The 1957 Indian general election is recalled as both a political turning point and a test of Saleem’s uncertain memory: Congress retained power, but the Communists became its largest opposition party, while regional parties gained ground in Bombay. Saleem’s account also links the election to his rival Shiva’s political usefulness and ends by exposing a troubling mismatch in his own timeline.

Results and Political Shifts

Although the All-India Congress won, it was badly shocked by the result. Twelve million votes made the Communists the largest single opposition party. In Bombay, many electors rejected the Congress emblem of a sacred cow and suckling calf in favor of the less emotive pictograms of the Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti and Maha Gujarat Parishad. The outcome sharpened the prospect of dividing Bombay State, a possibility Saleem and the others on the hillock eventually accepted.

The election appears within an argument about the Communist challenge, but Saleem’s mother blushes during that discussion. The narrative gives no explanation for her reaction; it remains a personal detail set against the public contest over party strength and the state’s future.

Shiva and the Polling-Day Campaign

The election also draws Shiva, whom Saleem identifies as Wee Willie Winkie’s supposed son, into party politics. A party whose name Saleem withholds recruits him, and on polling day Shiva and his gang, the Cowboys, stand outside a polling station in the north of the city. Armed with stout sticks, stones, and knives, they urge voters to use their ballots wisely and carefully.

Saleem raises, but does not resolve, the question of what happened after the polls closed: whether ballot-box seals were broken and ballot stuffing took place. Qasim the Red narrowly loses his seat, and Shiva’s paymasters are pleased. The episode presents political participation alongside coercion and possible fraud, while Saleem’s suggestive questions leave the allegations unconfirmed.

Memory and Narrative Uncertainty

Padma asks Saleem for the election’s date. He answers that it took place sometime in the spring, then realizes he has placed it after his tenth birthday when it actually occurred before it. He cannot make his memory accept the corrected order. The discrepancy is more than a missing date: it makes the sequence of his life itself feel unstable.

Padma tries to console him by observing that everyone forgets small things, but Saleem fears that larger losses may follow. The recalled election thus carries two kinds of uncertainty: the unresolved question of electoral manipulation and the narrator’s inability to trust his own chronology. Its political history is presented not as a settled record, but as an episode filtered through memory that openly falters.