A sitting Prime Minister loses her own seat

Indira Gandhi had governed under a state of Emergency since June 1975, with civil liberties suspended, press censorship in place and opposition leaders jailed. In January 1977 she called elections, apparently expecting the Emergency's public-works achievements to carry her government back to power; the Emergency itself ended on 21 March 1977, in the middle of polling.

Voting ran from 16 to 20 March 1977. The Janata Party — a hastily assembled merger of the Congress(O), the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, the Bharatiya Lok Dal and the Socialist Party, formed specifically to fight the Emergency's legacy — won a landslide, the Congress's first defeat in a national election since independence.

Indira Gandhi herself lost her own seat, Rae Bareli, to Raj Narain of the Janata Party — the same Raj Narain whose 1971 election petition against her had originally triggered the Allahabad High Court ruling that led to the Emergency. Morarji Desai was sworn in on 24 March 1977 as India's first non-Congress Prime Minister.