A forgotten hero of India

Have you heard of Sukumar Sen? In all likelihood, you might not have. Well, he was the first Election Commissioner of India. It’s a pity how we forget so many important people of our Indian history who have helped build what we have today. Can we balme it on fickle memory or our habit of giving no relevance to recording historic people and events?  Its sad that we do not know anything about Sukumar Sen, the extraordinary man who set up India’s extraordinary electoral system.

A mathematician, a civil servant, a judge and then Chief Secretary of West Bengal, he was holding office in free India, from 1947 to 1950.  In March 1950, a year after the Election Commission of India was established, Sen became India's first chief election commissioner, in which role he supervised the general elections of 1952 and 1957. At that time, he had no model to fall back upon but had to ensure that some176 million Indian, aged 21 and above where more than 85% lacked basic education, needed  to exercise their voting right. He took upon the gargantuan task of first identifying and then registering each and every adult citizen of India. Once he got voters registered, he undertook activities to design party symbols.

Ramchandra Guha, historian recounts that registering women voters was a social nightmare, especially in North India, where they did not give names – they merely registered as “Ramu’s mother or Shyamu’s wife”. Sen was furious when he saw this. He asked his officials to correct this and due to this, women reluctant to give their own names, dropped out.  Some 2.8 million women struck their names off the list. But historians now believe it was a good move to force them to register with their own identity and helped to establish women's equality with men; most women who dropped out in the first election added their names in subsequent elections. This was the first time in history when every adult, regardless of race, sex and social stature, was granted the right to vote at the same time in true universal adult franchise.

It so happened that after the first Indian general elections, Sen was asked to supervise elections in the newly independent country of Sudan. He spent nine months in that country, setting up the infrastructure for polling and making sure it worked. It was Sukumar Sen who had devised the system of identifying parties by different symbols and colours — this method was now adapted to the Sudanese voter, who, like his Indian counterpart, was mostly illiterate.

And to think that we let such great men just wither away with time, with no memoirs or not even a mention in history.  It’s a pity that people like Sen do not get decorated with a Bharat Ratna or even a recognition in history. Well, there is one road named after him – Sukumar Sen Road.