The importance of election symbols in India was set at our first elections in 1951-52, says Vikram Doctor

YOU KNOW THAT ELECTION SEASON is really on us when stories on election symbols start to appear in the news. Before that it’s all jousting about when and with which alliances parties will go to the polls, but with symbols they are moving from the manoeuvring to the actual mechanics of being elected.

This year we have seen a Madhya Pradesh Congress leader calling for lotus ponds to be covered up to avoid promoting the BJP’s symbol, leading the BJP to ask if the Congress would then have to cover up their hands to avoid displaying their open palm symbol. In Delhi the Aam Admi Party has taken out “jhadu chalao yatras” brandishing the brooms that are their symbol.

The Election Commission (EC) has had to come up with a special symbol for the None Of The Above option (a box with NOTA written inside). And we can only pity people in Chhattisgarh who are probably being deafened by whistles blown by the Chhattisgarh Swabhiman Manch, a new party that has been allotted that as their symbol.

Election symbols usually seem to be a fairly comic sidelight to the election process. Their use can seem entertaining, or perhaps annoying if we find them painted all over our walls. They can turn cruel when actual animals are used which is why People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has called for a ban on animal symbols.

And sometimes the images can just seem weird like the batsman allotted to Meera Sanyal, the banker who campaigned as an independent in the last general election from Mumbai. Salil Tripathi, the writer and cricket buff who was one of her advisers recalls being baffled at the image: “The shot looks as if the batsman is in front of the wicket. If so, it is a hook shot, and if a hook, the right handed batsman should be looking the other way. If he is right handed and playing a high square drive then the weight would be on the left leg, not the right leg, and the picture shows the weight on the right leg.” Was the EC pre-judging her ultimately unsuccessful campaign by giving her an impossible image?

Yet amusing or annoying as they may seem today election symbols also represent a remarkable promise, and the way it was fulfilled the first time they were used, anywhere in the world, on a really large scale. This was in independent India’s first elections and the promise was for universal adult franchise, unqualified by any considerations like the literacy of voters. Today that is a part of democracy we take for granted, but it was far from being that way before India showed it was possible over those few months in 1951-52 when those first elections took place.

These were not the first elections to take place across the subcontinent. The British had conducted polls in 1920 as part of the limited democracy promised by the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms that were made concrete in the Government of India Act, 1919. This provided for a Central Legislature made up of both nominated and elected members in different communal categories. But the Act limited the electorate to men only and only those who owned land or paid taxes of a certain value.

As it happened, the UK has just moved the year before, in 1918, to expanding its own electorate beyond such restrictions (though it would be 1928 before all adult women were included), but it was felt that India was not yet at that stage. Across the world, in fact, universal adult franchise was the exception rather than the rule until relatively recently. Electorates were reserved for men of property and it was only thanks to political movements like the Chartists, 19th century labour activists, and the Suffragettes, who fought for the vote for women, that it was expanded by the mid-20th century.

In all the resistance that all these movements faced one argument loomed large – lack of literacy among the groups that didn’t have the vote. Opponents of expanding the franchise argued that many potential new voters, like women or workers, were not literate and hence could not read and evaluate election manifestos. This would make them liable to being moved by emotional arguments, liquor, money, patriarchal pressure or any other means of persuasion. Even more to the point, how could they fill in ballots that generally required the names of candidates to be read and the final choice written out by the voter?

It was a superficially practical sounding argument that worked effectively to exclude less educated groups like black voters in the American south. In the US Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, a major thrust of activism was to overturn such literacy requirements and this was achieved with the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The US Supreme Court recently overturned certain sections of this Act, on the grounds that they had outlived their usefulness, but strong concerns have been raised that unscrupulous politicians will again be able to exclude potential electors using means that recall the old literacy tests.

All of which underscores how remarkable the decision of the Constituent Assembly of India was to go in for universal adult franchise including illiterate voters. The independence movement had been fought for all Indians, and even if as much as 85% were illiterate at that point, they could not be excluded from the elections. Balloting had to be by means that didn’t require reading or writing, and that could only be with a graphic symbols.

The newly set up Election Commission did have a model. The Round Table Conferences on the future of India that took place from 1931-32 (significantly, under a Labour government that was the heir to the Chartists) lead to the creation of an Indian Franchise Committee to advise on an expanded and more equitable Indian election system. The Committee (whose fascinating report is archived on the EC website) readily agreed that universal adult franchise was the only really fair way to conduct elections, but they couldn’t see how this could be easily implemented in India.

What is really significant though is that these concerns were about issues like how to get enough officials to give up other duties to oversee polls and how to conduct the polls in just a day or two which, based on their experience of British elections, is how they felt election had to be done. But while they worried about the effects of illiteracy on the electorate, they also conceded that this need not prevent people from voting – because they had the example of Ceylon to show how this could be done.

The information on elections in Ceylon was provided by Sir Bernard Bourdillon, the Colonial Secretary of Ceylon, who must count as an important influencer of Indian elections. Bourdillon, an ICS official with progressive views, who would go on to become an admired Governor of Nigeria, had overseen the creation of a system where any Ceylonese who wished to vote simply had to register (no voting list was created, a key difference with the later Indian system) and then could vote under what the Committee described as “the coloured box or ‘symbol’ system, under which it is unnecessary for the voter, whether literate or illiterate to make any mark on the ballot paper.”

This was what Sukumar Sen, another ICS man, built on when appointed Chief Election Commissioner in 1950. Ramachandra Guha has called Sen an “unsung hero of Indian democracy,” for pulling off that first election and dealing with all the problems raised by the Committee so effectively as to prove them irrelevant in the face of the larger success. Sen is, in fact, a hero for democracy beyond India because that election was monitored by observers from other nascent democracies, like Indonesia and Turkey, while he himself went on to supervise elections in Sudan in 1953.

The scale of Sen’s achievement requires some statistics. The electorate comprised around 176 million individuals, of who 85% were illiterate (in Ceylon that number was less than 50%). It was not just one election, but two since provincial assemblies were also elected at the same time. As a concession to scheduled castes and tribes some constituencies had to elect two members from the same seat, one general and one from the caste or tribe, and North Bengal (today’s Cooch Behar seat), actually elected three members! (Multiple member constituencies were dropped in the 1962 elections in favour of the current system of reserved seats, though some womens rights activists, frustrated over the refusal of Parliament to reserve one third seats for women have suggested a return to this system).

But perhaps the biggest difference from today’s election was the one dictated by Ceylon’s attempt to simplify matters as much as possible for illiterate voters. Instead of all the symbols being printed on one ballot paper which voters had to mark, the symbols were placed on ballot boxes, one for each candidate. Voters were given a ballot paper (or two or three for multiple member constituencies) which they simply had to drop into the ballot box marked with the symbol of their choice. This is why such a huge number of boxes was needed: two million, which Guha estimates required 8,200 tonnes of steel.

Politicians quickly realised how crucial symbols were under this system. In July 1951 the EC called meetings with parties to decide on symbols, and at once squabbles broke out. On July 2nd, the Times of India reported how at the first meeting the Congress, Socialist, Communist and Peasants & Workers Parties all laid claim to the plough symbol. The Socialists were particularly annoyed why “the Congress which has always been represented by a ‘charkha’ today chose to have the plough…” The EC found itself having to decide on symbol allotment, something that was to become a constant role for it.

The solution to the plough question was to give it to no party, though the Congress was allowed a similarly rural symbol of two bullocks with a yoke, while the Socialists had to be content with a tree. Other parties were happier with what they got: the Hindu Mahasabha had a suitably aggressive horse and rider, the Scheduled Castes Federation had the elephant that its current avatar, the Bahujan Samaj Party has retained, while the hand which we associate with the Congress today originally went to a faction of the Forward Bloc lead by the labour leader RS Ruikar.

Ruikar’s party didn’t do well in the elections and the hand symbol vanished with his party, which was merged with JB Kriplani’s Praja Socialist Party, leaving it free for its later resurrection and current use. In a paper from 1956 on that first election the American academics Irene Tinker and Mil Walker explain why performing well was crucial for the symbols: the EC allowed parties that claimed to be national to use one symbol across the country, but “in the future only those parties polling 3% of the total vote will have this advantage.” Only four parties passed this mark, but this simply increased the demand for the free symbols that the EC had kept for use by all other candidates.

Tinker and Walker write that the EC tried to choose “sober and unemotional” symbols and they note how an English anthropologist writing in the Calcutta Statesman deplored this boring tendency and hoped “that in the future the psychologists and anthropologists should be considered.” He needn’t have worried; in Calcutta itself candidates were quickly doing their best to add the colour the EC had tried to avoid. The Times reported how one candidate allotted a camel paraded one through the streets of North Calcutta with a sign reading: “The problem province of West Bengal is like a desert where a camel alone can help you.” That wouldn’t be out of place today, even if PETA might protest!

And that in general is what happened across the country in those first elections. For all those debates in the Constituent Assembly and the fears of the Franchise Commission about how an untrained and largely illiterate electorate would deal with this crucial new task, when it happened the people of India, whether candidates or voters, took to elections with ease. Tinker and Walker describes scenes that started with the first voters, in remote parts of today’s Himachal Pradesh who had to vote before the winter snows cut them off, and which are still familiar today.

Old ladies being carried to vote, women in burkhas, groups of voters like the Dhobi Panchayat of Delhi who had first done a pre-vote on who to support and then voted en masse, they all lined up for their ballots and placed them in the boxes marked with the symbols of their candidates.

And despite all the doubts of sceptical observers and, even more, the failures of the politicians elected with those pieces of paper, the voters of India have never ceased since to make that connection and fulfil their role.

(with inputs from Times Archives)

1957, Congress campaigning with their symbol

1952, ballot boxes being checked by candidates’ agents

Some of the symbols approved by the EC for the first elections in 1951. Standing Lion is Forward Block (Marxists); Horse and Rider is Hindu Mahasabha; Rising Sun is Ram Rajya Parishad; Elephant is Scheduled Castes Federation; Flaming Torch is Revolutionary Communist Party; Star is Bolshevist Party.

1957 election, this donkey canvasses for Jan Sangh votes

1952, Muslim woman voting, probably in Delhi

Vikram.doctor@timesgroup.com