Voting began, in a remote corner of what is today Himachal Pradesh on October 25, 1951— because all passes there become snowbound at the end of the month — and was completed across the country in the third week of February 1952. The results, when they came, exhilarated Nehru and the Congress party. All the sceptics admitted that they were wrong and that the prime minister’s faith had been amply vindicated. “The so-called illiterate voter,” Nehru declared, “showed greater civic sense than most people in towns”.

“From a purely democratic point of view,” he wrote, “the elections have been, I think, a remarkable success, except perhaps in Rajasthan and Saurashtra”. There, “feudal elements” had indulged in “intimidation”. Although 77 political parties, apart from Independents, had contested the elections, the Congress party won a two-thirds majority in the Lok Sabha and captured 3, 772 seats in state assembles. Even so, the massive Nehru wave was stopped in the south, dominated then by the state of Madras that included today’s Tamil Nadu, all Andhra areas outside the princely state of Hyderabad and the Malabar region of what is today Kerala. In the newly elected Madras Assembly, the Congress was the largest single party but did not command a majority. Rejecting the rivals’ claims, the governor managed to install a Congress ministry, which is a separate and unsavoury story by itself.

Nehru was uncharacteristic but entirely right in writing to Krishna Menon: “It is true that without me in the Congress, there would have been no stable government in any State or in the Centre, and a process of disruption would have set in”.

... contd.