Hindustan Times

Taylor C Sherman

A near-fatal plane crash, reluctant campaigners, tussles over party expenses, and a polling cycle that was shrinking from four months to under three weeks - the mechanics of holding the world's biggest elections formed part of the drama, as a massive new democracy found its feet.

Planting the seeds of a new India

It is often assumed that the Nehruvian years were a period of stability in Indian democracy. The Constitution, it is assumed, provided the country’s founding moment, and set up a political system that would only slowly evolve (or be eroded) after Nehru’s death. Equally, it is said, under Nehru’s leadership, the Congress Party dominated the three elections (1951-52, 1956-57, 1962) and the opposition was fragmented and unable to pull together a genuinely distinct platform from which to contest Congress rule.Looking more closely at this period, however, the years between 1950 and 1964 witnessed several significant evolutions in India’s democracy. From how politicians campaigned and how citizens voted, to the issues of the day, the third election had a very different feel from the first one.<h2 style="text-align:center;">The story of the campaigns</h2>Over the course of the first three elections, the nature of campaigning took on a more fervent pace. While the first election had spanned nearly four months, from October 1951 to February 1952, the second election was conducted over just 20 days, between February and March 1957, and the third general election took but 10 days, in February 1962.

While Nehru had travelled primarily by train and a little by plane during the first election, by the second, he was flying much more. The plane, a Russian Ilyushin aircraft, had been promised to the prime minister by the Soviet leaders Nikita Khrushchev and Nikolai Bulganin during their tour of India at the end of 1955, just as they had gifted one to the Burmese premier, U Nu.Nehru gifted the plane to the Indian Air Force and proceeded to use it to travel the country. Opposition parties were none too pleased with Nehru’s use of airplanes for electioneering. They complained that he was exploiting official transportation for non-official party business. And they railed against the expenses incurred, including building new airstrips where required, asking how these could possibly have fit within the maximum election expenses allotted to each candidate.On one of his election flights during the second campaign, Nehru nearly suffered a fatal crash. On February 26, 1957, he was travelling from Mangalore to Raipur when an engine caught fire. Writing to his sister the following day to praise the captain of the plane, Squadron Leader Reginald Azariah Rufus, for turning off the engine rapidly, Nehru observed: “It is possible that if he had not succeeded in the course of fifteen or twenty seconds or a little more, the fire might have reached the petrol tanks and, then, we would all have been blown into the higher atmosphere.” The pilot landed on a disused landing strip left over from the World War 2, in Raichur, and Nehru spent some time there waiting for a replacement plane to arrive. With typical restraint he noted near the end of the letter to his sister: “I am a little wary of this travelling about.”For all candidates and all parties, campaigning became exceedingly expensive over the course of the first three elections, even without the use of airplanes.Although the law stated that candidates were only permitted to spend ₹25,000 on their electioneering, it was widely understood that, as chief election commissioner KVK Sundaram reiterated in 1962, “The general impression is that, wherever the elections are hotly contested, the really serious candidates have to, and do in fact, spend much more than the prescribed maximum amount.”Indeed, for the parties, the elections were very costly matters, with the Congress spending ₹5 crore on the second general election, and a similar amount on the third in 1962. Increasingly, this money came from corporate donations. Indeed, the Union government, led by the Congress, seemed to pursue every possible avenue for opening up donations. In 1956, the Companies Act authorised corporate donations to political parties, so long as the enterprise’s memorandum of association permitted it. Separate legislation exempted this money from taxation.The prime minister was rather out of step with this larger trend. In September 1961, Nehru travelled to Kanpur and collected more than ₹1 lakh for his party, but he did so feeling “a little ashamed”.He told a public meeting, “It is not proper for the Congress that it should take money from those who do not like the policy and aims of the Congress. They only want the Congress to be under an obligation to them by accepting their money.” Indeed, one of the first big cash-for-influence scandals of postcolonial India, the Serajuddin Affair, would break shortly after the third election, demonstrating the hidden work these donations did in gaining influence in the form of obtaining licences and permits.Although the influence of money on Indian politics was a worrying trend, when it came to offering voters genuine choice, India’s democracy grew more vibrant over the course of the Nehru years.<h2 style="text-align:center;">The challenges from Left, Right and Below</h2>After the Communist Party of India abandoned armed struggle in 1951, and through the second general election, opposition parties tended to criticise the Congress for not living up to its own programme. They demanded better adherence to non-alignment in foreign policy, a stronger commitment to socialism, and more concerted efforts in uplifting the people.

Indeed, after the Communists took power in Kerala in 1957, their programme was not remarkably different from the Congress one. As EMS Namboodiripad explained, his ministry’s aims were “natural concomitants of the national goal which has been accepted by all sections of our people – the goal of building a Socialist Society”.By the late 1950s, however, this Congress-led consensus was beginning to fade. The Swatantra Party emerged as a force to the Right of the Congress. Its leaders challenged Congress socialism, in part by caricaturing it as a step on the way to Soviet Communism, but also by pointing out the corrupting influences of what they called the permit-and-licence raj.At the same time, genuine opposition to the Congress’s approach to caste and reservations was emerging. The Congress programme had two facets, the first being reservations for SCs and STs. When they were due to expire, 10 years after the inauguration of the Constitution, Nehru’s government extended reservations for SCs and STs. At the same time, direct appeals to caste were forbidden during election campaigning, and the rules against appealing to citizens to vote on the basis of caste were strengthened before the third general election.Nehru personally almost never spoke about caste. He regarded it as atavistic and parochial, and he preferred to focus instead on economic development, insisting that it was the best means of addressing the inequalities and indignities of the caste system.By the late 1950s, this approach was openly being called into question, not least because everyone from sociologists such as MN Srinivas to Gandhian workers such as Jayaprakash Narayan, could see how caste allegiances had been mobilised during the first two election campaigns. The Republican Party of India, founded just before BR Ambedkar’s death in 1956, pulled together a coalition of Dalits and OBCs to oppose reservations as a form of “charity” that they did not want.Meanwhile, Left-leaning parliamentarians, including socialists and communists, began to question the government’s policy of avoiding any discussion of caste. Renu Chakravartty, Communist Member of Parliament from West Bengal, argued that caste communities ought to be able to express “legitimate grievances” relating to “social oppression” during election campaigns. Under Ram Manohar Lohia, the Socialist Party’s 1962 election manifesto included a demand for reservations to be extended to women and “backward castes of religious minorities”, and their election manifesto called for inter-caste dining among government employees. The conversation about caste had clearly shifted by the 1960s, presaging the greater transformations that would be witnessed in the 1970s and 1980s.<h2 style="text-align:center;">Planting the seeds of a new India</h2>Perhaps the greatest contribution to democracy of the Nehru years was an awareness of the fragility of democracy. India’s founders had written the Constitution with a mix of high ideals and wary realism. Of course, they had dreams and goals for the country, but after nearly two decades of experience with elections under the British, they had a realistic understanding of how democracy could be distorted by self-serving politicians. This produced a constant vigilance, at least in the strongest leaders.Among officials, for example, this care was evident when the first chief election commissioner, Sukumar Sen, introduced a different system of voting — moving from multiple unmarked ballots to marked ballots — in order to put an end to corrupt practices of ballot stuffing.Among politicians, by the late 1950s, there was an emerging awareness that their democratic system, and election campaigns in particular, were taking India’s democracy in unintended directions. They worried about the increased use of strikes, protests and other forms of disobedience to achieve political ends, as well as about an upward tick in violence. They fretted about the prominence of caste in electioneering. And they were deeply concerned about perceptions that ministers and other politicians took money from businessmen during campaigns and used the exercise of their official duties to pay back these favours.One way in which India’s leaders addressed these concerns was through voluntary codes of conduct.After the second general election, Gulzarilal Nanda worked to bring four trade unions and three central employers’ organisations together to agree to a code that stipulated, among other things, that the parties were to “settle all disputes and grievances through negotiation”. The following year, in 1959, the main political parties in what was then the state of Madras signed an agreement pledging not to “exploit” students for political purposes.In Kerala, the biggest political upheaval of the Nehru years had seen the Communist government ousted in 1959 after a series of opposition party protests that erupted in violence. Shortly thereafter, all parties in the state agreed on a code of conduct for political campaigning. This would become a model for other states.Before the third general election, the chief election commissioner worked with political parties in each state to draft codes of conduct for electioneering. Though there were local variations, they shared a commitment to abstain from “exploiting caste and communal feelings” for electoral purposes, to avoid interfering in meetings and processions of their rivals, and to eschew personal attacks on their opponents. This was all part of the prehistory to today’s Model Code of Conduct.Apprehension about the integrity, stability and longevity of India’s democracy has been a near-constant feature of the country’s history after independence. During the first three elections, India’s democracy matured and expanded, but not always in ways that the ruling classes were comfortable with. India’s elites, Congressmen and opposition parties, as well as the press, exercised their freedom to criticise the workings of democracy with the aim of strengthening it, even if their efforts at times fell short.(Taylor C Sherman is author of Nehru’s India: A History in Seven Myths, published by Princeton University Press; 2022)The views expressed are personal