The Emergency and politics of the body

For the average Indian, it was through the tyranny of the dreaded nasbandi (sterilisation) camps that the worst consequences of the suspension of civil and political rights under the Emergency manifested itself in their everyday lives.

- Yamini Aiyar

In September 1976, India recorded over 1.7 million sterilisations, a figure that equalled the annual average for the 10 preceding years. By 1977, Sanjay Gandhi, the younger son of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, and his bulldozer gang had overseen the conduct of more than 8 million sterilisations. The predominance accorded to forced sterilisation was intertwined with Sanjay Gandhi's growing influence. He needed to consolidate his hold on power within the Congress; family planning (and his other obsession, urban gentrification) became his preferred tools.

In the process, he unleashed the worst form of State violence, stripping ordinary citizens of agency over their bodies. Much has changed in India's approach to family planning since those dark Emergency years. However, 50 years on, Sanjay Gandhi's weaponisation of family planning and exertion of power over individual bodily rights afford important lessons for how we respond to demographic challenges in the contemporary moment. Above all, it serves as a critical reminder to be patient with democracy, for it is the only pathway for sustainable, socially just economic growth and development.

On the surface, Sanjay Gandhi's approach to family planning was not new. Malthusian worries had shadowed India's demographic debates long before independence, and India became the first country in the world to launch a national family planning programme in 1952. And as Christophe Jaffrelot and Pratinav Anil argue in India's First Dictatorship: The Emergency, 1975-77, elements of eugenics, visible in the Emergency, undergirded these debates. "Undesirable others"—minorities and lower castes—were the targets.