Moga agitation: police fire at the Regal Cinema and Punjab's students rise

Who: Students of Moga's colleges, among them members of the Punjab Students Union; the management of the Regal Cinema; the Punjab Police; and the state government. On October 5 four people died: the students Harjit Singh and Swarn Singh of Charrik village, and the passersby Gurdev Singh and Kewal Krishan. Two more died on October 7, and the accounts opened do not name them.

What: According to accounts published for the fiftieth anniversary, students complained to the magistrate's office that Regal Cinema was selling tickets in the black market, and were ignored. On October 5, 1972 they protested, took sticks and lathis from shops and tried to set the hall on fire. Police used tear gas, then opened fire, and Section 144 orders were imposed. On October 6 the unrest spread to colleges in Jagraon, Ludhiana and Jalandhar, and Moga's residents formed a students' council. On October 7 the cinema was set on fire and police fired again. The government shut every college in the state. In defiance of the orders, students burned state transport buses and cinemas in many towns. Wikipedia's account says the agitation lasted about two months.

Where: Moga, spreading to Jagraon, Ludhiana, Jalandhar and other towns of Punjab.

Why it mattered: A quarrel over cinema tickets became a statewide student uprising within two days. The accounts call it the forerunner of the Moga Sangram rally of April 1974, described as the largest student demonstration in Punjab since 1947. A Panjab University doctoral thesis says that after the Moga agitation the Punjab Students Union did much to build the political awareness of young people and mobilised large sections of students, and that after 1972 several Naxalite groups gave up armed struggle for mass organisation. Almost every account is a commemoration by the union's own successors. No official inquiry or contemporary press file was found, so the toll of six rests on those accounts.