General elections were held in India between 19 and 25 February 1962 to elect members of the thirdLok Sabha. Unlike the previous two elections, each constituency elected a single member.[1]
Jawaharlal Nehru won another landslide victory in his third and final election campaign. The Indian National Congress received 44.7% of the vote and won 361 of the 494 elected seats. This was only slightly lower than in the previous two elections and they still held over 70% of the seats in the Lok Sabha.
In 1963 a by-election was held for the Bilaspur Lok Sabha seat, which was at the time in Madhya Pradesh. The by-election was won by the Indian National Congress candidate Chandrabhan Singh, with 86,229 votes, against M. L. Shukla of Jana Sangh with 54,156 votes.[2] This by-election was needed because the original election for this seat was declared void by the Madhya Pradesh High Court, which judged that the nomination papers of one of the candidates, Bashir Ahmed Qureshi, "was improperly and illegally rejected by the Returning Officer".[3]
^P. Dixit; K. Pandey (22 April 1963). "Satya Prakash vs Bashir Ahmed Qureshi". Archived from the original on 27 October 2021. Retrieved 15 October 2021. our conclusion is that the respondent's nomination was improperly and illegally rejected by the Returning Officer and the Election Tribunal rightly declared the appellant's election as void.