Meanwhile, the growing Hindu tint of the Congress had led to the departure of some of its most effervescent leaders. Already in 1948 a group of brilliant young Congress members had left to start the Socialist Party. Now, in June 1951, the respected Gandhian J. B. Kripalani left to form his Kisan Majdoor Praja Party (KMPP), which, as its name indicated, stood for the interests of farmers, workers and other toiling people. Like the Socialists, Kripalani claimed that the Congress under Purushottamdas Tandon had become a deeply conservative organization.
As it happened, the formation of the KMPP strengthened Nehru’s hand against Tandon. The Congress, he could now say, had to move away from the reactionary path it had recently adopted and reclaim its democratic and inclusive heritage. In September, when the All-India Congress Committee met in Bangalore, Nehru forced a showdown with Tandon and his supporters. The rank and file of the party was increasingly concerned with the upcoming general election. And, as a southern journalist pointed out, it was clear that the AICC would back the prime minister against Tandon, if only because ‘the Congress President is no vote-getter’. By contrast, ‘Pandit Nehru is unequalled as a vote-catcher. On the eve of the general elections it is the votes that count and Pandit Nehru has a value to the Congress which none else possesses’.19
That indeed, is what happened in Bangalore, where Tandon resigned as president of the Congress, with Nehru being elected in his place. As head of both party and government, ‘Nehru could now wage full war against all communal elements in the country’.20 The first battle in this war would be the general election of 1952.
III
India’s first general election was, among other things, an act of faith. A newly independent country chose to move straight into universal adult suffrage, rather than – as had been the case in the West – at first reserve the right to vote to men of property, with the working class and women excluded from the franchise until much later. India became free in August 1947, and two years later set up an Election Commission. In March 1950 Sukumar Sen was appointed chief election commissioner. The next month the Representation of the People Act was passed in Parliament. While proposing the Act, the prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, expressed the hope that elections would be held as early as the spring of 1951.
Nehru’s haste was understandable, but it was viewed with some alarm by the man who had to make the election possible. It is a pity we know so little about Sukumar Sen. He left no memoirs and few papers either. Born in 1899, he was educated at Presidency College and at London University, where he was awarded a gold medal in mathematics. He joined the Indian Civil Service (ICS) in 1921 and served in various districts and as a judge before being appointed chief secretary of West Bengal, from where he was sent on deputation as chief election commissioner.
It was perhaps the mathematician in Sen which made him ask the prime minister to wait. For no officer of state, certainly no Indian official, has ever had such a stupendous task placed in front of him. Consider, first of all, the size of the electorate: 176 million Indians aged twenty-one or more, of whom about 85 per cent could not read or write. Each one had to be identified, named and registered. The registration of voters was merely the first step. For how did one design party symbols, ballot papers and ballot boxes for a mostly unlettered electorate? Then, sites for polling stations had to be identified, and honest and efficient polling officers recruited. Moreover, concurrent with the general election would be elections to the state assemblies. Working with Sukumar Sen in this regard were the election commissioners of the different provinces, also usually ICS men.
The polls were finally scheduled for the first months of 1952, although some outlying districts would vote earlier. An American observer justly wrote that the mechanics of the election ‘present a problem of colossal proportions’.21 Some numbers will help us understand the scale of Sen’s enterprise. At stake were 4,500 seats – about 500 for Parliament, the rest for the provincial assemblies. 224,000 polling booths were constructed, and equipped with 2 million steel ballot boxes, to make which 8,200 tonnes of steel were consumed; 16,500 clerks were appointed on six-month contracts to type and collate the electoral rolls by constituency; about 380,000 reams of paper were used for printing the rolls; 56,000 presiding officers were chosen to supervise the voting, these aided by another 280,000 helpers; 224,000 policemen were put on duty to guard against violence and intimidation.
The election and the electorate were spread over an area of more than a million square miles. The terrain was huge, diverse and – for the exercise at hand – sometimes horrendously difficult. In the case of remote hill villages, bridges had to be specially constructed across rivers; in the case of small islands in the Indian Ocean, naval vessels were used to take the rolls to the booths. A second problem was social rather than geographical: the diffidence of many women in northern India to give their own names, instead of which they wished to register themselves as A’s mother or B’s wife. Sukumar Sen was outraged by this practice, a ‘curious senseless relic of the past’, and directed his officials to correct the rolls by inserting the names of the women ‘in the place of mere descriptions of such voters’. Nonetheless, some 2.8 million women voters had finally to be struck off the list. The resulting furore over their omission was considered by Sen to be a ‘good thing’, for it would help the prejudice vanish before the next elections, by which time the women could be reinstated under their own names.
Where in Western democracies most voters could recognize the parties by name, here pictorial symbols were used to make their task easier. Drawn from daily life, these symbols were easily recognizable: a pair of bullocks for one party, a hut for a second, an elephant for a third, an earthenware lamp for a fourth. A second innovation was the use of multiple ballot boxes. On a single ballot, the (mostly illiterate) Indian elector might make a mistake; thus each party had a ballot box with its symbol marked in each polling station, so that voters could simply drop their paper in it. To avoid impersonation, Indian scientists had developed a variety of indelible ink which, applied on the voter’s finger, stayed there for a week. A total of 389,816 phials of this ink were used in the election.22
Throughout 1951 the Election Commission used the media of film and radio to educate the public about this novel exercise in democracy. A documentary on the franchise and its functions, and the duties of the electorate, was shown in more than 3,000 cinemas. Many more Indians were reached via All-India Radio, which broadcast numerous programmes on the constitution, the purpose of adult franchise, the preparation of electoral rolls and the process of voting.23
IV
It is instructive to reflect on the international situation in the months leading up to India’s first general election. Elsewhere in Asia the French were fighting the Viet-Minh and UN troops were thwarting a North Korean offensive. In South Africa the Afrikaner National Party had disenfranchised the Cape Coloureds, the last non-white group to have the vote. America had just tested its first hydrogen bomb; Maclean and Burgess had just defected to Russia. The year had witnessed three political assassinations: of the king of Jordan, of the prime minister of Iran and of the prime minister of Pakistan, Liaqat Ali Khan, shot dead on 16 October 1951, nine days before the first votes were cast in India.
Most interestingly, the polls in India were to coincide with a general election in the United Kingdom. The old warhorse Winston Churchill was seeking to bring his Conservatives back into power. In the UK the election was basically a two-party affair. In India, however, there was a dazzling diversity of parties and leaders. In power was Jawaharlal Nehru’s Indian National Congress, the chief legatee and beneficiary of the freedom movement. Opposing it were a variety of new parties formed by some greatly gifted individuals.
Prominent among parties of the left were J. B. Kripalani’s KMPP and the Socialist Party, whose leading lights included the young hero of the Quit India rebellion of 1942, Jayaprakash Narayan. These parties accused the Congress of betraying its commitment to the poor. They claimed to stand for
the ideals of the old ‘Gandhian’ Congress, which had placed the interests of workers and peasants before those of landlords and capitalists.24 A different kind of critique was offered by the Jana Sangh, which sought to consolidate India’s largest religious grouping, the Hindus, into one solid voting bloc. The party’s aims were well expressed in the symbolism of its inaugural meeting, held in New Delhi on 21 September 1951. The session began with a recitation from the Vedas and a singing of the patriotic hymn ‘Vande Matram’. On the rostrum, the party’s founder, Syama Prasad Mukherjee, sat along with other leaders, behind them a
white background [with] pictures of Shivaji, Lord Krishna persuading the remorse-striken Arjuna to take up arms to fight the evil forces of the Kauravas on the battle-field of Kurukshetra, Rana Pratap Singh and of an earthen deepak [lamp], in saffron. From the Pandal was hung banners inscribed with ‘Sangh Shakth Kali Yuge’, a dictum taken from [the] Mahabharata, professing to tell the people who attended the convention that in the age of Kali there was force only in [Jana] Sangh.25
The imagery was striking: taken from the Hindu epics but also invoking those Hindu warriors who had later fought the Muslim invader. But who, one wonders, represented the evil enemy, the Kauravas? Was it Pakistan, the Muslims, Jawaharlal Nehru or the Congress Party? All figured as hate objects in the speeches of the Sangh’s leaders. The party stood for the reunification of the motherland through the absorption (or perhaps conquest) of Pakistan. It suspected the Indian Muslims as a problem minority, which had ‘not yet learnt to own this land and its culture and treat them as their first love’. The Congress Party was accused of ‘appeasing’ these uncertainly patriotic Muslims.26
S. P. Mukherjee had once been a member of the Union Cabinet. So had B. R. Ambedkar, the great Untouchable lawyer who, as the Union’s law minister, helped draft the Indian Constitution. Ambedkar had resigned from office to revive the Scheduled Caste Federation in time for the election. In his speeches he sharply attacked the Congress government for doing little to uplift the lower castes. Freedom had meant no change for these peoples: it was ‘the same old tyranny, the same old oppression, the same old discrimination . . .’ After freedom was won, said Ambedkar, the Congress had degenerated into a dharamsala or rest-home, without any unity of purpose or principles, and ‘open to all, fools and knaves, friends and foes, communalists and secularists, reformers and orthodox and capitalists and anti-capitalists’.27
Still further to the left was the Communist Party of India. As we have seen, in 1948 many activists of the CPI had gone underground to lead a peasant insurrection that they hoped would fructify into a countrywide revolutionary upsurge on the Chinese model. But the police and in some places the army had cracked down hard. So the communists came overground in time to fight the election. The Telengana struggle, said the party’s general secretary, had been withdrawn ‘unconditionally’. A temporary amnesty was granted and the militants put away their arms and went seeking votes. This abrupt change of roles produced dilemmas no text by Marx or Lenin could help resolve. Thus a woman communist standing for a seat in Bengal was not sure whether to wear crumpled saris, which would certify her identity with the poor, or wash and iron them, to better appeal to the middle-class audience. And a parliamentary candidate in Telengana (where the peasant revolt had been at its most intense) recalled his confusion at being offered a drink by a senior official: he said ‘yes’, and gulped down the offering, only to be hit by a ‘reeling sensation’ in his head as it turned out to be whisky rather than fruit juice.28
The election campaign of 1951–2 was conducted through large public meetings, door-to-door canvassing, and the use of visual media. ‘At the height of election fever’, wrote a British observer, ‘posters and emblems were profuse everywhere – on walls, at street corners, even decorating the statues in New Delhi and defying the dignity of a former generation of Viceroys’. A novel method of advertising was on display in Calcutta, where stray cows had ‘Vote Congress’ written on their backs in Bengali.29
Speeches and posters were used by all parties, but only the communists had access to the airwaves. Not those transmitted by All-India Radio, which had banned party propaganda, but of Moscow Radio, which relayed its programmes via stations in Tashkent. Indian listeners could, if they wished, hear how the non-communist parties in the election were ‘corrupt stooges of Anglo-American imperialists and oppressors of the workers’.30 For the literate, a Madras weekly had helpfully translated an article from Pravda which called the ruling Congress ‘a government of landowners and monopolists, a government of national betrayers, truncheons and bullets’, and announced that the alternative for the ‘long-suffering, worn-out Indian people’ was the Communist Party, around which ‘all progressive forces of the country, everyone who cherishes the vital interests of his fatherland, are grouping’.31
Adding to the list (and interest, and excitement) were regional parties based on affiliations of ethnicity and religion. These included the Dravida Kazhagam in Madras, which stood for Tamil pride against north Indian domination; the Akalis in Punjab, who were the main party of the Sikhs; and the Jharkhand Party in Bihar, which wanted a separate state for tribal people. There were also numerous splinter groupings of the left, as well as two Hindu parties more orthodox than the Jana Sangh: the Hindu Mahasabha and the Ram Rajya Parishad.
The leaders of these parties all had years of political service behind them. Some had gone to jail in the nationalist cause; others in the communist cause. Men like S. P. Mookerjee and Jayaprakash Narayan were superb orators, with the ability to enchant a crowd and make it fall in line behind them. On the eve of the election the political scientist Richard Park wrote that ‘the leading Indian parties and party workers are surpassed by those of no other country in electioneering skill, dramatic presentation of issues, political oratory, or mastery of political psychology’.32
Some might celebrate this diversity as proof of the robustness of the democratic process. Others were not so sure. Thus a cartoon strip in Shankar’s Weekly lampooned the hypocrisy of the vote-gathering exercise. It showed a fat man in a black coat canvassing among different groups of voters. He told an emaciated farmer that ‘land for peasants is my aim’. He assured a well-dressed young man that ‘landlords’ rights will be protected’. At one place he said that he was ‘all for nationalization’; at another he insisted that he would ‘encourage private enterprise’. He told a lady in a sari that he stood for the Hindu Code Bill (a reform aimed principally at enhancing the rights of women), but said to a Brahmin with a pigtail that he would ‘safeguard our Ancient Culture’.33
V
These varied parties all had one target: the ruling Congress. Its leader, Jawaharlal Nehru, had just survived a challenge to his leadership of the party. With the death of Vallabhbhai Patel he was also the dominant presence within the government. But he faced problems aplenty. These included angry refugees from East and West Pakistan, not yet settled in their new homes. The Andhras in the south and the Sikhs in the north were getting restive. The Kashmir question was, in the eyes of the world, still unresolved. And Independence had not as yet made any dent in the problems of poverty and inequality: a state of affairs for which, naturally, the ruling party was likely to be held responsible.
One way of telling the story of the election campaign is through newspaper headlines. These make interesting reading, not least because the issues they flag have remained at the forefront of Indian elections ever since. ‘MINISTERS FACE STIFF OPPOSITION’ read a headline from Uttar Pradesh. ‘CASTE RIVALRIES WEAKEN BIHAR CONGRESS’, read another. From the north-eastern region came this telling line: ‘AUTONOMY DEMAND IN MANIPUR’. From Gauhati came this one: ‘CONGRESS PROSPECTS IN ASSAM: IMPORTANCE OF MUSLIM AND TRIBAL VOTE’. Gwalior offered ‘DISCONTENT AMONG CONGRESSMEN: LIST OF NOMINEES CREATES WIDER SPLIT’. A Calcutta headline ran: ‘W. BENGAL CONGRESS CHIEF BOOED AT MEETING’ (the hecklers being refugees from East Pakistan). ‘NO HOPES OF FREE AND FAIR ELECTION’, started a story datelined Luckno
w: this being the verdict of J. B. Kripalani, who claimed that state officials would rig the polls in favour of the ruling party. And the city of Bombay offered, at three different moments in the campaign, these more-or-less timeless headlines: ‘CONGRESS BANKS ON MUSLIM SUPPORT’; ‘CONGRESS APATHY TOWARDS SCHEDULED CASTES: CHARGES REITERATED BY DR AMBEDKAR’; and ‘FOURTEEN HURT IN CITY ELECTION CLASH’. But there was also the occasional headline that was of its time but emphatically not of ours – notably the one in the Searchlight of Patna which claimed: ‘PEACEFUL VOTING HOPED [FOR] IN BIHAR’.
Faced with wide-ranging opposition from outside, and with some dissidence within his own party, Jawaharlal Nehru took to the road – and on occasion the plane and the train as well. From 1 October he commenced a tour which a breathless party functionary later described as comparable to the ‘imperial campaigns of Samudragupta, Asoka and Akbar’ as well as to the ‘travel[s] of Fahien and Hieun Tsang’. In the space of nine weeks Nehru covered the country from end to end. He travelled 25,000 miles in all: 18,000 by air, 5,200 by car, 1,600 by train, and even 90 by boat.34
Nehru kicked off his party’s campaign with a speech in the Punjab town of Ludhiana on Sunday 30 September. The choice of venue was significant: as was the thrust of his talk, which declared ‘an all-out war against communalism’. He ‘condemned the communal bodies which in the name of Hindu and Sikh culture were spreading the virus of communalism as the Muslim League once did’. These ‘sinister communal elements’ would if they came to power ‘bring ruin and death to the country’. He asked his audience of half a million to instead ‘keep the windows of our mind open and let in fresh breeze from all corners of the world’.
India After Gandhi Revised and Updated Edition Page 19