The first general election, 1951-52, and changing methods of voting

Detail

Legal base for the first election

• Election Commission of India (ECI): the constitutional body that runs elections to Parliament, the state legislatures and the offices of President and Vice-President. Article 324 gives it the "superintendence, direction and control" of elections.
• Universal adult franchise (Article 326): every adult citizen can vote. Property, education, caste and sex do not matter. In 1951-52 the voting age was 21. The 61st Amendment, 1988 lowered it to 18.
• Reserved seats: some seats are set aside so that only SC or ST candidates can contest them. Article 330 does this for the Lok Sabha and Article 332 for state assemblies.
• Laws behind the poll:
• The Representation of the People Act, 1950 covers seats, constituencies and electoral rolls.

• The Representation of the People Act, 1951 covers how elections are conducted, candidate qualifications, corrupt practices and election disputes.

• Sukumar Sen was India's first Chief Election Commissioner (CEC), from 21 March 1950 to 19 December 1958. He ran the 1952 and 1957 Lok Sabha elections together with the assembly elections. Both were run on universal adult franchise, with almost no earlier example to follow [2].

Conduct of the poll

• Postponed twice. Polling ran from October 1951 to February 1952.
• It is called the "1952 election" because most of the country voted in January 1952.
• First votes: cast at Chini (Kinnaur, Himachal Pradesh) on 25 October 1951. This hill area voted early, before the snow closed the roads.
• Long process: campaigning, polling and counting together took six months.
• Simultaneous elections: the Lok Sabha and the state assemblies were elected at the same time. They stayed in step in 1957, 1962 and 1967 (see Mains).
• Competitive contest:
• 1,874 candidates stood for the Lok Sabha in 1951-52, which works out to about 4.67 candidates per seat [3]. (NCERT: "more than four candidates" per seat.)

• Only 45 of the candidates were women [3].

• Turnout: ECI statistics put it at about 45%. (NCERT: "more than half" of those eligible voted.)

• Seats and constituencies:
• 489 Lok Sabha seats were spread over 401 constituencies.
• Double-member constituency: one constituency elected two members. One seat was general and the other was reserved for SCs or STs. This let the reserved group have a seat without drawing a separate constituency for it.
• Until the 1957 election, some constituencies elected 2 or 3 members [3].

• The Two-Member Constituencies (Abolition) Act, 1961 abolished them. Since then every constituency elects one member.

• Fair result: even the parties that lost accepted the results as fair.

Significance

• The first big test of democracy in a poor country:
• Until then, democracy was found mostly in rich, literate countries of Europe and North America.

• Most Indians were poor and could not read, so many people doubted that India could hold a free election.

• What the press said:

• Times of India: the polls "confounded all those sceptics" who had doubted that universal suffrage could work in India.

• Hindustan Times: "the largest experiment in democratic elections in the history of the world".

• Result: the election became a world landmark. It proved that democracy can work even with poverty and illiteracy.

Changing methods of voting

• Paper ballot: voting with a printed paper slip, marked or placed by the voter in secret.

Phase 1: one box per candidate (1952 and 1957)

• Each polling booth had one ballot box for each candidate, marked with that candidate's election symbol.
• Election symbol: a picture linked to a party or candidate (for example, Congress's pair of bullocks in 1952), so that voters who could not read could still choose.
• The voter received a blank ballot paper and dropped it into the box of the chosen candidate.
• About 20 lakh steel boxes were used in 1952.
• A presiding officer in Punjab described the work at his house:
• The boxes were labelled in Urdu, Hindi and Punjabi and smoothed with sandpaper.
• The job took six people, including his two daughters, five hours.

Phase 2: single stamped ballot paper (1962 to the late 1990s)

• From the third general election (1962), one ballot paper listed every candidate's name and symbol.
• The voter stamped the chosen name, folded the paper and put it in one common box.
• This method lasted about 40 years, from the 3rd to the 13th Lok Sabha elections. NCERT prints a sample of this ballot.

Phase 3: Electronic Voting Machine (EVM)

• EVM: a machine with a ballot unit, where the voter presses a button next to the candidate, and a control unit, which stores and counts the votes.
• How it came about:
• 1977: CEC S.L. Shakdhar proposed electronic voting [4].
• 1980: ECIL (Hyderabad) and BEL (Bangalore) showed working prototypes [4].
• 1982: EVMs were first used at 50 polling stations of the Paravur (Parur) assembly constituency, Kerala [4].

• 1982-83: they were then used in 11 assembly constituencies across 8 states and 1 Union Territory [4].

• Legal hurdle:

• No law allowed EVMs → the Supreme Court struck down the Paravur election and in 1984 suspended EVM use until the law was changed [4].

• 1988: Parliament amended the Representation of the People Act, 1951 (Section 61A). EVMs became lawful from 15 March 1989 [4].

• How use spread:

Year	EVM use
1998	25 assembly constituencies in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Delhi [4]
1999	45 Lok Sabha constituencies [4]
2000	45 Haryana assembly constituencies [4]
2001	All assembly seats of Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Puducherry and West Bengal [4]
2004	All 543 Lok Sabha constituencies, with more than 10 lakh EVMs [4]

• VVPAT (Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail): a printer attached to the EVM that shows the voter a paper slip of the vote for a few seconds.
• The Conduct of Elections Rules were amended on 14 August 2013 to allow VVPATs [4].

• VVPATs were used in 8 Lok Sabha constituencies in 2014 [4].

• NOTA ("None of the Above") was added in 2013. VVPAT and NOTA are covered in detail under elections-electoral-system.

Summary table

Period	Method	How the voter voted
1952, 1957	One box per candidate	Blank ballot dropped into the chosen candidate's box
1962 to late 1990s	Single ballot paper	Stamp placed on the chosen name and symbol
1982 (Paravur trial); whole country by 2004	EVM	Button pressed on the ballot unit
From 2013-14	EVM + VVPAT	Button pressed, then the paper slip checked

The Congress side of the first election

• Shankar's 1951 cartoon shows the Congress committee that chose its candidates:
• Nehru, with Morarji Desai, Rafi Ahmed Kidwai, B.C. Roy, K. Kamaraj, C. Rajagopalachari, Jagjivan Ram, Maulana Azad, D.P. Mishra, P.D. Tandon and G.B. Pant.

• The cartoon shows how much the result depended on choosing candidates inside the dominant party.

• NCERT biographies:

• Maulana Abul Kalam Azad: scholar and Congress leader. He was India's first Education Minister.
• Rajkumari Amrit Kaur: Gandhian and member of the Constituent Assembly. She was Health Minister until 1957.
• Rafi Ahmed Kidwai: Congress leader from UP. He was a Union Minister, holding Communications and later Food and Agriculture.

Prelims Hooks

• The first general election ran from October 1951 to February 1952, but it is called the 1952 election. The first votes were cast at Chini (Kinnaur, HP).
• The first CEC was Sukumar Sen (1950-58). He ran the 1952 and 1957 elections [2].
• In 1951-52 there were 1,874 candidates for 489 seats, or about 4.67 per seat. Only 45 women stood [3].
• Turnout: NCERT says "more than half"; ECI says about 45%. Expect a trap option that says "over 60%".
• Double-member constituencies (one general seat plus one SC/ST seat) were abolished by the Two-Member Constituencies (Abolition) Act, 1961.
• One box per candidate was used in 1952 and 1957. The single stamped ballot started in 1962.
• The first EVM use was at Paravur, Kerala, in 1982. The law came in 1988 (RP Act, 1951, Section 61A), and EVMs were used across the country in the 2004 Lok Sabha election [4].
• EVMs were designed and made by ECIL and BEL. VVPAT rules were amended in 2013, and VVPATs were first used in a Lok Sabha election in 2014 (8 seats) [4].
• The Hindustan Times called the poll "the largest experiment in democratic elections in the history of the world". Do not attribute this line to the Times of India.

Mains Points

• Democracy before development:
• In 1951-52 India gave all adults the vote at once, while most adults could not read.
• Western democracies had widened the vote slowly.
• The peaceful vote and the losers' acceptance of results showed that people do not need to be literate to choose wisely.

• Symbols and easy voting methods made this possible. (GS-I post-1947 history)

• Building trust in elections:

• Each change in voting method tried to stop fraud and speed up counting: candidate boxes, then the single stamped ballot, then EVMs.
• The 1984 Supreme Court suspension, which applied until the RP Act was amended in 1988, shows that a new technology needs a clear legal basis.

• VVPAT was later added so voters could check their vote [4]. (GS-II: electoral reforms)

• Simultaneous elections:

• Lok Sabha and assembly polls were held together from 1951-52 to 1967 [2].
• The cycle broke after assemblies were dissolved early in 1967-71.
• This history is the main reference point in today's "One Nation, One Election" debate.

• The trade-offs are lower cost and less disruption from constant campaigning, against federal concerns and early dissolutions.

• Representation design:

• Double-member seats guaranteed SC/ST seats but made constituencies very large. One reserved seat could also be decided by votes from the general population.
• The 1961 abolition moved to single-member reserved constituencies, which are still used today.