'1975: Key Events

• Indira Gandhi is accused of ‘corrupt practices’ during her 1971 election campaign in the Rae Bareilly constituency. She is debarred from holding elective office for six years. This event, and the expansion of the Jayaprakash Narayan- led movement into Gujarat, the formation of a multi-party ‘Janata Front’ culminating in Narayan’s major Delhi rally calling on the army and police to disobey ‘illegal orders’, lead to the declaration of Internal Emergency. All opposition leaders and thousands of intellectuals and political activists are jailed.

• Mrs Gandhi announces her Twenty-Point Economic Programme, using the unprecedented powers of her government to promise: the implementation of agricultural land ceilings, houses for landless labourers, the abolition of bonded labour, the liquidation of rural debt, cheaper prices, higher agricultural wages, increased production and employment, the socialisation of urban land, a crackdown on tax evasion, the confiscation of smuggled property and cheaper textbooks.

• Smallpox is eradicated from India.

• The Chasnala colliery disaster, in which 372 miners die.

• Utpal Dutt presents his play, Dushwapner Nagari.

• The USA loans its satellite ATS-6 for a one-year SITE project, while Doordarshan expands its number of terrestrial stations (Calcutta, Madras and Lucknow in 1975, Ahmedabad in 1976).

• The Aryabhata, a 360kg satellite, is made in India and launched from a Soviet cosmodrome.

• A new agreement with the MPEAA means that US films can be imported again. Sholay and Jai Santoshi Maa are made. The Bengali film fortnightly Anandalok starts.