Nowadays when elections come, there is hectic lobbying to secure a party ticket for contesting the polls, but many do not know that there were days in this State when at least two-thirds of the Members of the Odisha legislative Assembly were elected uncontested.
This historic record was created in 1946 when elections were held for the second pre-Independence Assembly. Under a limited franchise, the elections for this Assembly were held from April 4 to 9, 1946.At that point of time, the State Assembly had 60 seats, out of which four were to be filled up by nomination and elections were to be held for the remaining 56 seats.
It may be an unbelievable story for the present-day politicians, but the fact remained that in as many as 36 seats in the 1946 polls, the Congress nominees were elected uncontested.This electoral battle was fought in 19 constituencies, out of which the Congress candidates recorded a landslide victory in 10 seats raising the strength the Congress legislature Party to 47, which accounted for 84 per cent of the seats.
In this historic election, for the first time Muslim league opened its account by occupying four seats and the Communists had to be satisfied with one. The other four seats were captured by Independents.Priyambada Devi and A laxmibai came victorious as Congress candidates from the seats reserved for women. laxmibai set a new record being elected as the first woman Deputy Speaker while lalmohan Patnaik was made the Speaker.
All the 47 Congress MlAs came from the background of freedom struggle. Noted among them were Nabakrushna Choudhury, Biju Patnaik, Harekrushna Mahtab, Sadasiv Tripathy, Rajkrushna Bose, Nityananda Kanungo, Sarangadhar Das, Jayakrushna Mohanty, Pandit lingaraj Mishra, Satyabadi Nanda, Banamali Patnaik, Bodharam Dubey, lala Ranjit Singh, laxminarayan Mishra, Radhakrushna Biswasray and Radhomohan Sahu.
Harekrushna Mahtab was the Chief Minister with stalwarts like Nabakrushna Choudhury, lingaraj Mishra, Nityananda Kanungo and Radhakrushna Biswasray as Ministers.Nabakrushna Choudhury became the Chief Minister after Dr Mahtab demitted the office to join the Union Cabinet.During the term of this second pre-Independence Assembly, 26 Princely States merged with Odisha and 31 persons were nominated to the Assembly from these Princely States raising the strength of House to 91.
This Assembly adopted another historic motion to shift the State capital from Cuttack to Bhubaneswar.During those days social workers having training of constructive programmes of Mahatma Gandhi were chosen as Congress nominees and were accepted by the general public because of their simple living, high thinking, clean image and patriotism.