Politics in India sinc Independence Lok Sabha elections. The Congress scored big victory in those elections as well. It won a majority of seats in all the states except Travancore-Cochin (part of today’s Kerala), Madras and Orissa. Finally even in these states the Congress formed the government.
So the party ruled all over the country at the national and the state level. As expected, Jawaharlal Nehru became the Prime Minister after the first general election. A look at the electoral map on the previous page would give you a sense of the dominance of the Congress during the period - . In the second and the third general elections, held in and respectively, the Congress maintained the same position in the Lok Sabha by winning three-fourth of the seats.
None of the opposition parties could win even one-tenth of the number of seats won by the Congress. In the state assembly elections, the Congress did not get majority in a few cases. The most significant of these cases was in Kerala in when a coalition led by the CPI formed the government. Apart from exceptions like this, the Congress controlled the national and all the state governments.
The extent of the victory of the Congress was artificially boosted by our electoral system. The Congress won three out of every four seats but it did not get even half of the votes. In , for example, the Congress obtained per cent of the total votes. But it managed to win per cent of the seats.
The Socialist Party, the second largest party in terms of votes, secured more than per cent of the votes all over the country. But it could not even win three per cent of the seats. How did this happen? For this, you need to recall the discussion about the first-past- the-post method in your textbook, Indian Constitution at Work last year.
In this system of election, that has been adopted in our country, the party that gets more votes than others tends to get much more than its proportional share. That is exactly what worked in favour of the Congress. If we add up the votes of all the non-Congress candidates it was more than the votes of the Congress. But the non-Congress votes were divided between different rival parties and candidates.
So the Congress was still way ahead of the opposition and managed to win. Rajkumari Amrit Kaur ( - ): A Gandhian and Freedom fighter; belonged to the royal family of Kapurthala; inherited Christian religion from her mother; member of Constituent Assembly; Minister for Health in independent India’s first ministry; continued as Health Minister till . Credit: The Hindu