candour and intimacy. He came across to diverse audiences, to sophisti-
cated intellectuals and landless peasants alike, as a man of great integrity
amongst lesser mortals: it was easy to trust him, for here was a prime
minister with whom one could imagine mutually shared concerns.
The Congress emerged from the elections as the single largest party
in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of parliament, with 364 seats out of
489; it had contested all the seats, winning 74.4% of them in a first-past-
the-post system with 46% of the vote. The CPI emerged as the main
opposition party; it contested 49 seats and won 26 of them, concentrating
on its areas of strength, gaining 5.3% of the seats with 3.3% of the vote
share. The Socialist Party, by contrast, contested 256 seats but won only
12, that is 2.5% of the seats, with 10.6% of the national vote. The Kisan
Mazdoor Praja Party contested 145 seats and won nine, that is 1.8% of the
seats, with 5.8% of the national vote. Together, the two non-communist
socialist parties outside the Congress had won 16.4% of the vote (the
KMPP and the Socialist Party merged in 1952, after the elections, to form
the Praja Socialist Party). The Jan Sangh, the Hindu fundamentalist party
led by S.P. Mukherjee that replaced the Hindu Mahasabha, contested 93
seats and won three; that is, 0.6% of seats, with 3.1% of the national vote.
Altogether, 105,944,495 people voted.^23
Simultaneous elections were held in the federal units, now called
‘states’, with the old distinction between provinces and princely states
having been abolished. Altogether, the Congress contested 3,153 seats (of
a total of 3,283) and won 2,246 of them, which made 68.4% of the seats,
with 42.2% of the votes. The CPI contested 465 and won 106, 3.2% of
the seats, with 4.38% of the vote share; the Socialist Party contested 1,799
and won 125, 2.8% of the seats, with 9.7% of the vote. Corresponding
figures for the KMPP were 1,005, 77, 2.3% and 5.11%; and for the Jan
Sangh, 717, 35, 1.2% and 2.76%. A total of 103,801,199 votes were cast
in the state assembly elections. The ‘largest democracy in the world’ – a
phrase that would soon become a cliché – had been inaugurated.
THE NEHRUVIANS AND THE NEHRUVIAN PROJECT
With the consolidation of his position in the Congress, and with the
endorsement of Congress by the electorate, Nehru could try and get his
project of state-led social engineering off the ground. What exactly this
project was going to be was not immediately apparent. The phrasing of
CONSOLIDATING THE STATE, c. 1947–55 187