Lok Sabha elections 2024 | Trivia: How women started voting!

Take a look at interesting tidbits of history associated with the Lok Sabha elections.

New Delhi: Twenty-eight lakh women could not vote in the first General Elections in 1951-52 just because the country's first Chief Election Commissioner Sukumar Sen did not allow them to do so!

He had a reason – these women simply refused to give their proper names in the electoral rolls and insisted that they be identified as “A's mother, B's wife etc”. Almost all such cases were from “Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Bharat, Rajasthan and Vindhya Pradesh”.

It was during the preparation of electoral rolls that it came to light that a large number of women voters had been enrolled in some states not by their own names, “but by the description of the relationship they bore to their male relations”, as they were “averse to disclosing their proper names to strangers”.

He was not one to accept this. He asked his officers to get the names in the rolls but still then lakhs refused. They were out of the rolls. In the end, India had 17.32 crore voters in its rolls, out of which 85 per cent were illiterate.

Soon after, the EC instructed that the name of a voter is an essential part of his or her identity and must be included in the electoral rolls. “No elector should be enrolled unless sufficient particulars, including the name, were given," Sen wrote in 1955 in his official account of the first General Elections.

To ensure that more women voted, public appeals were issued and a one month extension was given in Bihar for filing such applications to ensure that the number of women voters whose names were liable to be struck off the rolls might be reduced. An extension was given in Rajasthan also but the "response there was poor".

“Out of a total of nearly 80 million women voters in the country, nearly 2.8 million eventually failed to disclose their proper names, and the entries relating to them had to be deleted from the rolls,” Sen wrote.

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However, Sen, who handled the second General Elections in 1957, too, was a happy man five years later as "women in general have come to value their franchise greatly and those women in respect of whom the entries had been deleted from the rolls in 1951 were in fact very disappointed when they saw their sisters exercising their franchise while they themselves could not do so".

After the 1951-52 polls, Sen had instructed officials to persuade women voters to disclose their proper names and then enroll them as electors. Parties and local women's organisations were also roped in and 92,141,597 women voters registered in the electoral rolls for the second general elections.

"In other words, about 94 per cent of adult women have now been registered as voters," Sen wrote after the 1957 elections. In 2024, India has around 96 crore voters, including around 47 crore women.

(Note: This is a revised version of an article published earlier in Deccan Herald)