Indian National Congress held onto power, retaining the government it had won in the previous election.

It won 371 of the 494 seats up for grabs in the newly reconstituted house.

That left it 123 seats clear of a majority.

The Independent finished second, with 42 seats on 19.3% of the vote.

That was a landslide: INC took 75.1% of all the seats in the house on 47.8% of the vote.

Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti, a front demanding a separate Marathi-speaking state, formed in Pune in February 1956 under Shripad Amrit Dange. It fought Congress across Bombay state, winning 101 of 133 seats, including 12 in Bombay city.¹

V K Krishna Menon, fresh from an eight-hour Kashmir speech at the UN Security Council, drew large crowds campaigning for North Bombay, defeating Praja Socialist candidate Alvares Peter Augustus 171,708 votes to 123,967.²

The Election Commission, under Chief Election Commissioner Sukumar Sen, ran the vote in phases from 24 February to 14 March 1957, alongside simultaneous state assembly elections nationwide.³

Bharatiya Jana Sangh's Atal Bihari Vajpayee contested three Uttar Pradesh seats at once, winning his first term at Balrampur with 118,380 votes to Hyder Hussain's 108,568, while placing second at Lucknow and fourth at Mathura, where Raja Mahendra Pratap won.⁴

Communist Party of India leader A K Gopalan, who had represented Kannur in the first Lok Sabha, instead won Kerala's Kasaragod seat, with a majority of 5,145 votes.⁵

This was the first election held on India's map after the country's states were redrawn, mainly along linguistic lines.

The redraw itself is called delimitation — the official redrawing of constituency boundaries, which happens every so often as India's population shifts.

Some of that year's constituencies used a multi-member design, where the same contest sent more than one MP to parliament.

91 of the 403 constituencies worked this way.

About 47.4% of registered voters turned out to cast a ballot — the highest share recorded in any general election up to that point.

That figure leaves out 2 seats where the original results never recorded a turnout percentage — the ballots there were cast, but that particular number never made it into the printed record.

The tightest finish of the election was in Cuddalore, Madras, decided by 59 votes — the smallest margin, how far ahead the winner finished, in votes, over whoever came second, of any seat that year.

At the other extreme, the winner in Rajapur, Bombay won by 66.7% of the vote over the runner-up — the widest margin of any single seat that year, measured as a share of the vote rather than in votes.

The highest turnout anywhere was in Kottayam, Keralam, at 75.7%.

9,26,313 voters were registered in Sitapur, Uttar Pradesh, more than any other constituency that year.

The most crowded ballot of the election was in Outer Delhi, Delhi, where 13 candidates stood.

In September 1952 the Kisan Mazdoor Praja Party and the Socialist Party merged to form the Praja Socialist Party. It became one of the main non-Congress opposition parties contesting this election.⁶

The election also saw the first documented instance of booth capturing in India, when the polling booth at Rachiyahi in Bihar's Begusarai district was forcibly seized and its ballot boxes stuffed.⁷

PSP crossed into serious seat counts for the first time this election.