# Sukumar Sen — Ramachandra Guha

- **Publication**: [From the Dumpster Fire](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/) · [Haul 001: Wild, wild times](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/1)
- **Canonical URL**: https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/1/sukumar-sen
- **Type**: Lives (The life)
- **Creator**: Ramachandra Guha
- **Original Source**: [India After Gandhi](https://amzn.in/d/07BIgTop) (2007)
- **Published**: 2026-10-31

## Why it's here (Editor — Bhuvanesh)

I wanted to add a profile of Sukumar Sen, India's first election commissioner. The context here is the debates about the special intensive revision, SIR, and all the debates about disenfranchisement. I think it's important to know how far we have come. It's important to know how radical and revolutionary our past elections were, and how monumentally challenging they were, and yet how far we have come: how we started at a place where we protected the sacred right of people to vote and express their democratic choice at all costs. There's that anecdote in Guha's book that four months before that, in the glacier somewhere, there were election booths, and the general election happened much later across the country. How Sukumar Sen was radical, how he included the women's names in the rolls, and how he struck them off.

## Sukumar Sen (1899–1963): India’s first Chief Election Commissioner, who ran the republic’s first general election (Machine)

*Written by Claude from Ramachandra Guha’s India After Gandhi, the Election Commission of India’s Report on the First General Elections in India 1951-52, Volume I, the Press Trust of India’s India’s first voter fulfils his duty again and Wikipedia’s Sukumar Sen (civil servant).*

### The man who had to make it happen

India set up an Election Commission two years after independence, and on 21 March 1950 Sukumar Sen took charge as its chief. He came to it from the post of chief secretary of West Bengal, having joined the Indian Civil Service in 1921 and served in a number of districts and as a judge. Born in 1899, he had studied at Presidency College and at London University, which gave him a gold medal in mathematics. He left no memoirs and few papers, and Guha regrets how little is known of him. *(Guha; ECI PDF p. 34)*

Jawaharlal Nehru hoped the country could vote as early as the spring of 1951. Sen, who would have to run the election, asked the prime minister to wait. The polls were set for the first months of 1952, with some outlying districts to vote before that. *(Guha)*

### Every adult, by name

About 85 per cent of the electorate could not read or write, and every voter had to be found, named and registered before anything else could be done. Of about 180 million adults, the rolls held 173 million names, in every state except Jammu and Kashmir. About 45 per cent of the names were women’s. *(Guha; ECI PDF pp. 74, 75)*

In several northern states many women would not give their own names to strangers, and asked to be entered as somebody’s mother or somebody’s wife. Sen would not accept it, and directed his officials to put the women’s names on the rolls in place of the descriptions. The Commission’s rule was that a name is an essential part of a voter’s identity, and a woman who refused to give hers was not to be registered. Bihar was given an extra month to correct its rolls and used it well; Rajasthan was given the same, and the response there was poor. *(Guha; ECI PDF p. 78)*

In the end about 2.8 million women were struck off the rolls, out of nearly 80 million women voters, practically all of them in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Bharat, Rajasthan and Vindhya Pradesh. Sen thought the uproar over their omission a good thing: it might help the prejudice vanish before the next elections, when the women could be put back on the rolls under their own names. When his report on the election went to press, it recorded that no state was having any difficulty enrolling women by their proper names. *(Guha; ECI PDF p. 79)*

### Boxes, symbols and ink

There were about 4,500 seats to fill, some 500 in Parliament and the rest in the provincial assemblies. The Commission set up 224,000 polling booths and supplied them with 2 million steel ballot boxes, which took 8,200 tons of steel to make. It took 56,000 presiding officers, another 280,000 helpers and 224,000 policemen to run the vote. *(Guha)*

Since most voters could not read a party’s name, each party was given a picture from daily life: a pair of bullocks, a hut, an elephant, an earthenware lamp. Each polling station had a separate box for every party, marked with its symbol, so that a voter only had to drop the ballot paper into the right one. To stop anyone voting in another person’s name, Indian scientists developed an ink that stayed on the finger for a week, and 389,816 phials of it were used. *(Guha)*

Through 1951 the Commission explained the vote with a documentary shown in more than 3,000 cinemas, and with programmes on All-India Radio about the constitution, adult franchise, the rolls and how to vote. *(Guha)*

### The first votes

The first constituencies to vote were Chini and Pangi in the hills of Himachal Pradesh, where polling had to be finished before the snow that usually falls in early November. Polling there began on 25 October 1951; most of the remaining states voted in January 1952. Even so, it took about a week to carry the ballot boxes down to Chamba and Kasumpti to be counted. *(ECI PDF pp. 126, 147)*

Shyam Saran Negi of Kalpa, in Kinnaur, is recognised as the country’s first voter, from the poll of 25 October 1951. At ninety-seven he was still voting, at a booth in the school from which he had retired after 23 years. *(PTI)*

In Lahaul and Spiti the Commission had warned the state government in June 1951 to hold an early poll, and the government let the matter slide. Its polling stations were then placed outside the snow-bound area, far from the voters’ homes, and the voters could not reach them. The Commission’s report called it a virtual denial of the right to vote to 6,348 voters, and said it very much regretted it. *(ECI PDF pp. 153, 154)*

### Afterwards

Sen signed the preface to that report in February 1955. It was late, he wrote, partly because he had spent more than a year abroad after the elections, serving in the Sudan as chairman of its International Electoral Commission. He was among the first people awarded the Padma Bhushan. He ran the second general election too, in 1957, and served until December 1958. He died in 1963. *(ECI PDF pp. 3, 4; Wikipedia)*

> "curious senseless relic of the past"
> — Sukumar Sen, on women entered on the electoral rolls as somebody’s mother or wife instead of by name *(Guha)*

### The first general election, in numbers

- **173 million** names on the electoral rolls *(ECI PDF p. 74)*
- **85 per cent** of the electorate could not read or write *(Guha)*
- **224,000** polling booths *(Guha)*
- **2 million** steel ballot boxes *(Guha)*
- **389,816** phials of indelible ink *(Guha)*
- **2.8 million** women struck off the rolls for want of their own names *(Guha)*

### A life in dates

- **1899** Born
- **1921** Joins the Indian Civil Service
- **1950** Takes charge as Chief Election Commissioner, 21 March
- **1951** The first votes, at Chini and Pangi, on 25 October
- **1952** Most of the country votes, in January
- **1955** Signs the report on the first election
- **1957** Runs the second general election
- **1958** Leaves office in December
- **1963** Dies

### Further reading

- Ramachandra Guha, *India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy*, Picador, 2007 (https://amzn.in/d/07BIgTop)
- Ornit Shani, *How India Became Democratic: Citizenship and the Making of the Universal Franchise*, Cambridge University Press, 2017
- Election Commission of India, *Report on the First General Elections in India 1951-52*, Government of India Press, 1955 (https://cdn.downtoearth.org.in/library/0.61706000_1558592806_first-general-elections-in-india%2C-vol.pdf)
- Election Commission of India, *Leap of Faith: Journey of Indian Elections* (https://www.eci.gov.in/EBooks/Leap-of-Faith/)

### Written from

- Ramachandra Guha, *India After Gandhi*, 2007. An extract reproduced with the author’s permission at The Caravan, 2014: https://caravanmagazine.in/vantage/ramachandra-guha-indias-first-election-commissioner
- Election Commission of India, *Report on the First General Elections in India 1951-52, Volume I*, 1955. A scanned copy in Down To Earth’s library: https://cdn.downtoearth.org.in/library/0.61706000_1558592806_first-general-elections-in-india%2C-vol.pdf
- Press Trust of India, *India’s first voter fulfils his duty again*, 2014: https://morungexpress.com/indias-first-voter-fulfils-his-duty-again
- Wikipedia, *Sukumar Sen (civil servant)*, 2026: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sukumar_Sen_(civil_servant)

## Public-Domain Plate

- **Caption**: Sukumar Sen in 1953, on a Colonial Office file sheet from the time of the Sudan election.
- **Credit**: The National Archives UK, CO 1069/14 (Open Government Licence v1.0)
- **Image**: https://files.fromthedumpsterfire.com/hauls/001/plates/sukumar-sen.jpg