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Al Jazeera
25-06-2025
- Politics
- Al Jazeera
India forcibly sterilised 8m men: One village remembers, 50 years later
Uttawar, India — When everybody ran, towards the jungles and nearby villages, or dived into a well to hide from government officials, Mohammad Deenu stayed put. His village, Uttawar, in the Mewat region of northern India's Haryana state, about 90km (56 miles) from the capital, New Delhi, was surrounded by the police on that cold night in November 1976. Their ask: men of fertile age must assemble in the village ground. India was 17 months into its closest brush with dictatorship – a state of national emergency imposed by then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, during which civil liberties were suspended. Thousands of political opponents were jailed without a trial, an otherwise rambunctious press was censored, and, backed by financial incentives from the World Bank and the United States, India embarked on a massive forced sterilisation programme. Deenu and his 14 friends were among its targets. They were pushed into the forces' vehicles and taken to ill-managed sterilisation camps. To Deenu, it was a 'sacrifice' that saved the village and its future generations. 'When everyone was running to save themselves, some elders [of the village] realised that if no one is found, it would create even bigger, long-lasting troubles,' Deenu recalled, sitting on a torn wooden cot. 'So, some men from the village were collected and given away.' 'We saved this village by our sacrifice. See around, the village is full of God's children running around today,' he said, now in his late 90s. As the world's largest democracy marks 50 years since the imposition of the emergency on June 25, Deenu is the only man who had been targeted in Uttawar as part of the forced sterilisation project who is still alive. More than 8 million men were forced to undergo a vasectomy during that period, which lasted until March 1977, when the state of emergency was lifted. This included 6 million men in just 1976. Nearly 2,000 people died in botched surgeries. Five decades on, those scars live on in Uttawar. 'A graveyard, just silence' In 1952, just five years after securing its freedom from the British, India became the world's first country to adopt a national family planning programme. At the time, the idea was to encourage families to have no more than two children. By the 1960s, at a time when birth rates were close to six children per woman, the government of Indira Gandhi began adopting more aggressive measures. India's booming population was seen as a burden on its economy, which grew at an average of 4 percent from the 1950s until the 1990s. The West seemed to share that view: The World Bank loaned India $66m for sterilisation initiatives, and the US made food aid to a starving India contingent on its success at population control. But it was during the emergency, with all the democratic checks and balances removed, that the Indira Gandhi government went into overdrive, using a mix of coercion and punishment to pressure government officials into implementing forced sterilisation, and communities into accepting it. Government officials were given quotas of how many people they had to sterilise. Those who failed their targets had their salaries withheld or faced the threat of dismissal from their jobs. Meanwhile, irrigation water was cut off from villages that refused to cooperate. Security forces were also unleashed on those who resisted – including in the village of Uttawar, which had a predominantly Muslim population, like many of the communities targeted. The Muslim birthrate in India at the time was significantly higher than that of other communities, making members of the religion a particular focus of the mass sterilisation initiative. In the lane next to Deenu's house, Mohammad Noor, then a 13-year-old, was sleeping in his father's arms in a cot outside their house when policemen, some of them riding horses, raided their home. His father ran towards a nearby jungle, and Noor rushed inside. 'They broke the doors and everything that came in their way; they shattered everything they could see,' Noor recalled. 'To make our lives worse, they mixed sand in flour. There was not even a single home in the village that could cook food for the next four days.' Noor was picked up in the raid, taken to a local police station and beaten before he was let go. He said that because he was under 15, he was deemed too young for a vasectomy. That night of scare, as the village calls it now, also gave birth to a local folklore: the words of Abdul Rehman, then the village head. 'Outside our village, no one would remember this name, but we do,' said Tajamul Mohammad, Noor's childhood friend. Both are now 63 years old. Before raiding Uttawar, several officials had come to the village, asking Rehman to give away some men. 'But he remained steadfast and denied them, saying, 'I cannot put any family in this place',' said Tajamul, with Noor nodding passionately. Rehman also did not agree to give away men from neighbouring areas either, who were sheltering in Uttawar. According to a local Uttawar legend, Rehman told the officials: 'I will not give away a dog from my area, and you are demanding humans from me. Never!' But Rehman's resolve could not save the village, which was left in a state of mourning after the raids, said Noor, sucking tobacco from a hookah. 'People who ran away, or those who were taken away by the police, did not return for weeks,' he said. 'Uttawar was like a graveyard, just silence.' In the years that followed, the impact became more visible and dreadful. Neighbouring villages would not allow marriages with men of Uttawar, even those who were not sterilised, while some broke their existing engagements. 'Some of the people [men in Uttawar] were never able to recover from that mental shock, and spent years of their lives anxious or disturbed,' said Kasim, a local social worker who goes by his first name. 'The tension and the social taboo killed them and cut their lives short.' Echoes in today's India Today, India no longer has a coercive population control programme, and the country's fertility rate is now just more than two children per woman. But the atmosphere of fear and intimidation that marked the emergency has returned in a new avatar, under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, believe some experts. For 75-year-old Shiv Visvanathan, a renowned Indian social scientist, the emergency helped perpetuate authoritarianism. In the face of a rising student movement and a resurgent political opposition, the Allahabad High Court on June 12, 1975, found Indira Gandhi guilty of misusing state machinery to win the 1971 elections. The verdict disqualified her from holding elected office for six years. Thirteen days later, Gandhi declared a state of emergency. 'It was the banalisation of authoritarianism that created the emergency, with no moment of regret,' Visvanathan told Al Jazeera. 'In fact, the emergency has created the emergencies that have followed in today's India. It was the foundation of post-modern India.' Indira Gandhi's loyalists compared her with Hindu goddess Durga, and, in a play with phonetics, to India, the country itself, much like Modi's supporters have compared the current prime minister with the the Hindu god Vishnu. As the culture of the personality cult grew under Indira Gandhi, 'the country lost the sense of understanding', said Visvanathan. 'With the emergency, authoritarianism became an instrument of governance.' Visvanathan believes that even though the state of emergency was lifted in 1977, India has since slid towards complete authoritarianism. 'All the way from Indira Gandhi up to Narendra Modi, each one of them contributed and created an authoritarian society while pretending to be a democracy.' Since Modi came to power in 2014, India's rankings have fallen swiftly on democratic indices and press freedom charts, due to the jailing of political dissidents and journalists as well as the imposition of curbs on speech. Geeta Seshu, the cofounder of Free Speech Collective, a group that advocates for freedom of expression in India, said a similarity between the emergency years and today's India lies in 'the manner that mainstream media has caved in'. 'Then and now, the impact is felt in the denial of information to people,' she said. 'Then, civil liberties were suspended by law, but today, the law has been weaponised. The fear and self-censorship prevalent then is being experienced today, despite no formal declaration of emergency.' For Asim Ali, a political analyst, the defining legacy of the emergency 'is how easily institutional checks melted away in the face of a determined and powerful executive leadership'. But another of the emergency's legacies is the successful backlash that followed, he said. Indira Gandhi and her Congress party were voted out of power in a landslide in 1977, as the opposition highlighted the government's excesses – including the mass sterilisation drives – in its campaign pitch. '[Like the 1970s], whether Indian democracy is able to move beyond this phase and regenerate again [after Modi] remains to be seen,' Ali said. 'Seven generations!' Back in November 1976, Deenu said he only thought of his pregnant wife, Saleema, as he sat inside the police van while he was being taken away. Saleema was at home at the time. 'A lot of men, unmarried or childless, pleaded with the policemen to let them go,' Deenu recalled. None of Deenu's 14 friends was let go. 'Nasbandi ek aisa shrap hai jisne Uttawar ko tabse har raat pareshan kiya hai,' he said. (Sterilisation is a curse that has haunted Uttawar every night since.) After eight days under police custody, Deenu was taken to a sterilisation camp in Palwal, the nearest town to Uttawar, where he was operated upon. A month later, after he returned from the vasectomy, Saleema gave birth to their only child, a son. Today, Deenu has three grandsons and several great-grandchildren. 'We are the ones who saved this village,' he said, grinning. 'Otherwise, Indira would have lit this village on fire.' In 2024, Saleema passed away after a prolonged illness. Deenu, meanwhile, revels in his longevity. He once used to play with his grandfather, and now plays with his great-grandchildren. 'Seven generations!' he said, sipping from his plastic cup of a bubbly cold drink. 'How many people have you seen that enjoy this privilege?'
BBC News
23-06-2025
- Politics
- BBC News
Ethiopia-Eritrea: People embrace at the border demanding peace
There have been celebrations at the border between Ethiopia and Eritrea as communities from the frontier villages came together for the first time in five by the closed border since the outbreak of the 2020 conflict in Ethiopia's northern Tigray region, and subsequent political tensions, Sunday's coming together was a symbolic moment of peace and reunion of families and friends took place in the Ethiopian town of Zalambessa in the presence of village elders and religious move to re-open a section of the border was organised by local activists and community figures without the official backing of the authorities on either side. But those behind it indicated that they had the blessing from officials in Tigray and at the celebration described it as an emotional and long-overdue five years, relatives and friends whose communities straddled the international boundary had not been able to see each other across the militarised in Zalambessa and the nearby villages had suffered economic hardship and social fragmentation during the two-year war in Tigray that ended in November had been forced to flee their homes, with more than 55,000 people now living in makeshift shelters in Adigrat, 30km (19 miles) south of Zalambessa, relying on relatives for border has officially remained closed despite the end of the war amid tensions between the two governments."Enough of the past, let's sit at the table of peace and build a better future," people chanted on Sunday. Cross-border trade near Zalambessa has also re-started with people using both the Ethiopian and Eritrean currencies."As people, we want to eat, trade and attend social events as before. Their siblings are here, their siblings are there. What we need is peace," one woman from Tigray told the a lot of work still needs to be done to repair the damage of the infrastructure remains broken, with electricity, telephone and banking services completely of the infrastructure is owned by Ethiopia's federal government, and residents say restoring it will require significant health and education facilities, also affected, are slowly being rebuilt by local communities and Eritrea seceded from Ethiopia more than three decades ago, relations have been tense – the border has been closed for most of that was formally reopened in 2018, shortly after Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed came to power and signed a historic peace agreement with Eritrean President Isaias deal earned Abiy the Nobel Peace the move initially brought hopes of normalised relations, the eruption of the conflict in Tigray in November 2020 derailed progress. "I am confident that the peace and reconciliation we started today will continue to grow," said Nebiat Woldegergis, who travelled from Senafe, Eritrea, to attend the a mother who had lived for five years in a refugee camp in Adigrat after fleeing Zalambessa, said: "Today I came to see my locked house. From now on, I will return with my children and continue living on my land."Local people recalled how families who once lived together had been torn apart by the from both communities declared that "peace and reconciliation has begun", encouraging residents to return home and rebuild their challenges property, destroyed homes and lack of services continue to make resettlement difficult for thousands of displaced it is not clear if this local arrangement will be translated into a wider reconciliation between the governments of Ethiopia and Eritrea. You may also be interested in: Three decades, one leader - how Eritreans had their hopes dashed'No-one can handle another war' - Tigrayans fear fresh Ethiopian conflictEritrean refugees describe police crackdown in EthiopiaTen women, one guy: The risk-taking dating show that stirred Ethiopia Go to for more news from the African us on Twitter @BBCAfrica, on Facebook at BBC Africa or on Instagram at bbcafrica
Daily Mail
10-05-2025
- Business
- Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE We live in Britain's strictest village and we LOVE it... but we're terrified of new neighbours moving in
Locals in an authoritarian Yorkshire village which has strict rules on planning and a complete ban on takeaways have complained their way of life is under threat after a flash developer lodged plans to create a luxury hotel and spa on their doorstep. Villagers in Wentworth, South Yorkshire, known as Britain's strictest village, told MailOnline they were happy with their draconian rules, which state they must seek permission from the 'village trust' before they can go ahead with home improvements. There are no supermarkets and takeaways are banned by the village elders. One of the more notorious rules compels all locals to have their front doors painted the exact same shade of green, the colour of the nearby Wentworth Estate. The result, they claim, is a dreamy English village redolent of times gone by, with a teashop, grocers, post office and country pub. But now the rhythm of life in the picture post card village could be set for change after plans were submitted to transform a nearby farm into a trendy hotel and spa. The buildings where generations of farm workers once toiled in howling rain could be transformed into an achingly hip hotel and spa. The design team have referenced some of the UK's trendiest hotels and clubs, including the world famous Annabel's in London's Mayfair. However Mary Pearson, whose family have been tenant farmers on the estate since the 1950s, told a parish council meeting that she had not been consulted. Mary said: 'I was once washing pots at the kitchen sink and saw a tape measure going across the kitchen window. 'It is very, very, disturbing. I have been very disturbed for the last eight years.' She said to the Mail; 'Let's just say we are facing an uncertain future if the plans do go ahead.' A woman walking her dog in the village said:'It's such a shame for the family who run the farm. They have been there for years. I suppose it will bring more people to the village, but at what cost?' Phil Russell, who lives nearby, said: 'From what I have seen the plans will bring more visitors to the village. 'But I do worry a bit about the traffic. The last thing we need is more cars.' Locals have been adamant that the village 'does not need' a hotel as others worry about more road accidents, traffic and pollution Dave, who has lived in the village for 50 years, said:'The plans look fine but I do worry about the traffic. 'We have too many lorries travelling through the village. And there have been fatal accidents over recent years. We need traffic calming measures as soon as possible.' Daniel Wild, who runs the village shop with his wife Katie, said: 'Look anything that will help footfall has to be a good thing. 'The village is beautiful but it can get a little quiet, particularly after 6pm. 'We love it here but have to work seven days week to keep the business going.' Over a dozen locals have raised objections to the plans on the council's website. The majority of the objections raise concerns over the increased volume of traffic which will be expected if the plans are approved. One local said: 'The village does not need this' and another said there will be 'traffic, pollution and more accidents.' And a neighbour said; 'This will be detrimental to the area and a family farm be lost.' The planning statement submitted by the applicant conveys the scale of their ambition to transform the old farm and duck pond into Vogue standard hotel and spa. 'The converted Grade II listed Threshing Barn will comprise a generous light-filled double height reception with a simple, modern staircase. Existing brick walls will be exposed where possible. 'The proposed restaurant, bar and guest lounge accommodated within the existing Gun Park building should evoke relaxation and understated luxury through the use of warmer textures and materials internally such as timber. 'A new, contemporary flat roof glazed link will be inserted between the two historic stone buildings to create a bright and airy transition space. 'A series of single and double spa treatment rooms are proposed in the converted Threshing Barn ground floor vaults, akin to the images adjacent. 'The new build purpose built spa including pool, sauna, steam room and associated facilities is linked to the hotel via a flat roof, glazed walkway. It also contains a cafe and the proposed floor to ceiling height glazing with slatted timber screens will provide glimpse views of the new courtyard and enhanced connectivity across the whole site. Home Farm Spa aspires to be a combination of clean, contemporary detailing and a rustic aesthetic, celebrating the historic fabric to be preserved. It is essential the finishes are appropriate for the variety of proposed uses.' Cllr Brendan J McNamara, Chair of Wentworth Parish Council, said: 'At a recent Parish council meeting, which was held on the 28th April, a decision was made for the parish council to consider expert advice. 'Following on from that, an informal meeting took place on the 1st May between three Parish councillors and three members of the public, where the Parish Councillors confirmed that Parish Council were considering seeking specialist advice. The parish council will continue to work with the Fitzwilliam Estate and the community.' A spokesperson for the local authority said that the planning application was 'currently being assessed.'
