Photos: Looking back at independent India’s first general election

From 25 October 1951 to 21 February 1952, the people of India celebrated their first festival of democracy, lining up before 224,000 polling booths to elect 489 members to the Lok Sabha and 3,283 for the state assemblies. The vote was also treated as a valuable right and cast carefully, so that despite it being the first time for most people, only 3-4% of votes were invalid. When the election results were declared, it was found that nearly 46.6% of the eligible voters had cast their vote. India’s first election commissioner Sukumar Sen led the daunting task of holding a national election in a young country and devised the elections in 68 phases. The first general election was conducted over a period of four months, and never before had such large numbers of people anywhere in the world been involved in an exercise of this kind.