The sentiment was Gandhi-like, and indeed Nehru’s next major speech was delivered in Delhi on the afternoon of 2 October, the Mahatma’s birthday. To a mammoth crowd he spoke in Hindustani about the government’s determination to abolish both untouchability and landlordism. Once more he identified communalists as the chief enemies, who ‘will be shown no quarter’, and ‘overpowered with all our strength’. His 95-minute speech was punctuated by loud cheers, not least when he made this ringing declaration: ‘If any person raises his hand to strike down another on the ground of religion, I shall fight him till the last breath of my life, both at the head of the Government and from outside.’
Wherever he went Nehru spoke out strongly against communalism. In S. P. Mookerjee’s native Bengal he dismissed the Jana Sangh as the ‘illegitimate child of the RSS and the Hindu Mahasabha’. To be sure, he touched on other themes as well. In Bihar he deplored the ‘monster of casteism’. In Bombay he reminded his audience that a vote for Congress was also a vote for its foreign policy of principled neutralism. In Bharatpur and Bilaspur he deplored the impatience of his left-wing critics, whose ends he shared but not their means: as he put it, ‘we can build the edifice of Socialism brick by brick only’. In Ambala he asked the women to cast off their purdahs and ‘come forward to build the country’. In many places he expressed his admiration for the best among his opposition: for men such as Ambedkar, Kripalani, and Jayaprakash Narayan, who had once been his colleagues in the party or in government. ‘We want a number of [such] men with ability and integrity,’ he said. ‘They are welcome. But all of them are pulling in different directions and doing nothing in the end.’ He was particularly sorry to find himself in opposition to the Socialist Party, which, he said, ‘contains some of my old intimate friends whom I admire and respect’. These sentiments were not shared by his daughter, Indira Gandhi, who in her own speeches alleged that the socialists were funded by American dollars.35
In the course of his campaign Nehru ‘travelled more than he slept and talked more than he travelled’. He addressed 300 mass meetings and myriad wayside ones. He spoke to about 20 million people directly, while an equal number merely had his darshan, eagerly flanking the roads to see him as his car whizzed past. Those who heard and saw Nehru included miners, peasants, pastoralists, factory workers and agricultural labourers. Women of all classes turned out in numbers for his meetings. Sometimes there was a sprinkling of hostiles among the crowd. In parts of northern India Jana Sangh supporters shouted out at Nehru’s rallies that he was not to be trusted because he ate beef. Coming across a group of communists waving the hammer and sickle, Nehru asked them to ‘go and live in the country whose flag you are carrying’. ‘Why don’t you go to New York and live with the Wall Street imperialists?’ they shot back.36
But for the most part the people who came to hear Nehru were sympathetic, and often adulatory. This summation by a Congress booklet exaggerates, but not by very much:
[At] almost every place, city, town, village or wayside halt, people had waited overnight to welcome the nation’s leader. Schools and shops closed: milkmaids and cowherds had taken a holiday; the kisan and his helpmate took a temporary respite from their dawn-to-dusk programme of hard work in field and home. In Nehru’s name, stocks of soda and lemonade sold out; even water became scarce . . . Special trains were run from out-of-the-way places to carry people to Nehru’s meetings, enthusiasts travelling not only on foot-boards but also on top of carriages. Scores of people fainted in milling crowds.37
The independent press provided many instances of the popular mood. When Nehru spoke in Bombay, a procession, mainly of Muslims, marched to Chowpatty to the accompaniment of pipes and cymbals. It was headed by a pair of bullocks and a plough (the Congress symbol). Everywhere, crowds started collecting from early morning for talks scheduled for the afternoon; almost everywhere, barricades were broken in ‘the enthusiasm to catch a glimpse of Mr Nehru’. After he finished his speech in Delhi, Nehru was met as he came off the dais by a famous wrestler, Massu Pahalwan, who offered him a gold chain and remarked, ‘This is only a token. I am prepared to give my life for you and the country.’ The media was much taken with a Telugu-speaking woman who went to listen to Nehru speak in the railway town of Kharagpur. As the prime minister lectured on she was consumed by labour pains. Immediately, a group of fellow Andhras made a ring around her: the baby was safely delivered, no doubt while the midwives had an ear cocked to hear what their hero was saying.
The extraordinary popular appeal of the Indian prime minister is best captured in the testimony of the confirmed Nehru-baiter D. F. Karaka, editor of the popular Bombay weekly, the Current. He was in the vast crowd at Chowpatty beach, one of 200,000 people gathered there, many standing in the sea. Karaka noted – no doubt to his regret – ‘the instant affinity between the speaker and his audience’. This is how the editor reported Nehru’s speech:
He had come to Bombay after a long time, he told them. Many years.
He paused and looked at them with that wistful look he specialises in. In that pause, ominous for his political opponents, a thousand votes must have swung in his favour.
Yes, he felt a personal attachment to the city.
Pause.
Two thousand votes.
It was like coming home.
Pause.
Five thousand votes.
In Bombay he had passed some of the happiest moments in his life. Yes, the happiest.
Five thousand votes . . .
He remembered those great moments so vividly. And some of the saddest moments too – the sad, hard days of the [freedom] struggle.
Ten thousand votes for the Congress.
Pause. ‘By looking at the people who have struggled together with me in the fight for freedom, I derive freedom and strength,’ he said.
The affinity was complete.
Twenty thousand votes!
Pause.
A deep, sorrowful, soulful look in the fading twilight hour; with the air pregnant with emotion . . . He told the gathering that he had taken upon himself the role of a mendicant beggar. Amidst cheers, he said: ‘If at all I am a beggar, I am begging for your love, your affection and your enlightened co-operation in solving the problems which face the country.’
Thirty thousand votes were sure for Nehru.
Pause.
A stir in the audience. A tear on the face of the man or woman sitting on the beach or standing on the shore. Two tears, a sari-end wiping them gently off a woman’s face. She would give her vote to Nehru no matter what anyone else said. Memories of Gandhi came back to the people – the days when Nehru stood beside the Mahatma. Nehru . . . was the man he left to us as his political heir.
Fifty thousand votes! a hundred thousand! Two hundred thousand!38
The crowds were moved by Nehru; and he, in turn, was moved by them. His own feelings are best captured in a letter he wrote to one who with both delicacy and truth can be referred to as his closest lady friend, Edwina Mountbatten:
Wherever I have been, vast multitudes gather at my meetings and I love to compare them, their faces, their dress, their reactions to me and what I say. Scenes from past history of that very part of India rise up before me and my mind becomes a picture gallery of past events. But, more than the past, the present fills my mind and I try to probe into the minds and hearts of these multitudes. Having long been imprisoned in the Secretariat of Delhi, I rather enjoy these fresh contacts with the Indian people . . . The effort to explain in simple language our problems and our difficulties, and to reach the minds of these simple folk is both exhausting and exhilarating.
As I wander about, the past and the present merge into one another and this merger leads me to think of the future. Time becomes like a flowing river in continuous motion with events connected with one another.39
VI
One place even Nehru didn’t get to was the tahsil of Chini in Himachal Pradesh. Here resided the first Indians to cast votes in a general election, a group o
f Buddhists. They voted on 25 October 1951, days before the winter snows shut their valleys from the world. The villagers of Chini owed allegiance to the Panchen Lama in Tibet, and were ruled by rituals administered by local priests. These included gorasang, a religious service to celebrate the completion of a new house; kangur zalmo, a ceremonial visit to the Buddhist library at Kanam; menthako, ‘where men, women, and children climb hills, dance and sing’; and jokhiya chug simig, the interchange of visits between relatives. Now, although they didn’t as yet know it, was added a new ritual, to be performed at five-year intervals: voting in a general election.40
Polling began in the UK general election on the same day, although there the first voters were not Buddhist peasants in a Himalayan valley but ‘milkmen, charwomen and all-night workers returning home from work’.41 However, in those small islands the results of the election were known the following day – Labour had been swept out of power and Winston Churchill returned as prime minister. In India, the first voters had to wait months, for the rest of the country did not go to the polls until January and February 1952.
The highest turnout, 80.5 per cent, was recorded in the parliamentary constituency of Kottayam, in present-day Kerala; the lowest, 18.0, was in Shahdol in what is now Madhya Pradesh. For the country as a whole, about 60 per cent of registered voters exercised their franchise, this despite the high level of illiteracy. A scholar from the London School of Economics described how a young woman in Himachal walked several miles with her frail mother to vote: ‘for a day, at least, she knew she was important’.42 A Bombay-based weekly marvelled at the high turnout in the forest districts of Orissa, where tribals came to the booths with bows and arrows. One booth in the jungle reported more than 70 per cent voting; but evidently Sukumar Sen had got at least some things wrong, for the neighbouring booth was visited only by an elephant and two panthers.43 The press highlighted the especially aged: a 110-year-old man in Madurai who came propped up on either side by a great-grandson, a 95-year-old woman in Ambala, deaf and hunchbacked, who still turned up to vote. There was also the 90-year-old Muslim in rural Assam who had to return disappointed after being told by the presiding officer that ‘he could not vote for Nehru’. A nonagenarian in rural Maharashtra cast his vote for the Assembly election, but fell down and died before he could do the same for Parliament. And there was a vindication of Indian democracy in the electoral roll of Hyderabad, where among the first who voted was the Nizam himself.
One place in which there was especially brisk polling was Bombay. Delhi was where the rulers lived, but this island metropolis was India’s financial capital. It was also a very politically aware city. Altogether, 900,000 residents of Bombay, or 70 per cent of the city’s electorate, exercised their democratic right on election day. The workers came in far greater numbers as compared to the fashionable middle class. Thus, reported the Times of India, ‘in the industrial areas voters formed long queues long before the polling stations opened, despite the particularly cold and dewy morning. In contrast to this, at the WIAA Club [in Malabar Hill], which housed two polling stations, it appeared as if people straggled in for a game of tennis or bridge and only incidentally to vote.’
The day after Bombay went to the polls it was the turn of the Mizo hills. With regard to both culture and geography there could not have been a greater contrast. Bombay had a great density of polling stations: 1,349 in all, packed into just 92 square miles; the Mizo, a tribal area bordering East Pakistan and Burma, required a mere 113 booths spread over more than 8,000 square miles of territory. The people who lived in these hills, said one scribe, ‘have not known any queues hitherto except those in battle arrays’. But they had nonetheless ‘taken a strong fancy’ to the exercise, reaching their booths after walking for days on ‘perilous tracks through wild jungles, camping at night on the way amid song and community dances around the fire’. And so 92,000 Mizos, who ‘have through the centuries decided an issue with their arrows and spears, came forward to give their decision for the first time through the medium of the ballot’.
An American woman photographer on assignment in Himachal Pradesh was deeply impressed by the commitment shown by the election officials. One official had walked for six days to attend the preparatory workshop organized by the district magistrate; another had ridden four days on a mule. They went back to their distant stations with sewn gunny sacks full of ballot boxes, ballots, party symbols and electoral lists. On election day the photographer chose to watch proceedings at an obscure hill village named Bhuti. Here the polling station was a school-house which had only one door. Since the rules prescribed a different entry and exit, a window had been converted into a door, with improvised steps on either side to allow the elderly and ailing to hop out after voting.44
At least in this first election, politicians and the public were both (to quote the chief election commissioner) ‘essentially law-abiding and peaceful’. There were only 1,250 election offences reported. These included 817 cases of the ‘impersonation of voters’, 106 attempts to take ballot papers out of a polling station and 100 instances of ‘canvassing within one hundred yards of a polling station’, some of these last offences doubtless committed unknowingly by painted cows.45
VII
Polling for the general election ended in the last week of February 1952. When the votes were counted, the Congress had won comfortably. The party secured 364 out of 489 seats in Parliament and 2,247 out of 3,280 seats in the state assemblies. As critics of the Congress were quick to point out, the first-past-the-post system had produced a far from representative result. More than 50 per cent of the electorate had voted for non-Congress candidates or parties. For Parliament as a whole, Congress had polled 45 per cent of the vote and won 74.4 per cent of the seats; the corresponding figures for the states were 42.4 per cent and 68.6 per cent. Even so, twenty-eight Congress ministers had failed to win a seat. These included such men of influence as Jai Narayan Vyas, in Rajasthan, and Morarji Desai, in Bombay. More striking still was the fact that it was a communist, Ravi Narayan Reddy – he who drank his first glass of whisky during the campaign – who achieved the largest majority, larger even than Jawaharlal Nehru’s.
One of the more notable defeats was that of the Scheduled Caste leader B. R. Ambedkar. Opposing him in his Bombay constituency was an obscure milkman named Kajrolkar. The gifted Marathi journalist P. K. Atre popularized a slogan which went:
Kuthe to Ghatnakar Ambedkar,
Aani Kuthe ha Lonivikya Kajrolkar?
which, roughly translated, means:
Where is the (great) constitution-maker Ambedkar
And where the (obscure) butter-seller Kajrolkar?46
Yet, in the end, the prestige and hold of the Congress, and the fact that Nehru made several speeches in Bombay, carried Kajrolkar to victory. As one wag remarked, even a lamp-post standing on the Congress ticket could have been elected. Or, as a political scientist more dispassionately put it, the election was won on ‘Nehru’s personal popularity and his ability to express the aspirations of a newly independent India in a vivid and forceful manner’.47
On the eve of the polls Sukumar Sen suggested they constituted ‘the biggest experiment in democracy in human history’. A veteran Madras editor was less neutral; he complained that ‘a very large majority [will] exercise votes for the first time: not many know what the vote is, why they should vote, and whom they should vote for; no wonder the whole adventure is rated as the biggest gamble in history’.48 And a recently dispossessed maharaja told a visiting American couple that any constitution that sanctioned universal suffrage in a land of illiterates was ‘crazy’. ‘Imagine the demagoguery, the misinformation, the dishonesty possible’, said the maharaja, adding, ‘The world is far too shaky to permit such an experiment.’49
Sharing this scepticism was Penderel Moon, a Fellow of All Souls College, and an ex-ICS man who had chosen to stay on in India. In 1941, Moon had spoken to the graduating students of Punjab University about the unsuitability of Western-styl
e democracy to their social context. Now, eleven years later, he was the chief commissioner of the hill state of Manipur, and had to depute election officers and supervise the polling and the counting. As the people of Manipur went to the polls on 29 January, Moon wrote to his father that ‘a future and more enlightened age will view with astonishment the absurd farce of recording the votes of millions of illiterate people’.50
Just as sceptical as the All Souls man was the Organiser, a weekly published by the revanchist Hindu group, the RSS. This hoped that Jawaharlal Nehru ‘would live to confess the failure of universal adult franchise in India’. It claimed that Mahatma Gandhi had warned against ‘this precipitate dose of democracy’, and that the president, Rajendra Prasad, was ‘sceptical about this leap in the dark’. Yet Nehru, ‘who has all along lived by slogans and stunts, would not listen’.51
There were times when even Nehru had second thoughts about universal franchise. On 20 December 1951 he took a brief leave of absence from the campaign to address a UNESCO symposium in Delhi. In his speech Nehru accepted that democracy was the best form of government, or self-government, but still wondered whether
the quality of men who are selected by these modern democratic methods of adult franchise gradually deteriorates because of lack of thinking and the noise of propaganda . . . He [the voter] reacts to sound and to the din, he reacts to repetition and he produces either a dictator or a dumb politician who is insensitive. Such a politician can stand all the din in the world and still remain standing on his two feet and, therefore, he gets selected in the end because the others have collapsed because of the din.
This was a rare confession, based no doubt on his recent experiences on the road. A week later Nehru suggested that it might be better to have direct elections at the lower levels – say within the village and district – and indirect elections for the highest levels. For, as he put it, ‘direct election for such a vast number is a complicated problem and the candidates may never come into touch with the electorate and the whole thing becomes distant’.52
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