How different was India’s first Lok Sabha election?
Independent India’s first Lok Sabha election was unlike most that would follow. This is not just because of the challenges involved in holding an election for the first time in a country where an overwhelming majority was still illiterate. The nature of seats — the basic unit of contest in the election — themselves were unlike today’s seats. And while the nature of the contest and the result seems a given (at least in hindsight), there were some surprises. Here are three charts that detail India’s first Lok Sabha election.
Multiple seat constituencies
In the first two Lok Sabha elections, parliamentary constituencies (PCs) could have more than one seat. In the 1951-1952 election, there were 314 PCs with one seat, 86 with two seats, and the North Bengal PC had three seats. While only 10 seats in the single-seat PCs were reserved for Scheduled Tribes (ST), the multiple seat PCs had equal representation for general and Scheduled Caste (SC) or ST categories. In the two-seat PCs, one seat was reserved for either SC or ST candidates. Of the 86 such PCs, in 71 the reserved seat was for SCs and in 15 for STs. In the three-seat PCs, one seat each was for SC, ST, and general category candidates. A 1961 law abolished such PCs by breaking them up into single-seat PCs of the kind we know today.
The number of contesting parties was significant
{{/usCountry}}The number of contesting parties was significant
{{/usCountry}}Fifty two parties participated in the 1951-52 election. Then there were the independents. This number was not matched subsequently until the 1971 election when 53 parties contested the election. The number again dropped to the mid-30s until 1989. Since then, though, the number of contesting parties has always been above 100.
To be sure, only the Congress contested a large proportion of the seats on offer. Since the Election Commission of India (ECI) has only published PC-wise statistics, it is only possible to count the number of unique candidates fielded by each party. The Congress fielded 479 candidates across all states except in the one-PC Bilaspur (located in present-day Himachal Pradesh). Jayapraskash Narayan’s Socialist Party (SP), which fielded the second-highest number of candidates, fielded only about half that number (254 candidates) across all big states. J B Kripalani’s Kisan Mazdoor Praja Party (KMPP) fielded only 145. All other parties fielded less than 100 candidates. The Communist Party of India (CPI), for example, fielded 49 candidates, 25 of them in Madras and West Bengal. (Chart 1: Parties that fielded more than 10 candidates)
Almost all other parties failed to make any impact
Although a large number of parties contested the first election, the results were skewed towards the biggest party of the time, which also had perhaps the most identifiable politician of the time, India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Only 17 of the 52 parties won more than one seat and only four won more than 10. The Congress alone won 364 or three fourth of the 489 seats. This 74% seat share is rivalled in only two other elections, also won by the Congress. The 1957 election, when the Congress won 75.7% of the seats and the 1984-85 election, when it won 76.5% of the seats.
The only big states where the Congress did not equal its national seat share of 74% were West Bengal, Hyderabad, Orissa, Tranvancore-Cochin, Madras, and Rajasthan. Even in these states it won at least 45% of the seats. The next biggest winner was not any other party, but independent candidates, who won 38 seats. To be sure, 15 of these 38 seats came from the 75-PC Madras state alone. Other states where independent candidates had a significant seat share were Travancore-Cochin (4 of 20 seats) and Rajasthan (6 of 25 seats).
The only parties to win 10 or more seats were the Communist Party of India (CPI) and SP. Thirteen of CPI’s 16 seats came however from just Madras and West Bengal and SP’s 12 seats were scattered over eight states. Former Congress-member Kripalani’s KMPP, formed in 1951, won just nine seats, six of which were in Madras . B R Ambedkar’s All India Scheduled Caste Federation won just two (one in Bombay and one in Hyderabad) of the 35 seats it contested. (Chart 2: Parties other than Congress that won more than one seat)
Close contests only in places where Congress didn’t do well
As the headline numbers suggest, the 1951-52 election was hardly a closely-fought one. Four Congress candidates and Anand Chand, the king of Bilaspur, won unopposed. To be sure, because ECI’s statistical report on the election gives numbers only at the PC-level, a victory margin analysis is possible only for the 314 single-seat PCs. Nearly three fourth of such seats (232 in number) were won by a victory margin of 10% or more. Only 44 and 38 single-seat PCs were won by a margin of under 5% or a 5-10% one, respectively. Jawaharlal Nehru — who contested from a two-seat PC in Uttar Pradesh — is likely to have been in the above 10% category. The two winners in Nehru’s PC were Nehru and Masuriya Din and they polled 39% and 30% of the total votes in the PC, while the other candidates polled less than 10%.
As is to be expected, the closely fought single-seat PCs were located in states where the Congress didn’t perform as well as elsewhere. The proportion of seats that were won by under 10% victory margin was the highest in Madras, Travancore-Cochin, West Bengal, Orissa, and Rajasthan among big states. Among the eight PCs that were won by a margin of under 1%, two were from West Bengal and Madras each, and one from Travancore-Cochin. Basanta Kumar Dass of Congress won by the smallest margin in the election: 0.06% (127 votes) of the total votes polled in Contai in West Bengal. He was defeated in the next Lok Sabha election by his 1952 KMPP runner-up, Pramatha Nath Bandopadhyaya. (Chart 3: Seats by victory margin in states with more than 5 seats)
What about the biggest winner? Contrary to expectations, this was a non-Congress and independent candidate fighting the election in a state where 93% of the seats were won by the Congress. Muchaki Kosa polled 83% of the votes in the Bastar PC of Madhya Pradesh (the highest vote share in any of the 401 PCs), and won by a margin of 66%. According to a working paper by Saagar Tewari available online at the website of Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), Kosa was among the 22 MPs who didn’t send a biographical sketch for the Who’s Who book of the first Lok Sabha. Kosa could only speak his local dialect and his election was arranged by the Maharajah of Bastar. The secretary the Maharajah appointed to assist Kosa in Parliament started stealing the latter’s stipend to the extent that Kosa nearly starved before rebelling successfully for his stipend.