1977 Punjab Assembly election

Who: The Shiromani Akali Dal, the Janata Party and the CPM, which fought the election as an alliance, according to Gurmit Singh and J. S. Grewal, and the Congress, which stood against them.

What: The election followed the Lok Sabha poll of March 1977, in which the Congress was routed and, Gurmit Singh writes, the Akalis won nine of Punjab's 13 seats. On 30 April 1977 the Acting President, B. D. Jatti, dissolved nine Congress-ruled state assemblies, Punjab's among them, and fresh elections were fixed for 12 June. It was the next Assembly election after 1972, when, Ashutosh Kumar writes, the Congress won a "steamroller majority" that made the Akali Dal see the need for pre-election alliances with non-Congress parties.

The alliance won 91 of the 117 seats and the Congress 17. By the figures in the IndiaVotes database, which match Gurmit Singh's: Akali Dal 58 seats (31.41 per cent of the vote), Janata Party 25 (14.99), Congress 17 (33.59), CPM 8 (3.50), CPI 7 (6.59) and independents 2. Turnout was about 65 per cent. Gurmit Singh says the Akalis took the votes of the Sikh peasantry but made no dent in the towns, and that the Congress was the largest single vote-getter. Kumar writes that the Akali-Janata victory was also due to electoral support for both parties' part in resisting the Emergency.

Parkash Singh Badal, who had been Union Agriculture Minister from 26 March to 17 June 1977, was persuaded to contest from Gidderbaha, won, and was sworn in as Chief Minister on 20 June 1977. The result led to the Akali-Janata coalition ministry that Badal headed.

Where: The voting was held in all 117 constituencies of Punjab.

Why it mattered: It put the Akali Dal back in government, in coalition with the Janata Party. Gurmit Singh writes that the Akalis were soon disillusioned: the Janata Government at the Centre refused to repudiate the 1976 Ravi-Beas water award, which they pressed it to do. Grewal writes that the coalition earmarked its extra outlay of 1977 for farm production and began an integrated rural development programme in November 1978, and that the All India Akali Conference at Ludhiana in October 1978 passed a dozen resolutions in the light of the Anandpur Sahib Resolution. After Indira Gandhi returned to power, her Government dismissed the Akali-Janata ministry on 17 February 1980, and the Congress won the next election in 1980.