KOLKATA: There was no bomb or gun, but rigging was very much there. From the very first Lok Sabha polls. “Cash for ballots, pouring nitric acid inside ballot boxes... I have seen it all,” says 90-year-old Aloke Chatterjee, one of the oldest surviving polling officers in this city.Sitting in his Monoharpukur Roadhome,Chatterjee gets nostalgic as the country gears up for the 17th Lok Sabha election. He is aware of all the challenges, but claims few could meet the ones faced in October 1951, the year the independent country held the world’s biggest democratic exercise for the first time. The biggest challenge, of course, was illiteracy, says Chatterjee.“One thing I remember the most is running with ballot through the paddy fields of Santipur. Those were long walks and there were too many boxes to handle — for each polling booth. Each candidate was allotted a separate ballot box, differently coloured, on which each candidate’s name and election symbol was labelled. You had to run to take all those boxes to the counting centre on time,” he smiles. Chatterjee was serving as a vocational training supervisor in the central government’s refugee rehabilitation department at that time.That may sound odd today, in this age of the voting machines. A voter had to simply insert the ballot paper given to him in the ballot box of the candidate of his choice. The arrangement was made after keeping in mind the large population of illiterate voters. Literacy level was just16%, as against today’s 73%.Chatterjee says he have had the chance of serving as “striking magistrates” (sectoral officer) in subsequent elections, but booth-level corruption had crept in from the second phase of the polls themselves. “The ballot paper resembled a Re 1 note, the present value of which is around Rs1,250 (if one considers the price of rice). Party activists would ask the poor villagers to hand the ballot papers over to them and in return of every ballot, the villagers were paid Re 1. The party workers would then go to the polling booth and deposit those ballots in the boxes of their choice,” recalled Chatterjee. The more violent ones would pour nitric acid inside the ballot box, damaging the ballots permanently.“But there was no bomb or gun. The name of both constituencies where I was deployed have changed too — both Santipur (it ceased to exist as a separate seat from 1957) and Nawadwip are now part of the Ranaghat seat,” he added.A few kilometres away from Chatterjee’s home, at Golpark, retired professor Piyush Roy (91) said there was a lot to learn during the training. Roy served as a polling officer at West Dinajpur in the first election. The polls were held from October 15, 1951 to February 21, 1952. Total number of voters was over 173 million. The first phase was held in the assembly constituencies of Chini and Pangi in Himachal Pradesh, before the onset of winter, while the final 68th phase was held in Uttar Pradesh. “The ballot papers were printed by the Election Commission at the Government of India Security Press at Nashik, where the Indian currency notes were also printed,” he said.After the votes were counted and results declared, the first House of the People was constituted by the Election Commission on April 2,1952.

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