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Home / Part 7 — Elections
Every Lok Sabha election from 1951 to 2024. Pick a year and see who won, how many seats they got, and where the opposition stood.
1951
Just before the first general election, Parliament amended the Constitution to add "public order", "friendly relations with foreign states" and "incitement to an offence" to Article 19(2). It gave the state more power to restrict speech — the same clause that is used against websites today.
1951 – 1952
India's first national vote: 17.3 crore voters, most of them illiterate, using separate ballot boxes per candidate. Congress won 364 of 489 seats. Critics then and now argue that a single-party dominance for the first two decades weakened the opposition — the same complaint made about later eras, just with a different party.
1957 – 1959
In 1957 Kerala elected the world's first democratically elected communist government. In 1959 the Centre dismissed it using Article 356 — a use of the President's rule provision that set a pattern later criticised by the Sarkaria Commission.
1967
Defections toppled governments across states and gave Indian politics the phrase "Aaya Ram Gaya Ram". It eventually led to the anti-defection law (10th Schedule, 1985).