describe the first general election in india.
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Answer:
India had its first general elections in 1951-52, although Election commission was set up in January 1950. This was because the election commission soon discovered that conducting free and fair elections in a country of India’s size wouldn’t be a piece of cake. Holding an election required drawing the boundaries of the electoral constituencies. It also required preparing the electoral rolls or the list of all the citizens eligible to vote. When the first draft of the rolls was published, it was discovered that the names of nearly 40 lakh women were not recorded in the list. They were simply listed as “wife of…”, Or “daughter of…” Election commission refused to accept these entries and ordered a revision. Preparing for the first general elections was a laborious task. No election on such scale had been organised before. These were the primary problems other major problems being- Illiteracy of the people, poverty, the population of the state, as well as it’s continental size. Till then democracy had existed only in the prosperous countries, mainly Europe and North America, where everyone was literate. By that time many countries in Europe had not given voting rights to all women. In this context, India’s experiment with universal adult franchise appeared bold and risky. But the Indian experiment proved the critics wrong. Elections were competitive- there were on an average more than four candidates for each seat. The level of participation was encouraging, more than half the eligible voters turned out to vote. Hence India’s general elections of 1952 became a landmark in the history of democracy all over the world.