Bulldozer Raj and Nasbandi: How the Emergency Meddled with Bodies

“Memories of the Emergency are not just about political repression. They are about personal violations, about bodies taken without consent, about families torn apart by policies that treated people as numbers rather than human beings.”

-Emma Tarlo in Unsettling Memories: Narratives of the Emergency in Delhi

The ebbs and flows of a democracy are not a linear set of events, while some governments uphold the inherent values of a democratic government, others are not afraid to transgress them. There has been no government in Independent India’s history that has committed as many excesses as had Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s administration during the Emergency implemented from June 1975 to March 1977. Steeped in controversy including the implementation of the draconian Maintenance of Internal Security Act (MISA), severe censorship of the press, absolute suspension of civil liberties and the implementation of a twenty-point programme aimed at poverty alleviation and land redistribution with a centralised focus, the emergency period has been described as a dark period in Indian political history.

Under the leadership of Sanjay Gandhi, the son of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, the forced sterilisation programme under the onus of population control and family planning, has been a lasting legacy of the emergency period. It disproportionately impacted the poor and minority communities of the country. Driven by Malthusian concerns and strong international pressure to curb India’s then rapidly growing population - the implemented programme used coercive means including state-sanctioned violence and a systematic targeting of marginalised communities to meet its objectives. The state implemented a clear logic of difference- where some bodies were considered to be more dispensable than others – this included religious minorities like Muslims and Christians and lower caste groups like Dalits.

The forced sterilisation campaign implemented by a member of the ruling and the son of the Prime Minster - is not only an example of the overreach of a draconian government but is also reflective of India’s anxieties over population growth and demographic control. Reproductive rights were viewed through the lens of government control rather than individual autonomy and a logic of otherization i.e. demarcating some bodies as desirable and some as not, was implemented – echoes of which are felt even today across party lines.

The Need for Population Control

The 1960’s saw the peaking of Cold War politics with the division of the world into two camps, with non-aligned countries caught in an act of balancing one superpower with another. India in the 1960s was economically weak and struggling to feed its population. Food shortage exacerbated by crop failure and two consequent droughts in 1965 and 1966, led India to be heavily dependent on foreign aid to meet its basic needs. Programmes like the PL-480 initiated in 1954, between the United States and India, provided some help to assuage the food crisis in the country and allowed it to embark on a modernisation of its agricultural sector becoming a culminating factor in the Green Revolution in the late 1960s. However, the benefits of the programme were limited and India’s food problem continued.

The general belief guiding food aid during the time was based on the understanding that populations needed to be controlled to be able to better manage food resources. Guided by the works of Stanford Professor Paul R. Elrich’s seminal work – The Population Bomb that predicted that the world’s population would not be sustained by the food resources available on the planet - coercive population control measures were seen to be an important way in containing the population problem. Soon enough, international food aid became contingent on implementing population control measures.

A host of international actors like USAID, the United Nations, World Bank, Ford Foundation, the Population Council and the International Planned Parenthood Foundation along with the national Ministry of Health and Family Welfare were complicit in establishing means of population control that were transactional, contingent and politically motivated. Individual rights were willing to be circumvented to implement population control measures. The United States and the United Nations exerted incredible influence when it came to implementing these measures in India. The conditionality of the aid offered to India was exemplified through the voluntary family planning and promised IUD purchases that were worked into a food aid agreement between President Lyndon B. Johnson and Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. The cumulative aid offered by the World Bank, Ford Foundation and USAID was a whopping $1.5 billion annually, the most invested in the Global South at that time. What then happened was that the Indian state attributed to population control a sense of urgency and fear that was perhaps not felt at the local level. The Congress’s concerns with demography emerged as early as the 1930’s. While Malthusian concerns were evident in family policy policies, the elements of eugenics were hard to miss. This culminated in the mass sterilisation programmes conducted during the emergency.

The Implementation of Mass Sterilisation

Surprisingly, the implementation of mass sterilisation came from Sanjay Gandhi’s five-point plan and not Prime Minister Gandhi’s original twenty-point programme. Sanjay Gandhi adopted an often aggressive, extensive and absolutely unprecedented approach to the implementation of the sterilisation programme to curb population growth. The first thing done was the implementation of quotas in achieving targeted vasectomies, IUD insertion and even tubectomies. Within this, vasectomies were the most popular method, preferred over the others. Fertility quotas, promotional incentives and downright coercion were used to implement these programmes. However, what was even more startling was the focus on the socio-economically backward groups that were targeted in fulfilling these quotas. The implementation of these policies were a product of the class and caste tensions that marked Indian society at that time – the suspension of democracy simply allowed the state to superimpose these calculated policies without an iota of accountability.

While people who had children were targeted, it was primarily the Muslim population, lower caste groups and those at the very margins of the socio-economic spectrum of Indian society who were lured into the medical procedure often without any knowledge of what was happening to their bodies. Islam’s polygamy and apparent aversion to family planning (notions perpetuated popularly) were also seen as reasons to target the community specifically when sterilisation policies were drafted. Emma Tarlo in her seminal work on the emergency titled Unsettling Memories: Narratives of the Emergency in Delhi provides evidence of how certain caste groups were able to escape sterilisation due to their standing in the caste system and their occupation. However, state imposition and violence were not alone in seeing the implementation of the sterilisation programme. The financial incentives offered were lucrative enough for them to opt for the procedures including cash benefits and land allotments.
The ruthless leadership of Sanjay Gandhi was displayed in his manipulation of public employees to meet the quotas introduced. Grade-4 and below state employees including teachers, municipal workers and even doctors and hospital staff were often threatened with job-related penalties if they failed to meet quotes leading to a sense of desperation among these sections and ultimately coercion in implementing sterilisation procedures. The overall system created was so violent that most individuals found it near impossible to refuse sterilisation due to the fact that the consequence of non-compliance was often withholding basic rights such as land allocation and food ration as promised by the Gandhi administration and the socialist voices she strongly supported.

What is Beauty?
The Riots in Turkman Gate

As mentioned earlier, the problematic elements of policy were based on the Four-Point Programme as laid down by Sanjay Gandhi and not so much from the Twenty-Point Programme that Prime Minster Gandhi laid out - aimed at poverty alleviation. The two pillars of Sanjay Gandhi’s Four-Point Programme were family planning and urban beautification – one dealing with how cities should be organised and the other family. Sanjay Gandhi’s idea of what urban spaces should look like led to the clearing of cities like New Delhi, where sizeable amounts of the people were removed from the mainland and relocated to overcrowded slums and ghettos. Consequently, it is from these slums and ghettos that people were picked up to meet sterilisation quotas.

However, to think of the removal of people from inner-city Delhi to the ghettos was not straightforward – the people mostly removed were minorities from the fringes of society. Sanjay Gandhi hated the idea of poverty and his policies stemmed from his disdain of the economically backward. He used his cadre of carefully curated officials including Jagmohan, DDA vice-chairman, Navin Chawla, Secretary to the LG of Delhi, DIG Bhinder and the municipal commissioner of Delhi B.R. Tamta, along with the power of the Youth Congress to implement his ideas and programmes. Close allies like Rukhsana Sultana and Arjun Dass were also complicit in the malpractices occurring in the region. The complete breakdown of the democratic apparatus of the state along with a personalised brand of politics that favoured individual allegiance was damning to the citizenry and people of Turkman Gate. While all of India felt the excesses of the Emergency, its most violative programmes were carried out in the Hindi-speaking belt of India, particularly Delhi. The extra-constitutional role adopted by Sanjay Gandhi, along with the mayhem of the Emergency was what cost Prime Minister Gandhi the next general election. Congress was completely ousted from Northern India in the 1977 general elections.

While there remain multiple districts, villages and towns that were impacted by the horrors of the emergency, the riots that occurred in the Turkman Gate region of Old Delhi, remains unforgettable. It remained a public reminder of the violence that was extended by the state during the emergency period. A predominantly Muslim neighbourhood, Turkman Gate was the site for the implementation of forced sterilisation and the urban development programme implemented by Sanjay Gandhi to clean the streets of Delhi. The Delhi Development Authority (DDA), along with the police force clashed violently with the residents of Turkman Gate over slum clearance and forced sterilisation. Peaceful protests over the “cleaning up” and “beautification” campaign of Delhi to meet modern standards were violently curbed, leading to the death of over 20 people officially – the unofficial death toll remains higher. Bulldozers were ordered to tear through the neighbourhood while families were still inside houses. People were picked up from the streets and subject to sterilisation procedures and local activists and leaders were dumped in jail in the name of security.

Overextending the “Slum Clearance Order” issued to areas near the Jama Masjid, the massacre that occurred at Turkman Gate was simply an overextension of a zealous city employee Jagmohan, who believed the area represented the “ghetto mentality” of the people it inhabited – largely Muslim. Shops were run over, houses were run over, and people were run over too. When inhabitants of the area went to get help from their representatives – they were asked to fill in quotas for the sterilisation programme. The ordeal carried on for days with truck full of debris being removed and relocation camps being set up across the Yamuna. Resentment rose among the people of the neighbourhood who were subject to the double atrocities of slum clearance and forced sterilisation. Matters reached its crescendo on April 19th – the locals clashed with officials and a blood bath ensued. However, things did not end here and the gentrification of Turkman Gate continued.

The Turkman Gate riots remain a clear example of how biopolitics operated in post-colonial states like India. Given the complex fabric of India where community, religion, public policy and economy intersect in myriad ways – the garb of public policy to advance narrow understandings of urbanisation and family control were pursued relentlessly. Sanjay Gandhi, drunk on power, allowed families to be torn apart and lives to be bulldozed over. Forced evictions, the fear of sterilisation and the human cost of implementing policies without ethical considerations has led to Turkman Gate becoming the symbol of tyranny that it is.

Secrecy and the Shah Commission

The Emergency implemented by Prime Minister Gandhi saw a complete blanket over press activity, which included severe censorship and overall silence on the actions of the state. Information pertaining to policies and its implementation were missing from the public and thus, the awareness on the excesses committed by the likes of Sanjay Gandhi were brought to light only after the end of the emergency. National newspapers like the Times of India and Hindustan Times were controlled into producing narratives that were state-friendly and were thus, unable to expose the true nature of the family planning programmes implemented.
It was only with the established and enquiry by the Shah Commission set up by the Morarji Desai administration that the true extent of the horrors of the mass sterilisation drives were unmasked. Further studies revealed that coercion was not uniformly applied across the country. Some districts experienced higher instances of state-imposed sterilisation while some did not receive the same treatment. The political and social motivations in the disproportionate targeting of marginalised groups that reduced their bodies to mere numbers in the name of policy is proof that demographic studies and transitions backed by public policy are not devoid of political motivations.

Consequences and Fear of Population Growth

Multiple studies have indicated that a direct increase in violence was noted in those districts that saw forced sterilisation being implemented with the heaviest of hands. The psychological trauma of undergoing such violating medical procedures exacerbated instances of rape, violent crime and murder. The trauma of forced vasectomies and the sense of a reduced masculinity that it created led to an increase in aggressive behaviour among men. Forced sterilisation also contributed significantly to India’s disproportionate sex ratios, often reinforcing gender-based violence against women and discrimination.

The mass sterilisation campaigns and its forced implementation often against the will of the individual was a direct manifestation of the Indian state’s deep fear of an uncontrolled population. The selective targeting of particular communities, especially its minorities, was done to promote the interests of its majority community and was not rooted in ethical family planning and population control. These coercive public health policies often weaponised by states to promote the interests of the majority communities have lasting consequences for society. The most egregious part was the role played by Sanjay Gandhi in the events that unfolded, whose credentials were simply his proximity to Prime Minister Gandhi as her son.

A similar instance of state-controlled measures in targeting specific bodies was noticed in the United States of America in Tuskegee. A medical programme was run from 1932 to 1972. A racist study on the onset of latent Syphilis on black bodies was conducted by the United States government. The study targeted 600 poor, black male farmers and sharecroppers in Alabama to study the progression of Syphilis and were not administered penicillin even when it was discovered. The study was allowed to continue for 40 years and was only terminated after public backlash on its exposure. Similar experiments were conducted in Nazi Germany, Japan, Guatemala, South Africa and other nations.

Economic and developmental concerns were often used to justify the Emergency-era forced sterilisation campaigns. However, the lack of autonomy and the manner in which the state was able to reduce its citizens to a mere number was startling – the horrors of which are felt till today. The selective targeting of specific communities is a direct reflection of the inherent logic of the Indian state and society. The ethical breaches of the quest to implement state-driven population control measures shows a direct correlation between demographic control and Indian governance. The ability of the state to be able to categorise certain bodies as desirable and certain bodies as dispensable makes it a powerful tool in the hands of oppressive and authoritarian regimes. Coercive state interventions have lasting social and political consequences.