Congress dominance, 1952-62

The Indian National Congress dominated the early elections. Why?

• It inherited the legacy of the national movement: it was the party that had won freedom.
• It had an organisation spread across the whole country, down to the villages.
• It had Nehru, the most popular leader in India.

The results:

• In 1952, the Congress won 364 of the 489 Lok Sabha seats. The next largest party, the Communist Party of India (CPI), won only 16.
• In 1957 and 1962, it again won about three-fourths of the seats. No opposition party won even a tenth of its tally.
• It also formed the government in almost every state.

How the voting system helped: India uses the first-past-the-post system: in each constituency, the candidate with the most votes wins, even without a majority. The opposition vote was divided among many parties, so the Congress won seat after seat. In 1952 it won less than half the votes (about 45 per cent) but about 74 per cent of the seats.

An exception: Kerala, 1957. The CPI won the state election and formed a government under E.M.S. Namboodiripad. It was one of the first times anywhere in the world that a communist party came to power through elections.

But in 1959, the Central government (run by the Congress) dismissed it under Article 356 of the Constitution, after a protest movement against it. The decision was widely criticised as a misuse of emergency powers, and it became the first of many such dismissals.