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Business Standard
10-07-2025
- Politics
- Business Standard
Tharoor recalls Sanjay Gandhi's role in Emergency; calls it a dark era
Congress MP Shashi Tharoor recalled Sanjay Gandhi's role in the 1975 Emergency, adding that it should not be remembered as merely a dark chapter in India's history, but its lessons must be fully understood. Tharoor expressed his views in an article published in the Emergency in the Malayalam daily Deepika on Thursday, PTI reported. Recalling Sanjay Gandhi's role, the Congress MP wrote, 'Sanjay Gandhi, the son of Indira Gandhi, led forced sterilisation campaigns which became a notorious example of this. In poor rural areas, violence and coercion were used to meet arbitrary targets. In cities like New Delhi, slums were mercilessly demolished and cleared. Thousands of people were rendered homeless. Their welfare was not taken into consideration.' Former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi imposed the Emergency on June 25, 1975, and it was imposed till March 21, 1977. Recalling the dark era of the Emergency, the Congress Working Committee member noted that the efforts undertaken for discipline and order often turned into acts of cruelty that could not be justified. Tharoor further said that democracy is not something to be taken lightly; it is a precious legacy that must be constantly nurtured and preserved, adding that the India of today is not the India of 1975. Tharoor stirs storm within Congress Why did Indira Gandhi impose the Emergency? On June 25, former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi imposed a period of Emergency, which lasted for 21 months. The decision was announced on All India Radio shortly after the Supreme Court allowed a conditional stay on a verdict passed by the Allahabad High Court, declaring her election to the Lok Sabha null and void. The court also asked Gandhi to stay away from the parliamentary proceedings. According to a DD News report, political unrest began to grow in the 1970s, when the opposition to the then-government increased, specifically in states like Bihar and Gujarat, where a series of protests were led by Jayaprakash Narayan. The public dissatisfaction was fuelled by issues like student-led agitations, unemployment, rising inflation, and allegations of corruption.
The Hindu
10-07-2025
- Politics
- The Hindu
Turbulent history: lessons from the dark days of Emergency
April 1976 was a month with long nights and no dawns. Fear hung in the air. There had been reports of an impending doom in Delhi, when a bulldozer would arrive at people's doorstep, demolishing all that they had earned, nursed and nurtured for generations. The worst apprehensions soon came true. 'Early on the morning of 13 April 1976, a rusty old bulldozer wheezed and creaked down Asaf Ali Road towards Turkman Gate...', John Dayal and Ajoy Bose documents in For Reasons of State: Delhi Under Emergency (India Viking/2018). Kalan Mahal, Turkman Gate, Dujana House all bore the brunt of the machine that spared no brick and mortar structure in its way. As the bulldozer demolished houses that had stood there for generations, a million dreams were crushed. Clearly shaken, women and children soon climbed on to the waiting trucks as commanded by a lower level functionary of the DDA to literally start life from scratch in Nand Nagri, Trilokpuri, Seelampur, and Ranjit Nagar — places they did not know existed. The men protested, some loudly, most feebly. Many held Jagmohan, the DDA chairman, to be the villain. Others felt Rukhsana Sultana, the enthusiastic proponent of coercive family planning programme to be responsible. She, after all, had Sanjay Gandhi's ear. A few turned to Subhadra Joshi, the local MP of the Congress. Most knew it was the doing of one man: Sanjay Gandhi. No one had the courage to say so. Finally, a thousand residents signed a memorandum addressed to the Gandhi scion, pleading for the bulldozer action to be halted. Mountain of complaints Dayal and Bose wrote: 'A small band of Youth Congress the prince himself. Sanjay Gandhi greeted them coldly when he heard what they had to say. They presented him with a memorandum signed by more than 1,000 people of Turkman Gate demanding the end of the demolition drive. The once and the meeting was over. After they left, the prince tore up the memorandum into little shreds. He had little time for the rabble. He had to catch a plane to Simla.' Delhi, apparently, was too hot. For him. And for the unfortunate bulldozer victims, now left to pick up the pieces of their life again. They were among the less unfortunate ones. The victims of police brutality were worse off. The Justice Shah Commission received a multitude of complaints about police excesses. Seasoned politician-lawyer and Governor of Goa, P.S. Sreedharan Pillai, who was a first year law student at Kozhikode Law College at that time, has written in detail about it in Democracy Enchained Nation Disgraced: Dark Days of India's Emergency (Konark Publishers/2025). 'Hundreds of pieces of evidence were presented before the Justice Shah Commission, clearly implicating Sanjay Gandhi and his coteries in the brutal actions in Turkman Gate and other areas across infamous and brutal torture method known as uruttal (rolling) was implemented in most police stations.' Pillai goes on to write of other torture methods, including 'fanning' where the victim's hands were tied to the blades of a fan which was then turned on. All along he seeks to highlight how the common citizen was dispossessed of all rights, even the basic dignity of food and clothing. Understandably, as Pillai writes, 'Foreign nations began to question whether India still deserved to be called a 'civilised community'.' Of course, there were Indians abroad whose heart beat for the nation. This is written in much greater detail by Sugata Srinivasaraju in The Conscience Network: A Chronicle of Resistance to a Dictatorship (Vintage/2025). International pressure Srinivasaraju undertakes a painstaking exercise to chronicle the two years when India was under Emergency rule where the author's scholarship and vast experience comes to the fore. While focussing on many of the international developments around Emergency, he makes space to talk of the challenges and the troubles of the likes of Indians for Democracy founder Anand Kumar who was threatened with deportation for raising his voice against Emergency. He also writes about Anand Patwardhan, documentary filmmaker who hailed from a family of freedom fighters, and whose film Waves of Revolution became an effective means of protest against the Emergency, and Subramanian Swamy, the 'maverick academic' who had disguised himself as a Sikh driver of Nanaji Deshmukh in India, and then on a lecture tour across the U.S. stated, 'It was completely false to suggest that only a handful of Western -educated elite were complaining about the Emergency.' Defiance at home By November 1975, there was resistance in 300 districts across India, Swamy revealed. In the U.S., there were posters highlighting the ongoing wrongs in India, seeking the help of common citizens with posters like, 'Support Political Freedom in India' and 'Support Human Rights in India'. Meanwhile, the government in India alternated between using its long arm of pliant diplomats and the inevitable recognition that the move had failure written all over. People could not be silenced forever. Writes M.A. Baby in his foreword to Sebastian Joseph's The Emergency: Twenty-One Months of Draconian Rule (Konark Publishing/2025), translated from the Malayalam by Radhika P. Menon, 'It was a dark chapter in Indian democracy as fundamental rights were suspended, the press was censored, and thousands of political opponents were detained without trial.' Then the seasoned politician has a word of caution for contemporary times, writing, 'Today, even though there is no formal suspension of civil liberties or censorship of the press, we are witnessing a disturbing trend: people exercising their liberties are often attacked — physically and digitally. The mainstream media, by and large, appears reluctant to question the powers that be.' It reminds us of L.K. Advani's words in 1975, and reproduced in Pillai's book about the media then, 'You were merely asked to bend but you chose to crawl.' The Emergency's lessons remain valuable.
The Hindu
29-06-2025
- Politics
- The Hindu
The forced sterilisations of Emergency
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.
Indian Express
28-06-2025
- Politics
- Indian Express
Raghu Rai on the symbolic photo that told the story of the Emergency
I distinctly remember the day the Emergency was declared. Almost overnight, police presence intensified everywhere. Protesters were put behind bars. I was a photojournalist with The Statesman and every photograph we wanted to publish required government approval. When we were told, 'You can't print this picture,' we would sometimes leave the space blank as an act of defiance. There were several photographs that couldn't be published, including that of political leaders who were arrested and protesters. We devised ways to depict reality, with symbolic representations. For instance, one of my photographs that was published had a man riding a bicycle, taking his daughter somewhere. Behind them stood a few onlookers and a posse of police in a rather empty street — a rare sight for Chandni Chowk, which is usually bustling with people. The caption read, 'Life normal in Chandni Chowk', a blatant fallacy, as nothing was truly normal, which was also evident through the photograph. Since there were no political and cultural activities, I also used the time to travel to villages and to the Himalayas to document life there. We are here in big cities to serve the big guys, but it's crucial to look beyond. I also extensively photographed one particular wall in Old Delhi during this period, running from Daryaganj to Jama Masjid — resulting in the series 'Confessions of a Wall'. That wall seemed to possess a life of its own: a bazaar was held nearby on Sundays, children sketched on it and there were also people who scribbled abuses on it. It was interesting to see how its facade changed. The final nail in the coffin was when the wall gave me the final image of the political situation in the country. Transformed into a political canvas, this wall was plastered with posters after the Emergency was lifted and elections were announced. This included posters of Indira Gandhi urging people to vote for her, and with her now-infamous slogan: 'Hum Do, Hamare Do' — the popular interpretation of 'Do' was her and Sanjay Gandhi. At the time, elections were held on the same day across the country and I had gone to Old Delhi to photograph people standing in queues to cast their votes. By 5 pm voting was over. On my way back, I saw a man collecting posters of political leaders and shoving them into a sack to sell them as raddi (scrap). I instinctively captured that moment. When I showed it to my editor Kuldip Nayar, he appreciated it but declined to publish it, fearing that if Indira Gandhi returned to power, both of us would be jailed. I was not a political writer, but I could feel the pulse of the people. I told him she would not return but he wasn't completely convinced. Frustrated, I tore the photograph and said I would not return to this office. The next afternoon, it was becoming clear that the Congress was losing. Mr Nayar started looking for me but I hadn't gone to the office in protest. He rang up to say the Congress was losing and my photograph can be published on the front page, in five columns. The photograph was published the very next day. When she lost the elections, the Gandhi family realised that you cannot run an ancient civilisation like India by such ruthless measures. Sure enough, the Janata Party couldn't survive long and she came back to power with full freedom for expression and democracy. When wars and terrorism are undeclared and when the Emergency and its parameters are undeclared, there remains an unknown and unmeasurable fear which retards the growth and well-being of the nation. As told to Vandana Kalra
Indian Express
28-06-2025
- Politics
- Indian Express
A ‘Nasbandi Colony' and a ‘Mata Indira Sanjay Act': 50 yrs later, ghosts are vivid at Turkman Gate
Along the Delhi-Ghaziabad border, adjoining Loni, lies 'Nasbandi Colony'. The name has stuck, 50 years on after the Emergency's sterilisation and resettlement drives uprooted residents of Turkman Gate, located in the Capital's heart, and dispatched many of them here, to its fringes. There are other things that remain the same in this colony, since it got the first of its Turkman Gate evacuees in the Eighties. Open drains line bumpy, pothole-marked roads, where two-wheelers weave their way through cattle. The smell of open garbage is pervasive. Residents say the government gave land, but no livelihood or shot at a new life – not even a school. Around 16 km away, at Turkman Gate, located in Delhi's Walled City, other families whose houses were razed during the Emergency now live in DDA flats they got as compensation. The flats, built 48 years ago, are in need of repair, while the cramped lanes sport endless electrical repair shops. As many here make a living as scrap dealers, used air-conditioners and coolers crowd public spaces. As per the Shah Commission that went into the Emergency excesses, six people were killed when police opened fire in the Turkman Gate area on April 19, 1976, on protesters, days into a demolition drive. Over 1.5 lakh structures were pulled down across Delhi during the Emergency, but Turkman Gate remains the most vivid example of the drive. While the protests at Turkman Gate on April 19, 1976, were over the demolitions, anger was also bubbling over sterilisations. On April 15, a sterilisation camp had been inaugurated at nearby Dujana House by Sanjay Gandhi and then Lieutenant Governor Krishan Chand. Overall, as per the Shah Commission, over 1.1 crore sterilisations were carried out between 1975 and 1977, against the government's target of 65 lakh, and over 1,774 died during the sterilisation procedures. Amid the steady clatter of machines turning out envelopes at a small factory near the same Dujana House, Zakir Ahmed, 69, sits quietly at his dispensary unit. He first started working at the age of 7 at a wedding card workshop, which still exists across the road, and was not yet a teen when the sterilisation teams arrived. 'They targeted outsiders – labourers, beggars, construction workers… those just walking by,' Ahmed says. Officials offered inducements to meet their sterilisation targets – sometimes money, often a 4-litre tin of Dalda (refined oil), rarely a transistor. Ahmed remembers one incident in particular. On April 18, 1976, as a van carrying men and boys for sterilisation crossed the neighbourhood, a woman snuck up and opened the back door. 'Unko azad kara diya nasbandi se pehle (She freed them from sterilisation).' Ahmed adds: 'Nobody could be saved from nasbandi in those days. Those who said anything would be jailed under the MISA (Maintenance of Internal Security Act).' The very next day, April 19, came the bulldozers. 'Those months were very difficult,' Ahmed says. 'People were terrified… Families… Hindu, Muslim… all would beg their loved ones not to travel after dark, offer each other shelter. Every time one left home, one was scared.' To ward off action, 'many put up photographs of Indira Gandhi at their shops'. Such was the contempt for the PM and her son, says Muhammed Shahid Gangohi, one of the founding members of the Turkman Gate Welfare and Coordination Committee, that 'people referred to the MISA Act as Mata Indira Sanjay Act'. If there is another name that invites similar derision, it is Rukhsana Sultana, a socialite and boutique owner who had risen quickly within the Congress in Delhi due to her proximity to Sanjay. Safi Dehlvi, 75, a former Congress leader, says Sultana took the lead in implementing Sanjay's sterilisation targets in the Walled City, as the one overseeing the camp at Dujana House. 'In April 1976, Sanjay came here and received a hostile reception… He looked around and said he saw a 'mini-Pakistan'. Within a few days, bulldozers were at Turkman Gate's doors.' The afternoon of April 19, Gangohi recalls, he was on his way for his BA first-year exams at Zakir Husain College. 'Around 4.30 pm, there was an announcement that students from our area should meet the Principal. We sensed something had happened… We were told that at 1.45 pm, police and military had come, there was a lathicharge as well as police firing. Around 500 people were arrested… beaten so brutally that it was equivalent to being killed.' Gangohi's family house shared a boundary wall with a mosque; they thought that gave them some immunity. 'But it was also demolished.' Most of the displaced were sent to Trilokpuri initially, while a few were moved to Nand Nagri, Ranjit Nagar and Shahdara. Gangohi says that the two appeals the displaced made were that 'families not be split' and that they get 'built-up area' as compensation. 'But the accommodations at Trilokpuri and Nand Nagri were completely barren… with no roads. It was a jungle.' Mohd Rizwan, 75, points to a spot along Asif Ali Road near Turkman Gate: 'This is where Sanjay Gandhi addressed the public, telling them the benefits of the sterilisation programme… After four-five days, the demolitions started.' One of his relatives, Abdul Malik, 23, was among those killed, Rizwan says. Another old-time resident of Turkman Gate, who was in school then and is now a senior government official, says on the condition of anonymity: 'Teachers would pressure us (on the issue). Near Chandni Chowk Market, we would run into Youth Congress volunteers raising slogans of 'Hum do, hamare do (Us two, ours two).' Government employees were afraid their promotions would be stalled if they put up resistance, he says. Historian Sohail Hashmi, who was himself a witness to Emergency crackdowns as a student at Jawaharlal Nehru University, talks about the experience of his mother, the headmistress of a government school in Kidwai Nagar. 'Teachers were expected to present two sterilisation certificates every month… It were the poor, the rickshaw-pullers, the drug addicts, who bore the brunt of this policy.' Santosh Gupta, who was among the first settlers at the 'Nasbandi Colony' and continues to live there, says his mother Sashi Bala was among those who volunteered for sterilisation. His father, who earned a living as a tailor, his brother and he never discussed the subject, Gupta says. 'I was too young to ask, and she never told us anything.' He wonders though if it was for land. In exchange for undergoing the procedure, Bala received a 90 sq yard plot in 'Nasbandi Colony'. In 1985, the family moved there. In 1998, Gupta opened a small shop on the plot, and lives in an adjoining house with his wife and four children. Bala and her husband are now deceased, as is Gupta's elder brother. He is now thinking of moving, perhaps to Karawal Nagar, which offers at least better amenities as well as connectivity, Gupta says. His 'Nasbandi Colony' plot could fetch Rs 55 lakh, he says. But could the ghosts of Emergency end with that? Ahmed, who has lived his lifetime in the shadows of it, still recalls the lifting of the provision, and their anticipation of a new start. 'The streets erupted in celebration, Delhi felt as joyous as Eid or Diwali. Outside the Tiz Hazari court, there were such long queues that shops ran out of liquor,' he says, before he breaks into a cough that has become chronic, a reminder of decades spent inhaling paper dust.
