Hindustan Times

Dipankar Ghose

Dhrubo Jyoti

These five Indians will be remembered for their role in this era.

Nehru, Ambedkar, Shastri: 5 key leaders

<h2 style="text-align:center;">Jawaharlal Nehru</h2><p>For five years after India’s independence from the fetters of colonialism, prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru dealt with a nascent republic beset by challenges. He led a country devastated by over two centuries of plunder; divided by a bloody partition and the killing of its talisman in Mahatma Gandhi; a country that still had to integrate several princely states. Still, in that time, there were many firsts, chief among them the drafting of the Indian Constitution, and the first general election, held in late 1951 and early 1952.</p>

<p>Politically, Nehru and his Congress cemented their positions as the unilateral pole of Indian leadership, sweeping elections in 1952, 1957 and 1962. In the first general election, Nehru’s Congress won a whopping 364 of 499 seats, and over 44% of the vote. Five years later, the domination only grew, with the Congress winning 371 of 505 seats, and its vote share rising to 48%. In 1962, the tally dipped slightly, to 361, but there was nobody close to challenging the Congress hegemony. Until his death in May 1964, Nehru remained the undisputed leader of the Indian republic; the man that gave that famous speech at midnight on the day India became free; the man that never lost a national election.</p><h2 style="text-align:center;">BR Ambedkar</h2><p>By 1951, when India first voted in a general election in what India’s first chief election commissioner Sukumar Sen called the “biggest experiment in democracy in history” for its sheer size and scale, BR Ambedkar was already a national icon. For over four decades he had established himself as the country’s leading voice for the marginalised; one of India’s most profound reformers; the man who rose from nothing to lead the arduous task of writing the Constitution of the newly formed republic and largest democracy in the world.</p>

<p>Ambedkar was part of Jawaharlal Nehru’s first cabinet, serving as India’s first law minister. But few remember that he first ran on a non-Congress ticket. Because of his differences with the Congress on a myriad issues, he fought the first general election from Bombay North on a ticket from the Scheduled Caste Federation party.</p><p>In one of the first signs that electoral results are not always commensurate with individual popularity in the face of broader extenuating political circumstances, Ambedkar lost, to the Congress candidate Narayan Kajrolkar. It was the Nehru wave in action.</p><p>Ambedkar was nominated to the Rajya Sabha. In 1954, he tried again, in a Lok Sabha bypoll; he lost again. Ambedkar died in 1956, before the second general election, which meant that one of India’s greatest icons never once tasted victory at the ballot box in independent India.</p><h2 style="text-align:center;">Syama Prasad Mookerjee</h2><p>The politics of Syama Prasad Mookerjee were diametrically opposed to that of the Congress. He, after all, was president of the Akhil Bharatiya Hindu Mahasabha, which took several divergent positions from the Jawaharlal Nehru-led Congress. But such was Mookerjee’s heft, and Nehru's attempt to assimilate and present a united front, that he was included in the prime minister’s first cabinet, becoming independent India’s first minister for industries.</p>

<p>Four years later, Mookerjee would accomplish something with far-reaching implications. In 1951, he founded the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, the ideological fountainhead of the Bharatiya Janata Party that would be formed over 30 years later. The Jana Sangh entered Parliament with three seats in the 1952 election, including Mookerjee’s. It continued to grow, albeit slowly, over the following decade. In 1957, it won four seats, and in 1962, 14.</p><p>More importantly, Mookerjee’s hardline stances on nationalism, Hindutva politics, Article 370 and Kashmir became a lightning rod for the country and would later serve as a means of mobilisation for the BJP.</p><h2 style="text-align:center;">AK Gopalan</h2><p>The decade between 1952 and 1962, and the three general elections that framed them, were remarkable for several reasons. The first was the democratic experiment itself, conducted in a country still grappling with communal tensions, pockets of dissonance, and violent debates over language and demography. The second was the sheer dominance of Nehru's Congress over the electoral battlefield, seemingly cloaking all these disparate voices under one gargantuan political umbrella.</p>

<p>But even then, in that wave of all political waves, there were those that differed. For all three of those elections, it was the undivided Communist Party of India (CPI) that was the strongest opposition unit in the Lok Sabha. Though it finished a distant second behind the Congress, with 16, 27 and 29 seats respectively, this meant, in effect, that India's first leader of the opposition (though not technically, because the CPI did not meet the stipulation of winning at least 10% of the seats in the House) was AK Gopalan.</p><p>In his first speech in Parliament, in 1952, the Member of Parliament from Kasaragod, Kerala, spoke of the CPI’s lack of experience with parliamentary procedures and practice, but said that the Lok Sabha would always “hear from them the voice of the people”. AKG, as he was popularly known, grew into his role and remained in parliament for 25 years.</p><h2 style="text-align:center;">Lal Bahadur Shastri</h2><p>By the time India won her independence from the British, the diminutive Lal Bahadur Shastri had already grown into a political giant. In 1947, Shastri was made parliamentary secretary in the crucial state of Uttar Pradesh, and became minister of police and transport there, under Gobind Ballabh Pant’s chief ministership.</p>

<p>Ahead of India’s first general election, Shastri was given an even more important role. He was tasked by Nehru, in acknowledgement of his political and organisational nous, to be the election manager for the grand old party, and promoted to general secretary of the Congress.</p><p>The party secured a rousing win, a feat it repeated in 1957 and 1962. Shastri didn’t contest the polls but became part of Nehru’s cabinet in 1952, serving as minister of railways and transport. In 1957, Shastri entered the Lok Sabha for the first time, winning from Allahabad, a seat he would win again in 1962.</p><p>Again, despite his resignation in the wake of two rail accidents in his first term, he was made minister of commerce and industry and home affairs, in the five-year period between 1957 and 1962. His stature grew, both in the Congress and in government, and when Nehru died suddenly, from a heart attack, in 1964, there was only one man with the heft to be India’s second prime minister.</p>