The Indian Express (Delhi Edition)
A third term for Nehru, but Cong begins to lose its sheen
1962: War with China followed months after the LS election. The increasing Opposition consolidation would have an impact in 1967 Of India’s 969 million electors, more than 18.4 million are between the ages of 18 and 19. This is the story of elections to I
BY THE time the elections of 1962 came around,theelectioncommissionofindia(eci) had finetuned many of its procedures. The election saw the highest turnout of voters until then — and even though the Congress won decisively, the first clear instances of political criticism of the party became visible.
This happened despite Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in his second term having overseen the successful liberation of Goa, Daman, and Diu in a military operation that ended more than 400 years of Portuguese rule over these territories.
New CEC, new challenges
The first Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Sukumar Sen retired in 1958, and was succeeded by KVK Sundaram. The big change in the 1962 election was the abolition of twomember seats, a system that was intended to provide representation to the general category in certain reserved (SC/ST) seats.
In the first two elections, some constituencies — including Nehru’s Phulpur and Feroze Gandhi’s Rae Bareli — sent two members to Lok Sabha. (There was even a threemember seat in West Bengal in the first Lok Sabha.) In 1957, Congress heavyweight and the future President of India V VG iri came third in Parvathipuram, Andhra Pradesh, one of the two-member seats, behind two Scheduled Tribe (ST) candidates. Around the country, SC/ST candidates were elected at nine single-member ‘general’ seats.
Giri challenged the election of the second ST candidate, Dippala Suri Dora, in the Supreme Court, but got no relief. As the demand for restricting SC/ST reservation to single-member constituencies gained momentum, Parliament passed The Two-member Constituencies (Abolition) Act, 1961.
A second change in the 1962 election came as a consequence of the creation of the new states of Gujarat and Maharashtra in 1960, and the Union Territories of Goa, Daman and Diu, and Dadra and Nagar Haveli in 1961, and the accompanying realignment of administrative boundaries.
10-day vote, 3-week count
Ten days, from February 16-25, is all it took for almost 21 crore Indians to vote for India’s third Lok Sabha.
A total 1,985 candidates contested the election, in which 55.43% of the 21.63 crore electors cast their votes—well above the 47.54% turnout in the 1957 election. The best turnout in 1962 was in Nagapattinam (80.66%); the worst in Bhanjnagar, Orissa (12.04%).
Votes were cast for 387 general, 76 SC, and 31 St seats in lo ks ab ha, and 3,121 seats in state Assemblies, including 693 reserved seats. The national parties were, besides the Congress, the Communist Party of India (CPI), Praja Socialist party(p sp ), and thebh ar a ti ya jan asangh (BJS), which was the precursor to today’s BJP.
The practice of putting indelible ink on the voter’s left forefinger, seen in the first two elections, continued in 1962 as well. But an experiment with issuing photo identity cards was abandoned after a test before a byelection to the Calcutta South-west Lok Sabha seat was not successful.
The counting of votes took longer than the polling — from February 25 to March 18, 1962. There were demands for recounts at the Gonda and Balrampur seats in UP. Congress candidates ultimately won both seats by small margins. The new Lok Sabha was constituted on April 2, 1962, after giving the old House time to wrap up essential pending work.
Third term for PM Nehru
By the middle of Nehru’s second term, the first criticisms of the Congress could be heard clearly. At the 1959 AICC session in Nagpur, Chaudhary Charan Singh, who was still in the Congress then, criticised the party’s Cooperative Farming Resolution, which proposed the pooling of individual land holdings without provisions for mechanisation of agriculture.
Just before the election, Chakravarti Rajagopalachari, the last Governor-general of India, merged his Indian National Democratic Congress with some smaller groups in Bihar and Himachal Pradesh to form the Swatantra Party, which was recognised as a state party in six states.
However, none of the Opposition parties managed to dent the Congress electorally in 1962. The party won 361 seats in Lok Sabha; the next biggest party in the House was CPI with 29, followed by BJS with 14. Thirty-five women were elected.
In the Assembly elections, the Congress returned to power in all states except Kerala. Barring Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, it got clear majorities everywhere.
Ram Manohar Lohia of the Socialist Party lost to Nehru in Phulpur. Vijayaraje Scindia, who contested on a Congress ticket, won in Gwalior.
Among the Opposition le ad ers,JB Kripalani contested from Bombay City (North) as an Independent and lost. Atal Bihari Vajpayee of the BJS lost both in Balrampur and Lucknow, but was subsequently elected to Rajya Sabha. Vajpayee’s party colleague Balraj Madhok lost in New Delhi.
After the election, at its national executive in Kota, Rajasthan, on May 24, 1962, the BJS would pass a resolution accusing central and state ministers of “heavily misusing” government machinery during the elections. The party would demand that governments at the Centre and in states should resign three months ahead of every election so that a level playing field could be ensured.
China war, other problems
On April 10, 1962, Nehru, then 73, took oath for a third term as Prime Minister. He had been greatly disturbed by what he saw as the articulation of separatist voices during the election campaign, and had told Lok Sabha on March 19 that he had been “shocked beyond measure at what the opponents of the Congress did”.
“...All the tendencies which have been so obvious in this election, caste tendency, communal tendencies and the like which are harmful and which disintegrate the country have to be met as far as possible unitedly... Elections upset our thinking apparatus and put passions in control of us and of others... If it is war, it will be war but it will not be accepted. When I find that not only the people who talk about them but others encouraging such parties and asking people to vote for them, it shows that something has gone wrong in somebody’s thinking completely...,” he said.
Nehru was speaking about the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), which had run a radical campaign and won seven seats in Madras and emerged as a major force there. A year earlier, in 1961, the National Integration Council (NIC) had been established to find solutions to “the evils of communalism, casteism, regionalism, linguism and narrow-mindedness”.
Besides the rising tides of linguist nationalism and subregional aspirations, Nehru’s government also grappled with food shortages and general social unrest. Then, on October 20, 1962, China invaded, dealing a body blow to Nehru’s trustful foreign policy doctrine of Hindi-chini bhai-bhai. Although China declared a unilateral ceasefire after a month, Nehru and the Congress could never recover from the setback.
Of the 10 bypolls held between the 1962 Lok Sabha election and July 1963, the Congress could win just four — Lohia entered Lok Sabha from Farrukhabad, and Kripalani from Amroha. In August 1963, Nehru’s government faced its first no-confidence motion.
The gradual consolidation of Opposition parties had an impact in multiple states in 1967. But Nehru was not alive to see the decline of his party. After serving for 16 years and 286 days — the longest prime ministerial tenure in India so far — Nehru passed away following a fatal heart attack on May 27, 1964, in New Delhi.