India's First General Election Ran From 25 October 1951 to 21 February 1952 Under Sukumar Sen, With 17.32 Crore Enrolled Voters and a Symbol on Every Ballot Box

India enrolled 17,32,13,635 voters (17.32 crore) for its first general election, and 8,86,12,171 of them cast a vote, according to the Election Commission’s own report on the poll, published in 1955. It was the first national election held on adult suffrage, with every citizen aged 21 or more entitled to register. The report runs to two volumes of 249 and 889 pages, according to the review it received in the Journal of Asian Studies in 1956. Polling for the House of the People and the state assemblies ran from 25 October 1951 to 21 February 1952, a window the Lok Sabha Secretariat confirms. The Indian National Congress won 364 of the 489 elected Lok Sabha seats.

The man who made it work was Sukumar Sen, a civil servant who had been Chief Secretary of West Bengal from 1947 to 1950. The Press Information Bureau records that he served as the first Chief Election Commissioner from 21 March 1950 until 19 December 1958. The body he headed is the one that, under Article 324, still runs every national election.

Why the vote could not be held in 1950

The Constituent Assembly decided on adult suffrage before the Constitution was finished. Article 326 puts it into the text: every citizen of at least 21 years, the age the Constitution originally set and the Sixty-first Amendment lowered to 18 in 1989, may register as a voter. On 24 November 1949, during the final debates, the member Manikya Lal Varma of the United States of Rajasthan told the Assembly: “If the experiment of adult franchise proves successful it will be well and good for us.”

The Commission’s report lists why 1950 was too early. Parliament had not yet passed the election law. The President had not yet notified the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, so the number of reserved seats could not be fixed; those orders came on 10 August and 6 September 1950. Constituencies could not be drawn until the population of each state was settled. The Representation of the People Act, 1950 passed on 20 April 1950 and dealt with rolls and constituencies. The Act of 1951, which governs the conduct of the poll, was enacted on 17 July 1951.

The Prime Minister told Parliament on 19 April 1950 that he hoped for elections in the spring of 1951. On 14 November 1950 the President’s address to Parliament moved the date to the second half of November or early December 1951, citing the unfinished law and, in Bihar, a food shortage. Ramachandra Guha writes in The Caravan that Sen’s training as a mathematician may be why he asked the Prime Minister to wait.

Building the rolls from nothing

Before 1951 only about 14 per cent of the population in British India’s provinces could vote, the report says, because the franchise was tied to tax, property and literacy. The new rolls had to be built village by village. By the report’s count India excluding Jammu and Kashmir had 35,66,91,760 people in the 1951 census and 18,03,07,684 adults. The rolls carried 17,32,13,635 names, leaving about 70 lakh adults off them, some of whom may not have qualified. The Commission called the enrolment “reasonably satisfactory”.

The work ran through 1,652 Electoral Registration Officers for administrative units, usually revenue officers, and 1,529 Revising Authorities, judicial officers who ruled on claims and objections. Punjab revised its whole roll because land allotments to displaced families had produced large numbers of duplicate entries. Across the country 82,497 double entries were removed. In the early rolls, refugees who had come from Pakistan after Partition could register on a declaration of intent to live permanently in a town or village, whatever their length of residence.

A symbol for every party, a box for every candidate

The report puts literacy at about 16.6 per cent. A ballot paper with names printed on it would have meant officials marking votes for most voters, which the Commission saw as the end of the secret ballot. It chose a symbol system. Each candidate had a separate ballot box with a symbol and the candidate’s name pasted on it, and the voter dropped a blank ballot paper into the box of the choice. The Commission rejected painting boxes in colours after seeing the Mylapore assembly seat in Madras, where 14 candidates stood.

Symbols had to be familiar and easy to tell apart, and the Commission barred any object with religious or sentimental associations, giving as examples a cow, a temple, the National Flag and a spinning wheel. Twenty-nine parties asked to be recognised as national parties. After a conference on 30 July 1951 with the main parties, the Commission recognised 14. Its allotments included two bulls with a yoke for the Congress, a tree for the Socialist Party, a hut for the Hindu Mahasabha, an elephant for the Ram Rajya Parishad and a lamp for the Jan Sangh. A list of 26 approved symbols issued on 8 September 1951 also had a cycle, a boat, a pitcher, a ladder and a camel for others to choose from.

The states bought 24,73,850 ballot boxes and Madras used 1,11,095 wooden ones when a steel-box supplier fell behind, about 26 lakh in all. They cost Rs 1,22,87,349. Paper seals took the place of locks, which the Commission estimated saved about Rs 1 crore. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research made the indelible ink that marked a voter’s left forefinger, and the States received 3,89,816 phials.

The polling stations and the people who ran them

The poll was run from 1,32,560 polling stations with 1,96,084 booths, or about one booth for every 884 voters. The report estimated that it needed about 9 lakh polling staff, drawn almost wholly from government employees, local bodies and aided schools, and 3,38,854 policemen were detailed to polling duty. The Commission suggested that presiding officers be government or aided-institution employees drawing Rs 60 a month or more, and it asked only that polling officers be literate.

The report notes an almost complete lack of experienced hands in many states, and the Part B states, formed by merging former princely states, found staff hardest to get. The Commission held mock polls, starting at Udaipur on 5 August 1951 with the Chief Election Commissioner supervising, and then in every state. Calcutta, with 826 polling stations and 1,918 booths, voted in a single day with 4,175 polling officers and 11,052 policemen. Where custom kept women from the polling stations, the states set up 27,527 booths for women alone, and mixed booths ran separate queues in alternate batches.

Counts of the machinery differ between sources. Guha’s essay gives 224,000 polling booths and 2 million steel ballot boxes, and Rasheed Kidwai of the Observer Research Foundation gives 224,000 polling stations. The Commission’s report gives the 1,32,560 stations and 1,96,084 booths above, which this article follows.

Snow, sand and forest: why the poll took four months

Chini and Pangi in Himachal Pradesh had to vote before the first snowfall, which usually comes in early November. The last seats to vote, in the northern hills of Uttar Pradesh, waited for the snow to melt and finished on 21 February 1952. Notifications were issued on 10 September 1951 and the poll was held on 25, 27, 29 and 31 October and 2 November. It then took about a week to carry the ballot boxes to Chamba and Kasumpti for counting. Across Himachal Pradesh polling stretched over 37 days, with voting on 17 of them.

In the hills of Outer Manipur the Commission secured porters through the hill chiefs by promising those who helped a piece of red blanket and a gun licence. Polling parties in Tripura used elephants in places and otherwise walked about 40 miles a day. In the Rajasthan districts of Barmer and Jalore, Army vehicles stuck in sand until every jeep in the state was pooled, and parties in Jaisalmer and Jodhpur travelled by camel in caravans. In Assam, advance parties marked the route to polling stations on tree trunks. Rajasthan’s control room at Jaipur ran in three shifts, and the report says no poll was adjourned because a party failed to arrive. Turnout in the hill tracts of West Bengal was 85.2 per cent and in the Rajasthan desert 27.7 per cent.

The whole programme, from the first notifications on 10 September 1951 to the West Bengal Legislative Council election on 4 June 1952, took more than eight months. Some summaries, including the Observer Research Foundation’s, give 27 March 1952 as the end of polling. This article follows the Commission’s report and the Lok Sabha Secretariat.

The result

The report gives the overall turnout as 51.15 per cent, the 8,86,12,171 voters who voted out of 17,32,13,635 on the rolls. Summaries often quote 45.7 per cent instead. The two numbers count different things. In the Commission’s constituency tables, the Cachar-Lushai Hills seat, which elected two members, shows 6,27,706 valid votes and 47.69 per cent, which equals those votes divided by twice its 6,58,171 electors. In a two-member or three-member constituency each voter had two or three votes, so total votes run well above the number of voters.

The 489 elected seats were in 314 single-member, 86 two-member and one three-member constituency, 401 constituencies in all. Of them 72 seats were reserved for Scheduled Castes and 26 for Scheduled Tribes. The Congress won 364 seats. The Communist Party of India won 16, the Socialist Party 12, the Kisan Mazdoor Praja Party 9 and the Jan Sangh 3. Of 93 candidates returned unopposed, 72 were Congress. Independents were 349 of the 748 candidates who lost their deposits for the House of the People. The House of the People held 499 members in all, counting eight nominated members from Jammu and Kashmir, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and the tribal areas of Assam, and two Anglo-Indians nominated by the President.

The Lok Sabha Secretariat says the House was constituted on 17 April 1952, its first session began on 13 May and G. V. Mavalankar was Speaker from 15 May. The Commission put the cost of the elections from 1948 to 1952 at about Rs 10.4 crore (the table of state totals adds to about Rs 10.45 crore), of which about Rs 5 crore was the Government of India’s share, or 9 annas 6 pies a voter for the state and central elections together.

The women who were struck off the rolls

About 45 per cent of the enrolled voters were women. The Commission found that in several states women had been entered under a relation, as the mother or wife of a named man, because local custom kept them from giving their names to strangers. It ruled that an elector’s name is part of identity and that a woman who would not give hers should not be registered. Officers were told to fill in names in place of descriptions, and Bihar received an extra month to do it. Guha quotes Sen calling the practice a “curious senseless relic of the past”.

The report counts nearly 80 million women voters, of whom nearly 2.8 million did not give their proper names and had their entries deleted, almost all in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Bharat, Rajasthan and Vindhya Pradesh. Guha writes that Sen regarded the outcry over the omissions as good because it might help the prejudice fade before the next elections. The Commission wrote that it expected women’s organisations to work more closely with registration officers, and that recent reports showed no difficulty in any state.

On polling day the Commission recorded 2,306 challenges to voters’ identity, 1,732 of which were rejected, and 58,887 tendered votes, cast on special ballot papers by voters whose names had already been used and not counted. It reported 817 cases of alleged personation and said complaints of personation reached it from a few urban areas. Nepal and Indonesia sent official teams to study the election. Sen later chaired the international commission that supervised Sudan’s election in November and December 1953, and the Sudanese election used the Indian law and procedure with changes.