Now that the election fever is mounting by the minute — and political parties are enlivening the scene by breaking up old marriages, contracting new ones and sometimes remarrying the discarded partner — it is time to look back on the first general election that was the historic beginning of the electoral process with Indian characteristics. It was indeed a great gamble that richly paid off.

In fact, there was no dearth of thinking people, Indian and foreigners, who said loudly that it was “crazy” to have adult suffrage in a country of India’s size and diversity, especially when nearly three-fourths of the 173 million voters were illiterate. Hadn’t the western democracies extended the suffrage to every adult in slow stages? Even Jawaharlal Nehru who had insisted that these elections must be held and at the earliest date, did develop second thoughts sometimes, but he was too strongly committed to the principle that the people must have the right to govern themselves.

Another daunting factor was the sheer immensity of the task. Since the elections were to be held for both Parliament and all state assemblies, two million steel ballot boxes had to be manufactured and transported to 224,000 polling booths in about 4,000 constituencies. A million government employees had to be mobilised to conduct the elections. The man who brilliantly organised all this was Sukumar Sen, an ICS officer who until then was chief secretary of West Bengal. If Nehru was the undoubted hero of this mammoth exercise in every sense of the word, Sen was its side-hero.

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