Question: India’s first general election was, among many other things, an act of faith. Comment.

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Answer: Many of the countries that gained freedom from colonialism during the 1940s and early 1950s experienced non-democratic rule. But India, despite the colossal problems like partition, integration of princely states, communal violence, poverty, cultural diversity and so on; decided to take the more difficult path, i.e to the idea of democracy through free and fair elections.

In this regard it can be said that India’s first general election was, among other things, an act of faith for a nascent country like India. Preparing for the first general election was a mammoth exercise. No election on this scale had ever been conducted in the whole world  which is evident from some of the below facts:  

• The holding of election also required delimitation or drawings of boundaries of constituencies, which was again considering the size of the country was a difficult task.
• The size of the electorate was around 176 million of age twenty-one or more, of whom about 85 per cent could not read or write. Each one had to be identified, named and registered.
• It was a difficult task to design a system of party symbols, ballot papers and ballot boxes for mostly unlettered electorate who understand and participate in the election process.
• Then, sites for polling stations had to be identified, and honest and efficient polling officers recruited. Around 56,000 presiding officers were chosen to supervise the voting, these aided by another 280,000 helpers; 224,000 policemen were puton 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.
• The other problems are social-economical problems like language, poverty, the caste, the patriarchal society where many women voters were either left out or registered themselves as A’s mother or B’s wife.

It was not just the size of electorate and of the country that made the first general elections a leap of faith. The first general election was the test of democracy in a poor and illiterate country which 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. Many touted this move as bold and risky and as the biggest gamble in history as  not many know what the vote is, why they should vote, and whom they should vote for.

But despite all the criticism and hurdles the first general elections became a landmark in the history of democracy all over the world. The elections upheld the values cherished in the national movement. 

They showed their maturity in choosing moderation and progress and disapproving of reaction and unrest. The faith shown by the leaders in the collective conscience of masses beared fruits and the first general elections laid the foundations of a strong democractic practice, which even today is praised all over the world as free and fair.