of conducting or participating in such an exercise. Moreover, Sen had the daunting task of conducting an election wherein India had adopted adult suffrage — ensuring all the adult citizens of the country have the right to vote without any discrimination on the basis of caste, colour, creed or religion.

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In fact, when discussions over adult suffrage being adopted, many argued against it. It was felt that the number of voters under adult suffrage would exceed all reasonable bounds and that its adoption would involve too stupendous an administrative task for the governments. Additionally, the illiteracy of the voters was another argument against introducing adult suffrage.

However, the Constituent Assembly unhesitatingly adopted the principle of adult suffrage with full knowledge of the difficulties involved.

But Sen accepted the challenge and prepared the electoral rolls for the polls. His officials went from door-to-door to register every single voter. They were also given instructions that women would give their proper name for the rolls and failure to do so would exclude them. This is exactly why nearly 28 lakh women, mostly from Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan were left out of the first election because they failed to disclose their proper names.

As per official data, a total of 17.32 crore voters from across the country, barring Jammu and Kashmir, were enrolled, and 45 per cent were women.

Ballot boxes and party symbols

Another big task before the polls was the creation of ballot boxes and assigning party symbols. With majority of the voting population not knowing how to read or write, the Election Commission realised that printing names of the candidates and the parties contesting the election would not elicit the voters’ choice.

Hence, they decided to assign specific symbols to parties contesting the polls. For instance, the Congress, under Jawaharlal Nehru’s leadership, got the election symbol of a pair of oxen carrying a yoke’. The All India Forward Bloc, once led by Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, contested the first parliamentary polls on the symbol of hand’, now identified with the Congress.

Initially, the EC also thought of having different coloured ballot boxes for candidates, making the process easier for voters. Over a dozen manufacturers were contracted to supply 19 lakh steel ballot boxes. However, they soon realised that their plan wasn’t feasible and it was finally decided that there would be a separate ballot box for each candidate at all booths, with the candidate’s election symbol on it.

The EC also printed nearly 62,00,00,000 ballot papers for the polls. Each of them was the size of a Re 1 currency note and pink in colour, with “Election Commission India” inscribed on them. The voters were instructed to place the ballot papers in the box assigned to a particular candidate, and ballot was secret.

The first vote is cast

After all the hard work and many delays, the voting for the first election began in October 1951 and voting continued in 68 phases. The first to vote were the tehsils of Chini and Pangi in Himachal Pradesh days before the winter snows shut off their valleys from the rest of the world.

भविष्य के सफल चुनावों की नींव रखने वाले पहले आम चुनावों की क्या है कहानी... जानिए हमारे इस खास वीडियो में। #FirstGeneralElections#ElectionCommissionOfIndia#ECI #IndianElections pic.twitter.com/Dws6X0a01X

— Election Commission of India (@ECISVEEP) September 1, 2022

This was followed by voting across the country. On 10 December 1951, the residents of Thiruvella and Trichur Lok Sabha constituencies of Travancore-Cochin (present-day Kerala) cast their vote.

The next state to go to the polls was Bilaspur.

In Travancore-Cochin, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, Hyderabad and Punjab, polling commenced in December 1951. All the remaining states went to the polls during January 1952. Polling in the northern hilly areas of Uttar Pradesh took place in the second fortnight in February 1952, after snow had melted there.

Data revealed later that the highest turnout, 80.5 per cent, was recorded in the parliamentary constituency of Kottayam in Kerala. On the other hand, the lowest, 18 per cent, was in Shahdol in what is present-day Madhya Pradesh. The country as a whole registered a 45.7 per cent voter turnout, despite the high level of illiteracy.

It’s interesting to note that at the time when the election was being held in India, Pakistan’s prime minister Liaquat Ali Khan had just been assassinated. Elsewhere, Vietnam was in the midst of a war with the French and the prime minister of Iran had also been killed.

Big winners and losers

Once the election was conducted, counting began and it was on 2 April 1952 that the results were declared. The Congress emerged victorious, winning 364 of 489 Lok Sabha.

The likes of Jawaharlal Nehru and the Bharatiya Jan Sangh’s Syama Prasad Mookerjee emerged triumphant in the first elections. However, Morarji Desai lost in Bombay. But perhaps, the most shocking defeat was of BR Ambedkar, who lost to his former personal assistant, Narayan Sadoba Kajrolkar, by around 15,000 votes at the Bombay North Central seat.

Interestingly, it was a Communist, Ravi Narayan Reddy who received the largest majority, larger even than Jawaharlal Nehru.

A huge success

India’s first election, which came with a price tag of 10.45 crore, ended in success with Chief Election Commissioner Sen calling it “biggest experiment in democracy in human history”.

Nehru, as per historian Ramchandra Guha’s book India After Gandhi, said: My respect for the so-called illiterate voter has gone up. Whatever doubts I might have had about adult suffrage in India have been removed completely.”

With inputs from agencies