Elections that shaped India | The first general election: a free country in full bloom

India's first general elections in 1951-52 marked by Nehru's "Naya Hindustan Zindabad" slogan, universal adult franchise, and logistical challenges.

In the nascent free India, just out of the throes of colonial rule, the first-ever general elections were marked by Jawaharlal Nehru’s remark, “Naya Hindustan Zindabad.”

During his campaign tour for the Congress Party across the country in 1951, as crowds chanted “Pandit Nehru Zindabad” (long live Pandit Nehru), Mr. Nehru would be quick to urge them to embrace an alternative rallying cry — “Naya Hindustan Zindabad” (glory to the new India), ​notes historian Ramchandra Guha in his 2002 piece in the World Policy Journal titled “Democracy’s Biggest Gamble.”

India bestowed universal adult franchise, to an eligible electorate of 175 million, more than 80% of them illiterate, spread over an area of more than a million square miles. The task of reaching every last mile, bracing unforgiving terrains, weather, was pushed by one man: Sukumar Sen, the first Chief Election Commissioner of India (CEC).

It was the first time one-sixth of the world’s population was casting its franchise to elect its political representatives; notably,just 14% of Indian citizens at the time had ever exercised their franchise; on two occasions (1937 and 1946) the British had facilitated a form of restricted franchise for some central and provincial legislatures under the Government of India Act, 1935.

Western observers marvelled that a country which had newly attained freedom, witnessed a bloody partition with the migration of 12 million refugees in both directions; and painstakingly undertaken the exercise of bringing together several princely States into a union, was choosing to immediately extend universal adult franchise to its citizens. In the West, suffrage was first restricted to men with property, then workers, and eventually women.

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In the CEC’s report of the 1951-52 elections, Mr. Sen noted, “The establishment by the Constitution of the democratic and Parliamentary form of Government in the country on the basis of adult franchise was like the rejoining of a historic thread that had been snapped by alien rule. Franchise on a liberal scale had been common in various parts of ancient India, and by providing for universal adult suffrage, the country boldly achieved the consummation of its electoral aspirations on a national basis.”