The forced sterilisations of Emergency

The Hindu

6 hours ago

As India marks the 50th anniversary of the Emergency, one of the most horrific and least acknowledged chapters of Indian democracy is of state-sponsored, forced sterilisation practices, popularly known as nasbandi in public memory. The sterilisation campaign, masquerading as population control, was a spuriously neo-Malthusian, eugenic exercise of state violence. It is an atrocity almost without any parallel in any democracy, for its sheer scale, brutality, and brazen invasion of the bodily autonomy of men and women. What began as a globally endorsed population policy, promoted by agencies such as the Ford Foundation, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, was converted into a grotesque tool of political repression. While India's National Family Planning Programme had long advocated sterilisation as a voluntary method of birth control, the campaign took a violent turn during Emergency, under the ambitious yet authoritarian leadership of the unelected maverick politician, Sanjay Gandhi, and his cronies. The targets were mainly the poor, slum dwellers, Dalits, minorities, and rural communities.
Past instances
Historically, there have been forced sterilisation practices globally. They were often justified by public health, eugenics, or social hygiene discourses. Researchers have documented that in the U.S., over 60,000 people, including the mentally ill, poor, Black, Native Americans, and Latina women, were sterilised between 1907 and 1979 under state-level eugenics laws. In Sweden, investigative reports revealed that 63,000 people deemed 'unfit' for parenthood were sterilised between 1935 and 1976. This scandal eventually forced the government to apologise publicly and offer compensation to survivors. Nazi Germany was notorious for weaponising modern biological science. Its 1933 Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring mandated sterilisation for about 4,00,000 people before and during World War II. Combining anti-poverty rhetoric and authoritarian disciplining of marginalised populations, Peru's President Alberto Fujimori oversaw the forced sterilisation of 3,00,000 mostly indigenous and rural women in the 1990s. China's one-child policy, which resulted in millions of coerced and non-consensual sterilisations, particularly targeting rural and ethnic minorities, exposed the darker side of biopolitics of contemporary world.
The Emergency's abuses
Anthropologist Emma Tarlo in her seminal research in Delhi mentions that people referred to the Emergency as the 'nasbandi ka vakat (the sterilisation time)', and the very term Emergency (Āpātkāl) became synonymous with sterilisation, a stigma for many in public life. The Shah Commission, set up the investigate the Emergency's abuses, recorded 1,778 sterilisation-related deaths and hundreds of injuries. It also noted that thousands of sterilisations happened unofficially. Leading researchers and demographers Pai Panandiker and K.G Jolly in their district-level studies of family planning point out that India performed around 1.3 million vasectomies in 1975 and 2.6 million in 1976. Within a year, total sterilisations — male and female combined — jumped to approximately 8.3 million in 1977, making it the most extensive coerced sterilisation campaign ever conducted globally. The northern States of Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Rajasthan, Bihar, and Madhya Pradesh turned into the 'vasectomy belt'.
In Patna in Bihar, where the Jayaprakash Narayan-led student movement was most intense, there were many nasbandi excesses. No one was spared, whether ticketless passengers, daily wage labourers, beggars, under trial prison inmates, or wandering monks. Young people who apparently looked 'hippie' were targeted. Possessing a sterilisation certificate became a grim necessity for daily survival. An individual needed a sterilisation certificate even to buy essential goods from a ration shop. Villagers often fled homes, hid in fields and forests, and clashed with police squads. Underground activists of the student movement organised protests in Patna, Gaya, Muzaffarpur, Saran, and Bhojpur. Reports suggest that the Bihar government conducted about 4,50,000 sterilisations in 1976-77. Quotas were imposed on block officials, panchayat heads, teachers, doctors, and local police house officers. Incentives of cash, rice and job preferences were paired with punishments such as job losses and withheld salaries and promotions.
As resistance to forced sterilisations grew, so did repression. The Uttar Pradesh police opened fire on October 16, 1976, in Khalpur in Muzaffarnagar, killing 25 people, mostly Muslim men. The incident was known as the Nasbandi Goli Kand (sterilisation bullet massacre). Local reports mention that in Haryana's infamous Uttawar village raid in November 1976, police and 700 officials sterilised 180 men after cutting power and surrounding the area.
The Emergency's sterilisation campaign revealed what Cameroonian political theorist Achille Mbembe called the 'necropolitics'. By the 1977 elections, sterilisation had become a chilling symbol of the atrocities of the Emergency, contributing decisively to the Congress's humiliating rout in most of north India. No wonder the song 'Kaya mil gaya sarkar tumhe/ Emergency lagake/ Nasbandi karake (What did you gain, Oh government, by imposing the Emergency… by forcing sterilisations)' from the film Nasbandi (1978) became etched in public memory.