It is about twenty minutes to midnight as I write this from Banglaore. Just finished watching "Ten Defining Moments of free India" on NDTV. I must say that I was more than a little bemused by some of the choices, especially our 1983 World Cup victory. Ram Guha pointed out that this was the only major tournament that India had won. Well, we won the World cup hockey in 1974. Plus, the victories by Ajit Wadekar’s men over the West Indies and England definitely preceded the World cup victory. The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has played a great role in India’s transformation over the years. Time magazine had a photo of India’s first rocket and derisively titled ‘Entering Space age on a Bullock cart’. We have definitely come a long way since then. I wonder why Liberation of Bangladesh was missed out.  

Happily, I agreee with Ram and Rajdeep Sardesai that the first ever general elections was one of the defining moments in Free India’s history. By any reckoning it was a massive exercise. The nation was still recovering from trauma of partition. Refugees in Punjab and Bengal were yet to be settled. The Bengal famine of 1943 was still fresh in the memory. Only one Indian in ten could read and write. The undivided Communist Party had just laid down arms fighting the Nizam’s repressive army and the Indian state.

The constitution adopted just over eighteen months prior had guaranteed universal adult franchaise. Elections were to be held simultaneously for both the Lok Sabha and the state assemblies. That is a massive 5000 seats were at stake. Two million polling booths were spread over a territory of over one million square miles.  Close to nine thousand tonnes of steel were required to manufacture two million ballot boxes alone. This was at a time when there was a solitary steel plant in the country. Less than ten percent of the country had electricity. The frosty terrian of Ladakh and the deserts of Rajasthan had to be covered. Ballots and Ballot boxes were carried over Camels to reach the remotest corner of the country. Armies of clerks and electoral officers had to deployed to conduct the polls and count the ballots. Over two hundred thousand police men were on call to maintain law and order and prevent violence.

Electoral constituencies had to be demarcated fairly and judiciously. Electoral rolls had to be prepared. Then the biggest question of all. How do the illiterate voters identify the candidate? And once a voter has voted, how should he or she be prevented from voting again. The answer to the first question was Electoral Symbol. For the second question, an indelible ink jabbed on the voter’s index finger.

Even now, more than five decades later, the sheer logistics and the accompanying problems of carrying out this exercise is mind boggling.

The newly created and constitutionally independent Election Commission was entrusted with this task. The commission announced that the whole process would take around four months to complete starting with the first ballot around the last week of October and the first Lok Sabha could convene in March 1952.

The parties had slightly more than a month to campaign. The Election Commission firecely protected free speech and ensure parity between the Congress and the other parties. Thus when Nehru during a campaign in Malabar insinuated that the Communists with their foregin flag should go live there, the communiusts retaliated by asking Nehru to go live amongst the Wall Street Imperialists. Not edifying, but positively polite by today’s standards.

Just as India was going to vote for the first time, crisis struck. Belligerence of our neighbour took a new turn when Liaquat Ali Khan, the Prime Minister of Pakistan was assasinated and their military staged their first coup, an event that has regretabbly repeated time and again.  That was on October 16, 1951. Nine days later, the first Indian somewhere cast his first vote and establish democracy in India. Sixty three out of every hundred Indian chose to vote in that election.

The greatest margin of victory was won not by an urban Congress candidate, but by a candiate in rural Telengana-Hyderabad, Ravi Narayan Reddy of the Communist Party of India. Reddy was a great freedom fighter and also fought against the Nizam’s army in the ‘Razakar’ agitation and had won the hearts of the poor peasants enough to earn their goodwill and their votes. The party that had earlier sought to establish a Proletarian Dictatorship in India had now sworn to protect the constitution. Five years later, in the newly formed state of Kerala, the same communists were voted to power - a seminal event.

The one man who was instrumental in initiating this ‘Festival of Democracy’ as Financial Times put it in a later context, was Sukumar Sen, the first Chief Election commissioner of India.  I wonder how many Indians have even hear of him. Sen was true national hero, an innovator who introduce party symbols and indelible ink, a great organizer.

So far, we have voted thrteen more times, but the first one is always the most difficult and is special. To that special first one, we owe a word of thanks and a tribute to Sukumar Sen.

It is around eight in the evening now and I am sitting in my hotel room in St. Louis as I type this. I have another three days of endless meetings and presentations. It has been three weeks already and I am dying to get back home.

I am visiting the United States after four years and at first glance notice that nothing has visibly changed here. It is especially stark for someone living in Bangalore where changes, for the better or for the worse happen as if in a whim. It is indeed remarkable that the War in Iraq is a distant third to Anna Nicole Smith, six weeks after her death and to the scandal of Attorney firings. The Wall Street journal editorially opposes a seat in the Congress for Washington DC. George W Bush has promised a veto! Not that one wound expect anything better from the WSJ or Bush.

One just needs to recollect that the slogan that sparked the American War of Independence was ‘No Taxation without Representation’. It is indeed remarkable that two centuries and quarter after the declaration of Independence, the residents of that nation’s capital are without representation. I wonder how the denizes of our National Capital region would take it if we decided that we would do without the services of the fourteen ladies and gentlemen who rejoice in representing Delhi in Lok Sabha.

Of course, Washington DC is not alone in being denied represenation. Peurto Rico and Guam readily come to mind. The reason cited is these are not states and the constitution requires state to have representation. It sure does look like a lame excuse to me. Alexander Hamilton had said that it would require a constitutional amendment to grant represenation to non-states. I wonder why that has not happened.

 Granted, the US constitution is extremely hard to amend and that effort has been carried out only about 27 times so far. But it is still possible. Surely something as fundamental as universal franchaise should not take a couple of centuries!

 Americans justifiably take great pride in their freedoms and their constitution, especially their bill of rights. America has come a long way since the days of slavery and the Jim Crow laws of the south. While the scourge of racsim persists, the very fact that one of the leading contenders for the next year’s presidency is black is indeed heartening. The American electorate may have an opportuinty to judge Obama not for the colour of his skin, but for the content of his character, as Martin Luther King put it.

American has faced several threats to its democratic experiment since its inception and each time it has emerged stronger. The civil war threatened the republic itself, but ultimately led to emancipation of slaves. The gilded age and the plutocracy of the late nineteeth century and early twentietth century resulted in the great depression. Again America survived it and got a ‘New Deal’. The red scare and the hate filled McCarthyism were soon confined to the dust bin of history. The Vietnam era led to flower power and civil liberties and voting rights act. Even today, the most vociferous critics of the excesses of Guantanamo and Abu Gharib are Americans.

 Thus the American system has this remarkable shock absorber and their enduring institutions are a testimony to that. I am no unabashed admirer of the American way. I have strong reservations about its Rambo style Wall Street capitalism and its endless interference and muscle flexing across the globe. Its almost schiezophrenic attitude towards immigration, its contemptuous disregard for world opinion certainly portray it in very poor light.

 But America has its strengths and has striven hard to live up to what Lincoln called ‘Government Of the People, For the People, By the People’. The one blot is the representation it denies to a small minority of its citizens. They are not about to revolt and American experiment is not in danger. But make that small amends would make American democracy even stronger for it would be done ‘With Malice towards none and Charity towards all’, again the words of Lincoln.

Some cynics may argue that anyway these people are better off without politicians. But that would be missing the point and toally wrong. As the FDR once said in a different context about the Nicaraguan dicator, Samoza, ‘He is a Son of a Bitch, but he is our own Son of a Bitch’. Well all of us deserve our own S.O.Bs, including residents of Washington DC, Peurto Rico and Guam.

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