Given below are two statements:

Statement I: The first general elections in India was the first test of democracy in a poor and illiterate country.
Statement II: Only 5% of the eligible voters were literate.

In the light of the above statements, choose the most appropriate answer from the options given below:

Statement I is true but Statement II is false.

The correct answer is Option 3: Statement I is true but Statement II is false.

Given statements:

Statement I: The first general elections in India was the first test of democracy in a poor and illiterate country. (Correct)
Statement II: Only 5% of the eligible voters were literate. (Incorrect)

The Election Commission discovered that it was not going to be easy to hold a free and fair election in a country of India’s size. Holding an election required delimitation or drawing the boundaries of the electoral constituencies. It also required preparing the electoral rolls, or the list of all the citizens eligible to vote. Both these tasks took a lot of time. When the first draft of the rolls was published, it was discovered that the names of nearly 40 lakh women were not recorded in the list. They were simply listed as “wife of …” or “daughter of …”. The Election Commission refused to accept these entries and ordered a revision if possible and deletion if necessary. Preparing for the first general election was a mammoth exercise. No election on this scale had ever been conducted in the world before. At that time there were 17 crore eligible voters, who had to elect about 3,200 MLAs and 489 Members of Lok Sabha. Only 15 per cent of these eligible voters were literate. Therefore the Election Commission had to think of some special method of voting. The Election Commission trained over 3 lakh officers and polling staff to conduct the elections.

It was not just the size of the country and the electorate that made this election unusual. The first general election was also the first big test of democracy in a poor and illiterate country. Till then democracy had existed only in the prosperous countries, mainly in Europe and North America, where nearly everyone was literate. By that time many countries in Europe had not given voting rights to all women.