It’s the eve of the India’s 18th general election counting day and the timing couldn’t have been more right to announce this latest project from Siddharth Roy Kapur’s Roy Kapur Films that alongwith Trickitainment Media has acquired the rights to make a biopic on the life of India’s first Chief Election Commissioner Sukumar Sen.
The decision on whether the project will be a series or a film is yet to be made. The proceeds of finalising the director and cast is under way.
Sukumar Sen was the visionary architect of India’s very first general elections in 1951-52, which cemented India’s status as a newly minted independent democracy. A brilliant mathematician turned civil servant, Sukumar Sen played a crucial role in India’s transition from a British colony to a democratic republic, surpassing what anyone could have imagined at the dawn of independence and creating a lasting and exemplary electoral system.
His biggest challenge in a young nation that had never experienced an election before, was to execute the entire process within just two years of the country becoming a republic on January 26th, 1950, resulting in ‘the biggest experiment in democracy in human history’, in his own words. No Indian official had ever before confronted a challenge of such magnitude.
Sukumar Sen’s job was mind-boggling in its complexity: to organize the largest democratic exercise in the world in a land of three million square kilometres; across varied terrains of mountains, deserts and forests; with an electorate of 175 million people, 85 per cent of whom were illiterate and dispersed across thousands of cities, towns and villages in 565 princely kingdoms and numerous newly formed states. At stake were as many as 4,500 seats – about 500 for Parliament and the rest for the provincial assemblies. In a poor country, only recently independent and just coming into its own, 224,000 polling booths were constructed and equipped with 2 million steel ballot boxes for which 8,200 tonnes of steel were consumed; 16,500 clerks were appointed on six-month contracts to type and collate the electoral rolls by constituency; 380,000 reams of paper were used for printing the rolls and 389,816 phials of ink were used; 56,000 presiding officers were chosen to supervise the voting, aided by another 280,000 helpers; and 224,000 policemen were put on duty to guard against violence and intimidation!
In remote hill villages, bridges had to be constructed to facilitate access to voters and for small islands in the Indian Ocean, naval vessels had to be used to transport electoral rolls to booths. Tribals from some forest districts came to the booths with their bows and arrows proudly achieving as much as 70 per cent turnout at one booth in the jungle, while a neighbouring booth was visited only by an elephant and two panthers! Dedicated citizens wanting to exercise their franchise reached booths after days of trekking through wild jungles, camping at night amid songs and dances around the fire.
After all the votes were counted, Sukumar Sen and his team’s herculean efforts had led to approximately 60 percent of registered voters exercising their right to vote for the very first time in their lives. Against all the odds, India’s first general election was a milestone in the history of democracy and the largest election the world had ever seen.
Announcing this inspiring biopic on the eve of the counting day of India’s 18th General Elections, the makers seek to remind audiences of the sheer ambition and audacity behind the country’s first and the world’s largest electoral process that we now take for granted, and for which Sukumar Sen laid the foundation.