2.1 Democracy as a Choice: The Path India Took

The previous chapter showed how independent India faced the colossal challenge of nation-building. That challenge did not stand alone. It came hand-in-hand with another, equally difficult task: the challenge of building democratic politics. Electoral competition between political parties began almost the day after Independence. In this chapter we look at the first decade of electoral politics in independent India to understand three things — the establishment of free and fair elections, the dominance of the Indian National Congress^? in the years immediately after 1947, and the rise of opposition parties together with their distinct policy positions.

You already know the difficult circumstances in which independent India was born. Faced with similar problems, the leaders of many newly liberated countries elsewhere in the world concluded that their nations could not afford democracy. They argued that national unity must come first, and that democracy would only introduce divisions and conflict. As a result, many countries that had freed themselves from colonialism slipped into non-democratic rule. This took various shapes — a "nominal" democracy effectively controlled by one strongman, single-party rule, or outright army rule. Each non-democratic regime promised to restore democracy "soon"; very few ever did.

India's conditions were no less daunting, but its leaders chose the harder path. Any other choice would in fact have been surprising — the freedom struggle was itself profoundly committed to the idea of democracy. The leaders did not see politics as a problem to be suppressed; they saw it as the means of solving problems. Every society needs to decide how it will govern itself. There are always different policy alternatives, and there are always groups with conflicting aspirations. Democratic politics is the answer to the question: how do we resolve those differences peacefully? While competition and power are the most visible features of politics, the real purpose of political activity is to identify and pursue the public interest. That is the route India took.

2.2 From Constitution to Ballot: Setting the Stage for Elections

Last year you studied how the Constitution of India was drafted. The Constitution was adopted on 26 November 1949, signed on 24 January 1950 and came into effect on 26 January 1950. At that point an interim government was running the country. The Constitution had laid down the rules; now the actual democratic machinery had to be assembled. The first task was to install a democratically elected government.

In January 1950, the Election Commission of India^? was set up. Sukumar Sen^? became the first Chief Election Commissioner of India. Initially, leaders thought the first general elections could be held later that very year. The optimism was understandable — the Constitution was ready, an interim government was functioning, and the country was eager to vote. But the Election Commission soon discovered that holding a free and fair election in a country of India's size was an undertaking of historic proportions.

2.3 The Mammoth Exercise: Why the First Election Was Postponed

Holding an election demanded two preliminary tasks: delimitation (drawing the boundaries of the electoral constituencies) and the preparation of the electoral rolls (the list of all citizens eligible to vote). Both tasks consumed enormous time. When the first draft of the electoral rolls was published, the Commission discovered a serious flaw: nearly 40 lakh women had not been recorded by their own names. They were entered simply as "wife of …" or "daughter of …". The Election Commission refused to accept these entries and ordered revision wherever possible and deletion wherever necessary. It was a powerful early signal that women were full and equal citizens of the new republic.

Preparing for the first general election was a mammoth exercise. No election on this scale had ever been conducted anywhere in the world before. At that time there were 17 crore eligible voters in India, who had to elect about 3,200 MLAs and 489 Members of the Lok Sabha. Crucially, only 15 per cent of these eligible voters were literate. The Election Commission therefore had to design a special method of voting that did not depend on reading. The Commission also trained over 3 lakh officers and polling staff for the conduct of the elections.

2.3.1 An Experiment with Universal Adult Franchise

It was not just the size of the country that made this election unusual. The first general election was the first major test of democracy in a poor and largely illiterate country. Until then, democracy had existed only in prosperous nations of Europe and North America where almost everyone was literate. At that very moment, several European countries had not yet given the right to vote to all women. In this context, India's experiment with universal adult franchise^? from the very first election appeared bold to the point of being foolhardy.

An Indian editor called this election "the biggest gamble in history". The magazine Organiser wrote that Jawaharlal Nehru "would live to confess the failure of universal adult franchise in India". A British member of the Indian Civil Service claimed that "a future and more enlightened age will view with astonishment the absurd farce of recording the votes of millions of illiterate people". Sceptics, both Indian and foreign, were waiting to see democracy fail.

2.4 Voting in a Largely Illiterate Country — A Special Method

Because most voters could not read names on a ballot paper, the Election Commission devised a creative method. Inside each polling booth a separate steel ballot box was placed for each candidate, with the candidate's distinct election symbol printed on it. Each voter received a blank ballot paper which they had to drop into the box of the candidate they wanted to vote for. Roughly 20 lakh steel ballot boxes were used for this purpose.

The labour involved in setting up just one booth was extraordinary. A presiding officer from Punjab later described how he prepared the ballot boxes — each one had to carry the candidate's symbol both inside and outside, the candidate's name in Urdu, Hindi and Punjabi on the sides, the constituency number, polling station number and polling booth number. A signed paper seal had to be inserted in a token frame, sandpapered surfaces had to be prepared with brick or sandpaper for the labels, and all this had to be ready the day before polling. He recalled that it took six persons — including his two daughters — about five hours of work at his home.

This multiple-box-with-symbols system was used for the first two general elections (1952 and 1957). From the third general election (1962) onwards, the method was changed: now the ballot paper carried the names and symbols of all candidates and the voter stamped beside the candidate of choice. This second system worked for nearly forty years. Towards the end of the 1990s the Election Commission began using the Electronic Voting Machine (EVM), and by 2004 the entire country had shifted to EVMs.

2.5 The Election Itself — October 1951 to February 1952

The elections had to be postponed twice and were finally held from October 1951 to February 1952. Although polling actually spanned six months, the contest is universally referred to as the 1952 election because most parts of the country voted in January 1952. It took six full months for campaigning, polling and counting to be completed. The election was thoroughly competitive — on average more than four candidates contested each seat, and 14 national parties along with 60 state-level parties entered the field.

The level of public participation was encouraging. More than half of the eligible voters turned out to vote on the day of polling — roughly 45 per cent turnout. When the results were announced, even the losing parties accepted them as fair. The Indian experiment had proved the critics wrong.

Observers outside India were equally impressed. India's general election of 1952 became a landmark in the history of democracy all over the world. After 1952 it was no longer possible to argue that democratic elections could not be held in conditions of poverty or limited literacy. The 1952 election proved that democracy could be practised anywhere in the world.

2.6 The Result — The Indian National Congress Sweeps the Nation

The results of the first general election did not surprise anyone. The Indian National Congress was expected to win this election. The Congress had inherited the legacy of the national movement; it was the only party then with an organisation spread across the country; and in Jawaharlal Nehru, it had the most popular and charismatic leader in Indian politics. Nehru led the Congress campaign in person, touring the length and breadth of the country.

What did surprise many people was the scale of the Congress victory. When the final results came in, the Congress had won 364 of the 489 seats in the first Lok Sabha — finishing far ahead of every challenger. The Communist Party of India^?, which came next in number of seats, won only 16 seats. State Assembly elections were held simultaneously, and the Congress also scored a sweeping victory there, winning a majority in all states except Travancore-Cochin (part of present-day Kerala), Madras and Orissa. Even in those three states, the Congress eventually formed the government. The party therefore ruled at both the national and the state level. As expected, Jawaharlal Nehru became the Prime Minister of free India after the first general election.

2.7 Why 1952 Was Called a Landmark

The first election did much more than fill the seats of Parliament. It changed the global conversation about democracy itself. Before 1952, mainstream political theory in the West held that democracy required three pre-conditions: a literate citizenry, a wealthy society, and a homogeneous population. India had none of those. Yet democracy worked. The election of 1952 stood as living proof that ordinary people, even when very poor and largely unlettered, could responsibly choose their own government.

2.8 The Sceptics Were Wrong — A New Political Equation

The achievement of 1952 was therefore double. Politically, India installed its first democratically elected government at the Centre and in nearly every state. Philosophically, India settled the question of whether democracy could survive in a poor society by simply practising it. The Congress dominance that followed in the next two general elections — 1957 and 1962 — must be read against this backdrop. The dominance was not the dominance of a dictator; it was the dominance of a party that kept winning free and fair elections in a fully competitive system. That is the story we will continue in the next part of this chapter.