Sukumar Sen and India's First Election

I’m reading Ramachandra Guha’s magisterial India After Gandhi, and one section stopped me in my tracks: his account of how India conducted its first general election. The scale of it is staggering. Guha walks through the numbers, the infrastructure, the people and the resources it took, and he credits much of it to one man, Sukumar Sen, about whom, as Guha notes, we know very little.

With the country in the middle of important debates over the SIR, the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls, it seems a good moment to step back and see how far we’ve come. India was one of the first countries to begin its democratic life with universal adult suffrage, rather than expanding the vote bit by bit. Through all the ups and downs since, the right to vote has remained an indispensable part of what it means to be Indian. That history should frame the arguments we’re having today.

So I asked Claude to write a short note on Sukumar Sen and the sheer scope of India’s first general election. Here it is.

An act of faith

Between October 1951 and February 1952, a country that had been free for barely four years asked roughly 176 million adults to choose their government. Some 85 percent of them could not read or write. Most had never voted for anything, and the world largely doubted it could be done.

It was the largest election humanity had ever attempted, spread over a million square miles of mountains, deserts, jungles and floodplains. The historian Ramachandra Guha has called it an act of faith. The man charged with turning that faith into ballot boxes was a quiet civil servant named Sukumar Sen.

The mathematician in charge

Sen was a Bengali, educated at Presidency College in Calcutta and University College London, where he won a gold medal in mathematics. He joined the Indian Civil Service in 1921 and rose to chief secretary of West Bengal. In March 1950 he was appointed India’s first Chief Election Commissioner.

His first and perhaps most important act was to say no. Prime Minister Nehru wanted elections as early as 1951. Sen, whom Guha suspects was thinking like a mathematician, asked him to wait. A census had to finish, election laws had to pass, constituencies had to be drawn, and every adult in the country had to be found and written down. A rushed vote that failed would have discredited democracy itself.

Building the machine

The numbers Guha gathers convey the scale. Nearly 4,500 seats were at stake, about 500 for Parliament and the rest for state assemblies, all elected at once. Some 224,000 polling booths were set up and about two million steel ballot boxes were made. More than 56,000 presiding officers ran the booths, backed by some 280,000 support staff and roughly as many police as there were booths.

The rolls were the first hurdle. Thousands of clerks were hired to compile them by hand. In parts of northern India, women would not give their own names, only “wife of” or “mother of” some man. Sen called this a senseless relic and ordered officials to record real names. About 2.8 million women who could not be properly identified were struck off, a painful price he accepted to keep the rolls honest.

He also had to design a vote for people who could not read. Each candidate got a pictorial symbol, such as a pair of bullocks, a hut or a lamp. Instead of marking a ballot, voters dropped a paper into the box carrying their candidate’s symbol. Mock polls were staged in 1951 to test the system, films and radio talks explained it, and phials of ink, nearly 390,000 by Guha’s count, were used to mark voters’ fingers against fraud.

The vote

Polling was staggered over about four months so that officials, boxes and police could move across the country. Snowbound hill districts voted first, in late October 1951, before winter closed the passes. A schoolteacher from Kalpa in Himachal Pradesh, Shyam Saran Negi, is remembered as the first person to cast a vote in independent India; he kept voting into his hundreds.

The rest of the country followed through early 1952. Turnout was roughly 45 percent, remarkable for a first-time electorate. The Congress Party won a large majority, and Nehru became India’s first democratically elected prime minister. Just as important, the losers accepted the result.

A forgotten founder

The success made Sen briefly famous abroad. Sudan invited him to oversee its first election in 1953, and India gave him the Padma Bhushan in 1954. He ran the second general election in 1957 too, using ballot boxes salvaged from the first, and left office in 1958. He died in 1963.

Yet Guha laments how little we know about him. He left no memoir, and his name rarely appears beside Nehru, Patel or Ambedkar. That may be the truest measure of what he achieved. Sen built a process so trusted that Indians came to take it for granted, and a democracy that the world expected to fail has held elections ever since.

Further reading

Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi (2007), chapter “The Biggest Gamble in History” — the best-known account. An extract is online at The Caravan.

Ornit Shani, How India Became Democratic (2017) — how the electoral rolls were built from 1947 onward, even before Sen took charge.

Election Commission of India, Report on the First General Elections in India 1951-52 — Sen’s own two-volume official account.

Election Commission of India, Leap of Faith — an illustrated history dedicated to Sen.

Chambers Book of Indian Election Facts (Hachette India) — figures and anecdotes; see the Mainstream review.

Note: sources differ on the ink. Guha records ink used in 1951-52, while others date the modern indelible ink to the 1962 election.