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Independence Day Events: 75 events that shaped 75 years of independent India

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India on Monday enthusiastically celebrated the 75th anniversary of India’s Independence by hoisting the tricolour and singing the national anthem and patriotic songs at the country’s missions.

The world leaders and celebrated individuals from across the world came forward to congratulate India on the occasion of its 76th Independence Day.

The August 15 ceremony is particularly significant this year as it marks the 75th anniversary of India’s independence, with the government launching a host of exercises to add to the verve around the celebration.

Here is a list of 75 events that shaped 75 years of independent India:

  1. 1947: Independence and Partition- On August 15, we achieved freedom after a long wait of 250 years. However, it was soon followed by riots and bloodshed as the country was divided into two, India and Pakistan.
  2. 1948: Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated- On January 30, Mahatma Gandhi was shot dead at 5:12 pm at the Birla House compound in Delhi. Nathuram Godse fired two shots, killing the father of the nation.
  3. 1950: India becomes a Republic- Though India became a free nation on August 15, 1947, it declared itself a Sovereign, Democratic and Republic state with the adoption of Constitution on January 26, 1950.
  4. 1951: The First Five-year Plan was launched in 1951 which mainly focused in the development of the primary sector.
  5. 1952: India witnessed the first Lok Sabha election- General elections were held in India between Oct 25, 1951 and Feb 21, 1952. They were the first Lok Sabha elections after independence.
  6. 1955: State Bank of India (SBI) was founded- On July 01, 1955, Government nationalised the Imperial Bank of India and changed its name to State Bank of India. RBI took 60% stake of the newly formed entity.
  7. 1959: Dalai Lama was given political asylum by India
  8. 1961: Liberation of Goa- Indian Armed Forces carried out ‘Operation Vijay’ in December, which involved air, sea and land strikes for over 36 hours, resulting in the liberation of Goa, Daman and Diu from 450 years’ Portuguese rule.
  9. 1962: India-China War- China attacked on October 20, immediately after their Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai’s diplomatic visit. The month-long war ended after China declared a ceasefire on November 21.
  10. 1963: India’s first-ever rocket launch- On November 21, a small rocket took off from Thumba on the outskirts of Thiruvananthapuram, announcing the birth of India’s modern space age.
  11. 1965: India-Pakistan War- A culmination of skirmishes flared into war but by the time the United Nations intervened, Indian forces outfought their Pakistani counterparts and halted their attack on the outskirts of Lahore, Pakistan’s second-largest city.
  12. 1966: Tashkent Declaration- On January 10, India signed a peace agreement with Pakistan, in the USSR. A day later, PM Lal Bahadur Shastri died after signing of the treaty.
  13. 1966: Indira Gandhi became the first lady to be the Prime Minister of India on January 24.
  14. 1966: Green Revolution begins in India- A high-yielding, disease-resistant wheat variant got shipped to Punjab from Mexico, ushering in the era of Green Revolution that would save the nation from an impending mass famine and over-dependence on foreign aid.
  15. 1967: Sino-Indian War takes place in Nathu La and Cho La- The Nathu La and Cho La clashes, referred to as the Sino-Indian War of 1967, consisted of a series of border clashes between India and China alongside the border of the Himalayan Kingdom of Sikkim, then an Indian protectorate.
  16. 1969: The government set up the Indian National Committee for Space Research (INCOSPAR) in 1962 with Dr Vikram Sarabhai at its helm. Indian Space Research Organisation was formed in 1969, which superseded the erstwhile organisation.
  17. 1971: The Bangladesh Liberation War in East Pakistan led to a military confrontation between India and Pakistan. Around 90,000 Pakistani forces surrendered on 16th December 1971, leading to the formation of Bangladesh.
  18. 1974: Operation Smiling Buddha took place (Pokhran-I)- Codenamed “Smiling Buddha”, India successfully tested its first nuclear bomb in Rajasthan’s Pokhran on May 18.
  19. 1975: Indira Gandhi imposed emergency- Emergency was imposed on June 25. Elections were cancelled and civil liberties were suspended. Indira Gandhi’s opponents were imprisoned and the press censored. Human rights violations including a mass forced sterilisation campaign were undertaken.
  20. 1975: Sikkim becomes a part of India- On May 16, the Himalayan kingdom of Sikkim became the 22nd state of the Union of India.
  21. 1975: On April 19, India launched its first satellite Aryabhata by a Soviet Kosmos-3M rocket from Kapustin Yar. It was completely designed and fabricated in India.
  22. 1977: In the general election, the Janata Party-led umbrella alliance defeated Congress. Morarji Desai became the first non-Congress Prime Minister
  23. 1979: In January, the Morarji Desai government set up a Mandal Commission to identify the socially or educationally backward classes. The commission considered the question of seat reservations and quotas for people to redress caste discrimination.
  24. 1983: On April 11, Bhanu Athaiya became the first Indian to win an Oscar for costume design for Richard Attenborough’s film, ‘Gandhi’.
  25. 1983: India won its first cricket World Cup on June 25, beating heavyweights and two-time defending champions West Indies in the final
  26. 1984: On April 3, Rakesh Sharma became the first and only Indian citizen to travel in space. He spent 7 days, 21 hours and 40 minutes aboard the Salyut 7 space station. With Sharma’s space voyage, India became the 14th nation in the world to send a man to outer space.
  27. 1984: Military-operation code-named Operation Blue Star was carried out between 1 and 10 June 1984 in order to remove Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale and their followers from the buildings of the Golden Temple, the holiest Sikh shrine located in Amritsar, Punjab.
  28. 1984: India’s first metro was commissioned in Kolkata on October 24. The first underground stretch, from Bhawanipore (now Netaji Bhawan) to Esplanade started operation.
  29. 1984: Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated at 9:29 am on October 31, at her residence in New Delhi. She was killed by her Sikh bodyguards Satwant Singh and Beant Singh in the aftermath of Operation Blue Star.
  30. 1984: A chemical accident on the night of December 2 at the Union Carbide India Limited (UCIL) pesticide plant in Bhopal. The Bhopal gas tragedy is considered as one of the world’s worst industrial disasters as over 500,000 people were exposed to methyl isocyanate (MIC) gas.
  31. 1990: On January 19, Jammu and Kashmir saw the beginning of the mass exodus of Kashmiri Pandits following a genocidal campaign launched by terrorists.
  32. 1991: Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated on the night of May 21 at Sriperumbudur in Tamil Nadu by a woman suicide bomber of LTTE.
  33. 1991: On July 24, Finance Minister Manmohan Singh kick-started economic reforms that liberalised the economy.
  34. 1992: On December 6, a large group of Kar Sevaks from VHP and allied organisations demolished the 16th-century Babri Masjid in the city of Ayodhya in UP
  35. 1992:A market manipulation carried out by Harshad Mehta with other bankers and politicians resulted in the biggest Indian stock market crash till then. The scam caused significant disruption to the stock market, defrauding investors of over $10 million.
  36. 1993: Bombay blasts- A series of 12 terrorist bombings rocked Bombay, on March 12. The single-day attack coordinated in India’s financial capital by Dawood Ibrahim resulted in 257 fatalities and 1,400 injuries.
  37. 1995:On July 31, the then-Union Telecom Minister Sukh Ram dialled erstwhile Bengal CM Jyoti Basu from his Nokia mobile phone, marking the start of India’s mobile age. The Internet was launched in India on August 15.
  38. 1998: The Pokhran-II nuclear tests were conducted at the Indian Army’s Pokhran Test Range in May. At 3.45 pm on May 11, the tests were initiated, under the code name Operation Shakti, with the detonation of one fusion and two fission bombs.
  39. 1999: For the first time a non-Congress govt was formed by NDA under the leadership of Atal Bihari Vajpayee that served its full 5 year term
  40. 1999: As part of a confidence-building measure, Atal Bihari Vajpayee took a bus ride to Lahore, Pakistan, on February 19. Little did he know then that within months of his historic initiative, India and Pakistan would be embroiled in the Kargil War.
  41. 1999: The Kargil War was fought between India and Pakistan from May to July in the Kargil district of Jammu and Kashmir and elsewhere along the Line of Control (LoC).
  42. 1999: An Indian Airlines Airbus A300 en route to Indira Gandhi International Airport in Delhi, India, was hijacked on December 24 and flown to several locations before landing in Kandahar, Afghanistan.
  43. 2001: On January 26, an earthquake devastated the town of Bhuj on the morning of India’s 52nd Republic Day and it was felt throughout north-western India and parts of Pakistan.
  44. 2001: On December 13, Parliament House was attacked. 5 Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorists killed 9 deaths and led to the 2001–02 India–Pakistan standoff.
  45. 2002: The burning of a train in Godhra on February 27 caused the death of 58 Hindu pilgrims returning from Ayodhya. This triggered communal violence in Gujarat. The ensuing riots ended with deaths of 790 Muslims and 254 Hindus, 223 went missing, and 2,500 more left injured.
  46. 2004: Sonia Gandhi performed an electoral miracle as Congress managed 145 LokSabha seats to beat poll favourites BJP to form the government with Manmohhan Singh at helm.
  47. 2004: On December 26, an earthquake of magnitude 8.6 off the coast of Sumatra triggered a deadly tsunami that claimed more than 3,00,000 human lives across 5 countries including India.
  48. 2006: On July 11, 7 simultaneous explosions in local trains rocked the city of Mumbai. 189 people died and more than 800 were injured in these terrorist attacks.
  49. 2007: On July 25, Pratibha Patil took oath as the 12th President of India. She was the first woman to hold the highest constitutional office in the country.
  50. 2007: India outclassed Pakistan by 5 runs in the final of the inaugural T20 World Cup in Johannesburg on September 24.
  51. 2008: On October 22, ISRO launched Chandrayaan-1 to the Moon. This was India’s first lunar probe under the program, a major boost to the space program, as the country researched and developed its own technology to explore the Moon.
  52. 2008: On November 26, 10 Pakistani terrorists arrived by the sea route and opened fire indiscriminately at multiple places in Mumbai killing 166 people, including 18 security personnel, and injuring several others, besides damaging property worth crores.
  53. 2009: The UPA Government launched Aadhar- the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) for the purpose of issuing unique identification numbers. Aadhaar architect Nandan M. Nilekani was appointed as the first chairman of UIDAI.
  54. 2010: On August 4, the Right to Education Act was passed in the Parliament of India that ensured free and compulsory education for children between 6 and 14 in India under Article 21a of Indian Constitution.
  55. 2010: India hosted the Commonwealth Games in 2010, at Delhi. It was India’s most successful Commonwealth Games to date with Indian athletes winning 38 gold, 27 silver and 36 bronze medals.
  56. 2011: On April 02, MS Dhoni-led Team India lifted their second Cricket ODI World Cup at the Wankhede Stadium in Mumbai, defeating Sri Lanka by six wickets in the final.
  57. 2011: Veteran Gandhian Anna Hazare, went on a fast-unto-death in Delhi demanding enactment of a comprehensive Jan Lokpal Bill to check corruption.
  58. 2012: On December 16, a 23-year-old medical student was brutally gang-raped on a moving bus in India’s capital New Delhi by six men. The gruesome case shocked the entire nation’s conscience, prompting lawmakers to stiffen penalties in rape cases.
  59. 2013: On November 05, ISRO launched Mangalyaan, a spacecraft bound for Mars. The Mangalyaan spacecraft successfully entered Mars orbit on September 24, 2014 making ISRO only the fourth space agency in the world to do so.
  60. 2014: A saffron wave swept the country in the Lok Sabha Elections of 2014. BJP won 282 seats, while NDA under the leadership of Narendra Modi won 336 seats who became the 14th Prime Minister of India.
  61. 2015: On January 1, the Narendra Modi-led NDA government replaced the Planning Commission with Niti Aayog.
  62. 2016: On September 18, four JeM terrorists from Pakistan carried out a deadly attack in Indian Army brigade headquarters near the town of Uri in Jammu and Kashmir. 19 Indian soldiers were killed in the attack. 10 days after the Uri attack, India carried out surgical strikes in PoK, inflicting heavy casualties on terrorists and ‘those protecting them’.
  63. 2016: In a televised address, PM Narendra Modi announced the demonetisation initiative at 8 pm on November 8 to fulfil four objectives of checking terror-funding by Pakistan, printing of counterfeit currency, black money and corruption.
  64. 2017: On the midnight of July 1, the Indian Government launched Goods and Services Tax (GST) with the idea of having ‘One Nation, One Tax’. The reform subsumed various existing taxes in India with GST.
  65. 2018: On September 6, the Supreme Court decriminalised Section 377. In a historic judgement, the SC stated that consensual adult gay sex is not a crime saying sexual orientation is natural and people have no control on it.
  66. 2019: On February 14, a suicide attack carried out by LeT militants claimed the lives of 40 CRPF jawans in Jammu & Kashmir’s Pulwama. The attack shook the entire nation, and was followed by the retaliatory Balakot strikes by Indian Air Force (IAF) on February 26.
  67. 2019: On August 5, Articles 370 and 35(A) were nullified that gave special status to Jammu & Kashmir and the mandate to define its domicile rules. The state was divided into two separate union territories, namely Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir and Union Territory of Ladakh.
  68. 2019: The Supreme Court in a unanimous verdict on November 9, cleared the way for the construction of a Ram Temple at the disputed site at Ayodhya, and directed the Centre to allot a 5-acre plot to the Sunni Waqf Board for building a mosque.
  69. 2020: The world and India witnessed once in a century health scare in the form of coronavirus pandemic. Some reports say the first wave of COVID-19 pandemic pushed 23 crore people below the poverty line in India.
  70. 2020: Hit by the Covid-19 pandemic, India’s GDP shrunk by 23.9 per cent in the first quarter of FY 20-21. It was the worst since independence.
  71. 2020: Farmers’ protest rocked the country after the Modi-led government passed three laws aimed at reforming India’s agriculture sector on November 26. The protests forced the government to roll back the disputed laws a year later.
  72. 2021: Manish Kumar, a 34-year-old sanitation worker at Delhi’s All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), became the first person in India to be vaccinated against the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) on January 16.
  73. 2022: In a major push to privatise state-owned entities, the Indian Government sold Air India to the Tatas, who regained ownership of the airline after nearly 70 years on January 27.
  74. The Air India Privatisation was followed by the LIC IPO which was launched on May 4. The government sold 3.5% stake in India’s largest-ever IPO.
  75. 2022: On July 21, Droupadi Murmu won the Presidential election with a massive margin and created history by becoming the first citizen from a tribal community for the first time in independent India.

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