Sukumar Sen built an election for 173 million mostly unlettered voters

In 1950 India decided to do something that no country had tried. It would hold a general election in which every adult citizen could vote. All of them would vote at once, from the start. There was no property qualification and no literacy test. The vote did not go first to the safe and the educated.

India had a population of about 361 million. It had a registered electorate of 173,212,343. Literacy was so low that about 85 per cent of these voters could not read the name of their candidate.

There was no example to copy. Britain took a century to give the vote to more people. It gave women the vote on equal terms only in 1928. In the United States, Black citizens got a real vote only with the Voting Rights Act of 1965. India wanted to start at the point where those countries had finished, on day one. And India was poor, very large, newly partitioned and mostly unable to read.

Many foreign observers said clearly that it would fail.

The man who made Nehru wait

A Bengali civil servant got the job. Almost nobody knows his name. Sukumar Sen was born in 1898. He studied mathematics at Presidency College and the University of London, and he won a gold medal in the subject. He joined the Indian Civil Service in 1921. By 1947 he was Chief Secretary of West Bengal. In March 1950 the government made him India's first Chief Election Commissioner.

Nehru wanted a quick election. Sen studied what the job really needed. He told Nehru that it would take longer. Sen won the argument, and the election started in the winter of 1951, not the spring.

The historian Ramachandra Guha has written more about Sen than most people. He described the problem of remembering Sen clearly.

It is a pity we know so little about Sukumar Sen. He left no memoirs and, it appears, no papers either.

Sen built the largest organised operation that the world had seen. But he kept no record of it. Only the machine that he made survives.

First, make the electorate

Before people could vote, somebody had to write down who they were. India had no real electoral rolls. Under British rule, only a small group with property could vote. So almost all of the new voters had never been on any list.

So the commission built the rolls from nothing. Sen's commission hired 16,500 clerks on six month contracts. Their only job was to type and collate the rolls. The printed rolls used about 380,000 reams of paper. At the end there were 173,212,343 names. Each name belonged to a real person in a real village. Many of those villages had no road.

That list is the real achievement. Compared with it, the voting was easy.

How to hold an election when most voters cannot read

The first problem was the ballot. A voter who cannot read cannot use a paper with candidate names on it.

So the commission did not use a single ballot paper. Each candidate got his own ballot box, in a different colour. The box showed his name and the symbol of his party. The boxes stood in a line in the polling booth. The voter got a blank slip of paper and put it into the box of his or her candidate. You did not have to read anything. You only had to recognise a picture.

India's election symbols come from this system. That is why they are still so simple. The Congress used a pair of bullocks. The Kisan Mazdoor Praja Party used a hut. The symbols were the ballot. The commission chose them so that a person who had never held a book could still vote. Nobody who could read had to stand next to that person and give instructions.

This decision caused a scale that was almost absurd. There was one box for each candidate. There were 1,949 candidates for 489 seats, and boxes at each of 196,084 polling booths. The usual figures are about two million ballot boxes, made from about 8,200 tonnes of steel.

Then there was the problem of people who would vote twice. The commission solved it with something new that India still uses. Scientists developed a chemical ink for this purpose. It stained a finger for a week, and water could not remove it. A polling officer marked every voter before the voter went near the boxes.

The 2.8 million women who were removed

While they made the rolls, enumerators in several states found a problem that nobody had planned for. Many women did not give their own names. They called themselves the mother or the wife of a man. In public, people referred to a respectable woman in that way. A woman did not give her personal name to a strange man with a register. The problem was mostly in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Bharat, Rajasthan and Vindhya Pradesh.

Sen did not accept these entries. His instruction was clear. A name is an essential part of the identity of a person. The rolls would have real names or no names. The commission ran publicity campaigns. It also extended the deadline specially for the corrections.

It was not sufficient. There were about 80 million women on the rolls. In the end, the commission deleted about 2.8 million of them, because they did not give their names.

You can argue for or against Sen's decision, and people still do. A roll full of women without names makes fraud easy. Also, the founding document of the republic would have treated women as parts of their husbands. That would have set its own precedent.

But there was a practical result too. The first universal vote in the country excluded nearly three million women. It excluded them because of a custom that they had not made.

Sen wrote later about the next election. By then, the same women knew well what they had lost. They had watched other people vote, and they could not.

Sixty eight phases, four months, and a schoolteacher who voted first

The voting could not happen in one day, or in one week. There was the monsoon and the Himalayan winter. It was also very difficult to move officials and steel boxes in a country with few roads. So the polling had 68 separate phases, from 25 October 1951 to 21 February 1952.

The weather set the order. Himachal Pradesh voted first, in October 1951. By February, snow would close its passes, and nobody could get to a booth. So the first votes of the Republic of India were cast in the tehsil of Chini, high up in the area that is now Kinnaur.

The very first vote came from a schoolteacher from Kalpa, Shyam Saran Negi. He voted on 25 October 1951, and then he went to do his own election duty. He voted in every election in India for the next seventy one years. He died in November 2022, at the age of 105. A few days before, he had cast his last vote by postal ballot from his house.

What it proved

The Congress won 364 of the 489 seats, with just under 45 per cent of the vote. The Communist Party of India was second in seats, with 16. Independents won 37 seats and nearly 17 million votes in total. In Jammu and Kashmir there was no Lok Sabha voting at all. That started only in 1967.

Most people expected this result. The Congress had just won independence, and it had no serious national rival. The surprise was that the election happened at all. There were 173 million people across a subcontinent, and most of them could not read. The state found them and listed them. It gave them a symbol to recognise and an inked finger. Then it counted their votes. And the state did not collapse under that load.

Sen had to settle one question. Could a poor country, where most people could not read, have a universal vote? Or did it have to earn the vote slowly, as Europe did? India answered simply by holding the election. Then it did it again. It has now done it eighteen times.

Sukumar Sen was Chief Election Commissioner until 1958. He also ran the second general election. Then he left quietly. He left no memoirs. Later, people wanted to ask him about the largest administrative project in the history of the world. By then he was dead.