As the 15th Lok Sabha elections draw to a close, I thought it would be fun to reflect on India's first elections held in 1952 (info from Ramachandra Guha's India After Gandhi) .
Here are some interesting facts -
- India chose universal suffrage from the get-go. This meant that the electorate consisted of 176 million, 85% of which were illiterate. All party slogans and mission were depicted by symbols - a pair of bullocks, a hut, an elephant. Each ballot box had a symbol on it so that people could drop their ballot in the box of their party of choice.
- 4,500 seats were contested. 224,000 polling booths were equipped with 2 million ballot boxes. 16,500 clerks created the electoral rolls and the elections were supervised by 56,000 officers who were aided by 280,000 helpers and 224,000 policemen. I would love to see what the numbers are for this year's election - perhaps then people will understand why the IPL was not held at the same time as the elections.
- 2.8 million women (mostly in the north) were struck off the poll list because they registered themselved as "Raju's mother" or "Keshab's wife".
- 60 per cent of registered voters voted. The highest turnout, 80.5 per cent, was in Kottayam in Kerala. In Bombay, 900,000 residents voted - 70 per cent of the electorate.
- there were only 1,250 reported offences including 100 incidents of canvassing within hundred yards of the polling stations, some committed unknowingly by painted cows.
The American Ambassador feared that the elections would be "the biggest farce ever staged in the name of democracy anywhere in the world." But a tour around India during the elections changed his mind - he saw multiple parties contesting freely and illiterate folks making informed decisions. He wrote "In Asia, as in America, I know no grander vision than this, government by the consent of the governed."
Need I say more? I know the usual complaints - the growing power of regional parties and people voting on basis of their religious and social allegiances and not on issues. I understand the concerns and share some of them. But at the core, I am proud of our system of governance and the process of selection of our leaders.
1 comment:
The American Ambassador was actually predicting the elections to be held in the US in 2000 ;)
Jokes aside, the numbers even then, were staggering. The population in the US in 1952 was 158 million; 18 million less than the electorate in India at that time. Being from India, we wont bat an eyelid at the scale of some of these statistics, but they always shock people who are used to dealing with at least 3 less zeroes in their statistics.
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