Elections in India

Elections in India are held to fill seats in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of Parliament, and in state legislative assemblies, under a first-past-the-post system and universal adult suffrage applied since the country's first general election in 1951-52. Conducted by the Election Commission of India, an independent constitutional body established in January 1950, Indian general elections are the largest recurring democratic exercise in the world by number of eligible voters.

Founding the System: 1950-1952

Unlike most Western democracies, where the franchise expanded gradually by class, property, and sex over decades, India's constitution granted universal adult suffrage from the outset, extending the vote to all citizens aged 21 and above, later lowered to 18 in 1989, regardless of literacy, property, or gender. The Election Commission of India, headed by its first Chief Election Commissioner, Sukumar Sen, organized the inaugural general election of 1951-52 amid enormous logistical difficulty: an electorate of roughly 173-176 million, most of them illiterate, was served by separate ballot boxes marked with each party's symbol. The Indian National Congress, led by Jawaharlal Nehru, won a commanding majority, a position it retained through the first three general elections of 1952, 1957, and 1962.

Political Realignments

Congress dominance persisted through the 1960s and 1970s under Nehru and then his daughter Indira Gandhi, interrupted by the 1977 election, held after Gandhi's 21-month Emergency (1975-1977), during which civil liberties were suspended and opposition leaders jailed. That election produced the first non-Congress national government, a coalition merged into the Janata Party under Prime Minister Morarji Desai; the government collapsed within three years, and Indira Gandhi returned to power in 1980. Her assassination on 31 October 1984 was followed weeks later by a general election that returned her son Rajiv Gandhi's Congress to power with 414 of 542 seats, the largest majority any party has won in the Lok Sabha to date.

The late 1980s and 1990s were marked by coalition instability, with no single party winning a majority between 1989 and 2014. V.P. Singh's National Front government (1989-1990) fell amid controversy over implementing the Mandal Commission's caste-based reservation recommendations; Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated by a suicide bomber during the 1991 campaign at a rally in Sriperumbudur, Tamil Nadu. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), under Atal Bihari Vajpayee, briefly formed a government in 1996 that lasted thirteen days, returned in 1998 as head of a coalition, lost a confidence vote by a single vote in 1999, and then won re-election later that year, governing until 2004.

The UPA and NDA Eras

The Congress-led United Progressive Alliance, under Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, governed from 2004 to 2014 after defeating the BJP's re-election campaign; Congress president Sonia Gandhi declined the prime ministership in 2004, nominating Singh instead. The 2014 election returned the BJP to power under Narendra Modi with 282 seats, the first single-party majority won by any party since 1984; the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance expanded its mandate further in the 2019 election, with the BJP alone winning 303 seats.

Scale

The scale of Indian elections has grown steadily. The 2019 general election had an electorate of roughly 900 million registered voters, of whom around two-thirds cast ballots across seven polling phases spread over several weeks, deploying more than a million electronic voting machines and several million polling personnel. State assembly elections, held on staggered schedules across India's states and union territories, add further to the frequency of elections nationally, with some part of the country typically voting in most years.

Reform and Oversight

The Election Commission has periodically gained additional tools to police the conduct of elections: a model code of conduct governs campaign behaviour once an election is announced, and the None of the Above (NOTA) option, allowing voters to formally reject all listed candidates, was introduced on EVMs from 2013 following a Supreme Court order. India marks National Voters' Day on 25 January each year, the anniversary of the Election Commission's founding in 1950, as part of continuing efforts to encourage voter registration and turnout, particularly among newly eligible young voters.

Voting Technology and Administration

Electronic Voting Machines were trialled experimentally in a single constituency, Parur in Kerala, during a 1982 by-election, but their use was contested in court and remained sporadic through the 1990s; the Election Commission adopted EVMs nationwide for the 2004 general election, replacing paper ballots across the country. Since 2013, EVMs have been paired with a Voter-Verified Paper Audit Trail printer, allowing voters to confirm their vote was recorded correctly. Because of India's size, general elections since the 1990s have been conducted in multiple phases, with security forces rotated between states to manage law and order during polling.