Sukumar Sen built an election for 173 million mostly unlettered voters

In 1950 India decided to do something no country had attempted. It would hold a general election in which every adult citizen could vote, all at once, from the beginning. No property qualification, no literacy test, no phased extension of the franchise to the safe and educated first.

The numbers it was proposing to do this with were these. A population of about 361 million. A registered electorate of 173,212,343. And a literacy rate such that roughly 85 per cent of those voters could not read the name of the person they were voting for.

There was no precedent to copy. Britain had taken a century to widen its franchise and had only granted women the vote on equal terms in 1928. In the United States, Black citizens would not be effectively enfranchised until the Voting Rights Act of 1965. India proposed to start where those countries had finished, on day one, while also being poor, enormous, freshly partitioned and largely unlettered.

A great many foreign observers said plainly that it would not work.

The man who made Nehru wait

The job of making it happen fell to a Bengali civil servant almost nobody has heard of. Sukumar Sen was born in 1898, read mathematics at Presidency College and the University of London, where he took a gold medal in the subject, joined the Indian Civil Service in 1921, and by 1947 was Chief Secretary of West Bengal. In March 1950 he was appointed India's first Chief Election Commissioner.

Nehru wanted the election quickly. Sen looked at what the job actually required and told him it would take longer. He got his way, and the election happened in the winter of 1951 rather than the spring.

The historian Ramachandra Guha, who has written more about Sen than most, put the problem of remembering him neatly.

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

The man who built the largest exercise in organisation the world had seen kept no record of having done it. What survives is the machine he made.

First, invent the electorate

Before anyone could vote, somebody had to write down who they were. India had no electoral rolls worth the name. Under British rule the vote had been restricted to a small propertied fraction, so the overwhelming majority of the new electorate had never appeared on any list.

So the rolls were built from nothing. Sen's commission hired 16,500 clerks on six month contracts purely to type and collate them. Printing the finished rolls took about 380,000 reams of paper. At the end of it there were 173,212,343 names, each attached to a real person in a real village, in a country where a great many of those villages had no road to them.

That list is the actual achievement. The voting was the easy part by comparison.

How you hold an election that most voters cannot read

The obvious problem was the ballot. If a voter cannot read, a paper listing candidate names is useless.

The solution was to abandon the single ballot paper altogether. Every candidate was given his own ballot box, painted a different colour, with his name and his party's symbol printed on it. The boxes were lined up in the polling booth, and the voter was handed a blank slip of paper and simply dropped it into the box belonging to the candidate they wanted. You did not have to read anything. You had to recognise a picture.

This is where India's election symbols come from, and why they are still so plain. The Congress ran under a pair of bullocks. The Kisan Mazdoor Praja Party used a hut. These were not branding exercises. They were the ballot itself, chosen so that somebody who had never held a book could still vote without being told what to do by a literate man standing beside them.

The scale that followed from this decision is faintly absurd. One box per candidate, 1,949 candidates contesting 489 seats, at every one of 196,084 polling booths. The commonly cited figures are around two million ballot boxes, made from roughly 8,200 tonnes of steel.

Then there was the problem of people voting twice, which the commission solved by inventing something India still uses. A chemical ink that would stain a finger for a week and could not be washed off was developed for the purpose, and a polling officer marked every voter before letting them near the boxes.

The 2.8 million women who were struck off

Here the story stops being a triumph and becomes something more complicated, and this part deserves to be better known than it is.

As the rolls were being compiled, enumerators in several states hit an obstacle nobody had planned for. Large numbers of women would not give their own names. They gave themselves as somebody's mother or somebody's wife, because that was how a respectable woman was referred to in public, and offering a personal name to a strange man with a register was not done. The problem was concentrated in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Bharat, Rajasthan and Vindhya Pradesh.

Sen refused to accept the entries. His instruction was that a name is an essential part of a person's identity and the rolls would carry real names or nothing. Publicity campaigns were run, and the deadline was extended specially to let the corrections be made.

It was not enough. Out of roughly 80 million women on the rolls, about 2.8 million were finally deleted because they would not give their names.

You can argue Sen's decision either way and people still do. A roll full of unnamed women is an invitation to fraud, and treating women as appendages of their husbands in the founding document of the republic would have set its own precedent. Against that, the practical effect was that the country's first act of universal suffrage excluded nearly three million women, and it excluded them for a custom they had not invented.

Sen noted afterwards that by the next election the same women were sharply aware of what they had missed, watching others vote while they could not.

Sixty eight phases, four months, and a schoolteacher in the snow

The voting itself could not be done in a day, or a week. Between the monsoon, the Himalayan winter and the sheer difficulty of moving officials and steel boxes around a country with limited roads, polling was spread across 68 separate phases running from 25 October 1951 to 21 February 1952.

The order was dictated by weather. Himachal Pradesh went first, in October 1951, because by February its passes would be under snow and nobody would reach a booth at all. So the first votes in the history of the Republic of India were cast in the tehsil of Chini, high in what is now Kinnaur.

The first of them belonged to a schoolteacher from Kalpa named Shyam Saran Negi, who voted on 25 October 1951 before going off to work an election duty of his own. He kept voting in every election India held for the next seventy one years. He died in November 2022, aged 105, having cast his last vote by postal ballot from his house a few days earlier.

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 came second in seats with 16. Independents took 37, and nearly 17 million votes between them. In Jammu and Kashmir no Lok Sabha voting took place at all, and would not until 1967.

None of which is really the point. The result was more or less what everybody expected, because Congress had just won independence and had no serious national rival. What was not expected was that the thing would happen at all: that 173 million people spread over a subcontinent, most of whom could not read, would be found, listed, given a symbol to recognise and an inked finger, and counted, without the state collapsing under the weight of it.

The bet Sen was asked to settle was whether a poor and largely unlettered country could be trusted with a universal vote, or whether it had to earn one gradually, the way Europe had. India answered by simply doing it, and then doing it again, and it has now done it eighteen times.

Sukumar Sen served as Chief Election Commissioner until 1958, ran the second general election too, and then went quietly. He left no memoirs, and by the time anybody thought to ask him about the largest administrative undertaking in the history of the world, he was gone.