ABSTRACT
On 22 November 1951, in a broadcast to the nation, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru described the first general election as a ‘great adventure’ and urged the nation to face it ‘with good heart and spirit’. ‘Thus shall we lay the firm foundations of the democratic structure of this great republic’, he announced in a triumphalist tone of making history.1 Indeed, this was a huge and unprecedented administrative exercise destined to transform India into a modern democratic nation. In April 1950 the Representation of the People Act was passed by the parliament; already an Election Commission had been constituted and Sukumar Sen, a Bengali ICS officer who was then the Chief Secretary in West Bengal, was appointed the Chief Election Commissioner. The task for him was truly ‘gigantic’, as The Statesman described it; if completed properly it would be a ‘triumph indeed for the nation’.2
