Cows & Communists

"You are actors on a great stage and all the world is watching," Jawaharlal Nehru, eager to get out the vote for India's second general election, kept telling his audiences. But there were obstacles. In Uttar Pradesh the citizens of 14 villages hidden away in the foothills of the Himalayas decided, after listening to candidates, that voting was "just not worth the long walk." In the thick jungles of Orissa, the prevalence of stampeding wild elephants kept all but the most venturesome of the electorate at home. And at least one Orissan who dutifully set out for the polls never made it: he was killed en route by a tiger.

Despite such hazards, Indians could boast that they had successfully staged the world's biggest free election. By the time the polls closed last week, 51% of India's 193 million voters had turned out. This time, moreover, the percentage of women voters was far higher than it was in the general election of 1952. In Allahabad and other Moslem centers, women in purdah not only queued up outside voting booths but docilely permitted special investigators to peek under their veils to make sure that no male ringers were sneaking in. The only serious sex-linked problem, in fact, arose in Lucknow, where some of the city's 4,000 eunuchs threw polling officers into confusion by joining the women's voting queue.

To tot up more than 90 million ballots, some of which were still trickling in from the hills by muleback, would take India's election committees at least two weeks. But already Jawaharlal Nehru's Congress Party was clearly on its way to a landslide victory. In his own constituency near Allahabad, Nehru ran nearly 200,000 votes ahead of his opponent, an anti-cow-slaughter candidate whose program the pandit dismissed with the brief comment: "I like horses as much as cows."

With an assist from Nehru, who stumped the "safe" district of North Bombay on his behalf, even V. K. Krishna Menon, the sharp-tongued bane of the U.N., won a seat in Parliament. By week's end, with millions of votes still uncounted, the Congress Party held solid majorities in 9 of 13 state assemblies and had won three times as many parliamentary seats (174) as its opponents combined.

Not everything went Nehru's way. In the Punjab, one Congress candidate lost a state assembly seat to his estranged wife, who cornered the female vote with detailed accounts of her opponent's shortcomings as a husband. The only serious threat to Congress dominance, however, developed in the impoverished, densely populated Malabar Coast state of Kerala, where the Communists won a plurality in the state assembly. So long as the Reds did not win an absolute majority of the 126 assembly seats, Nehru could--and almost certainly would--keep them out of the state government by invoking "President's rule," i.e., appointment of a state governor by New Delhi.

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