The first vote | Revisiting India’s first general election: 1951–52

At 8 a.m. on October 25, 1951, the first votes in independent India’s first general election were cast in the remote tehsils of Chini and Pangi in Himachal Pradesh. It was the beginning of an unprecedented democratic exercise that would unfold over several months, until February 1952, as millions of Indians went to the polls for the first time