question_answer

What forced the Union Government of India to appoint the States Reorganization Commission in 1953? Mention its two main recommendations. Name any four new states formed after 1956.

Or

Describe the various steps taken to hold the first general elections in India. How far were these elections successful?

Answer:

The States Reorganization Commission (SRC) was a body constituted by the Central Government of India in 1953 to recommend the reorganization of state boundaries. In 1955, after nearly 2 years of study, the Commission recommended that India?s state boundaries should be reorganized to form 16 states and 3 union territories.

One of the proposals was to reorganize the state on the basis of languages of India. This would make administration easier, and would help replace the caste and religion-based identities with less controversial linguistic identities. Earlier in 1920, the members of the Indian National Congress had agreed on the linguistic reorganization of the Indian states as one of the party?s political goals. As the memories of partition were fresh it was feared that the division on the basis of language might further lead to division of India.

By the 1952, the demand for creation of a Telugu - majority state m the parts of the Madras State had become powerful. Potti Sriramulu, one of the activists demanding the formation of a Telugu-majority state, died on 16 December 1952 after undertaking a fast-unto-5 death. Subsequently, the Telugu-majority Andhra State was formed in 1953. This sparked of agitations all over the country, with linguistic groups demanding separate statehoods.

In order to reorganize the states, the Government of India constituted the State Reorganization Commission (SRC) under the chairmanship of Fazal Ali, a former Court judge.

States formed after 1956 are:

(i) Uttarakhand in 2000

(ii) Chhattisgarh in 2000

(iii) Jharkhand in 2000

(iv) Telangana in 2014

Or

The Indian General Election of 1951-52 elected the first Lok Sabha since India became independent in August 1947. Until this point, the Indian Constituent Assembly had served as an interim legislature. The Indian National Congress (INC) won a landslide victory, winning 364 of the 489 seats and 45% of the total votes polled. This was over four times as many votes as the second-largest party. Jawaharlal Nehru became the first democratically elected Prime Minister of the country. Voter turnout was 45.7%.

Organization of the elections was a wondrous task. There was a house-to-house survey to register the voters. With over 70 per cent of the voters being illiterate, the candidates were to be identified by symbols, assigned to each major party and independent candidates, painted on the ballot-boxes. Over 2,24,000 polling booths, one for almost every 1000 voters, were constructed and equipped with over 21/2 million steel ballot-boxes, one box for every candidate. Nearly 620,000,000 ballot papers were printed. About a million officials supervised the conduct of the polls. Of the many candidates, who ever got the plurality, or the largest number of votes would be elected. It was not necessary for the winning candidate to have a majority.

Nearly 17,500 candidates in all stood for the seats to the Lok Sabha and the state legislatures. The elections were spread out over nearly four months from 25 October 1951 to 21 February 1952 and the first general election of the largest democracy turn out to be a big success.