The Emergency

In June 1975, Gandhi's government was in turmoil. In 1971, Gandhi won a large majority in a midterm national election with a radical manifesto encapsulated by the slogan garibi hatao (Rajagopal Reference Rajagopal2011, 1011). However, this majority quickly dissipated in the wake of a series of economic and political crises (Hewitt Reference Hewitt2008, 15). Rises in oil prices and poor monsoons coincided with corruption scandals involving Congress chief ministers in Bihar and Gujarat. In 1974–75, socialist campaigner Jayaprakash Narayan led a popular anticorruption movement against Gandhi's government. While Narayan called for “Total Revolution,” Gandhi remained defiant (Chandra Reference Chandra2003, 43–63). Opposition hardened in June 1975 after the Allahabad High Court found Gandhi guilty of electoral malpractice during the 1971 elections; the ruling declared Gandhi's unseating and disqualification from Parliament for six years. After an appeal from the government, the Supreme Court granted a conditional stay on the High Court ruling, but retained some constraints on Gandhi's official duties. Narayan called for Gandhi to resign; several national newspapers echoed his call. A mass opposition rally marched through the streets of New Delhi on June 25, where Narayan called for the police and the army to disobey the “immoral” orders of their illegitimate prime minister (Hewitt Reference Hewitt2008, 118).

Gandhi did not resign. Instead, she seized upon the opposition movement as justification for proclaiming a state of emergency on June 25, 1975 (Hewitt Reference Hewitt2008, 17). In a broadcast over All India Radio explaining the Emergency, Gandhi referred to Narayan's provocation as part of a “deep and widespread conspiracy” that posed a “threat to internal stability” (Gandhi Reference Gandhi1984, 177–78). Following the proclamation, thousands of members of the opposition were arrested, public meetings and strikes declared illegal, and press censorship imposed. The right of habeas corpus was suspended, and the Maintenance of Internal Security Act amended to provide the government with the power to detain political prisoners without charge (Weiner Reference Weiner1978, 5–6).

However, the justification Gandhi gave for proclaiming a state of emergency quickly shifted: from the safeguarding of national stability, to economic development and garibi hatao (Hewitt Reference Hewitt2008, 99; Rajagopal Reference Rajagopal2011, 1004; Weiner Reference Weiner1978, 6–7). On July 1, 1975, Gandhi announced a twenty-point economic program, which included measures to control the price of essential commodities, tackle rural indebtedness, and increase production (Gandhi Reference Gandhi1975, 1). Simultaneously, the national family planning program, which had existed since 1952, was greatly intensified.Footnote ² In some states, police were involved in “motivating” men to “accept” vasectomy; government servants were given quotas of people to “motivate” for sterilization and, in many cases, were themselves required to produce sterilization certificates in exchange for promotion, housing allocation, and holiday pay (Vicziany Reference Vicziany1982, 373).

Though Gandhi did not include family planning among her twenty points, her son Sanjay Gandhi did include it in his own four-point (later five-point) program, announced in February 1976 (Weiner Reference Weiner1978, 119). Consequently, the severity of the family planning program during the Emergency is often explained as a result of the personal influence or “extra-constitutional authority” of Sanjay Gandhi, who held no formal position in government (Chandra Reference Chandra2003, 203; Gwatkin Reference Gwatkin1979, 35; Narasimhan Reference Narasimhan1977, 60; Nayar Reference Nayar1977, 134; Sinha Reference Sinha1977, 162; Vicziany Reference Vicziany1982, 374; Weiner Reference Weiner1978, 36). However, coercive family planning policies had been pursued in India before 1975 (Banerji Reference Banerji1976; Connelly Reference Connelly2006; Gwatkin Reference Gwatkin1979), and during the Emergency the family planning program was bolstered even before Sanjay Gandhi announced his five-point program. Moreover, coercion and compulsion were explicitly authorized by the central government. Most notably, in April 1976, Karan Singh, minister of health and family planning, announced a National Population Policy (NPP) that included enormously enlarged targets for family planning (including sterilizations), increased monetary incentives for family planning “acceptors,” and disincentives for large families. Implementation of the program was assigned to the state governments (rather than the central government), and a number of states increased incentives and targets even beyond those announced by Singh. The NPP also allowed states to pass compulsory sterilization legislation, and several states began to draft such bills. In July 1976, the Maharashtra state government passed a Family (Restriction of Size) Bill and sent it to the central government for presidential approval (Gwatkin Reference Gwatkin1979, 39).

Then in January 1977, Gandhi unexpectedly called an election, released thousands from jail, lifted press censorship, and permitted public meetings once again (Weiner Reference Weiner1978, 8). After censorship ceased, press reports abounded of what came to be termed the “excesses” of the Emergency. Stories filled the newspapers of forced sterilizations, and deaths as a result of medical complications following hastily implemented family planning drives (Henderson Reference Henderson1977, 65–75). The central government, aware of the unpopularity of the family planning program, and in anticipation of the forthcoming elections, swiftly issued statements emphasizing the voluntary nature of the program and withdrawing its most coercive elements. The Maharashtra Family (Restriction of Size) Bill was returned to the state for “revision.” Gandhi nevertheless lost the election, and her defeat is often explained as a rejection of the “harshness” of the Emergency, particularly the family planning program (Henderson Reference Henderson1977, 66; Roy Reference Roy and Chatterji1978, 47; Tarlo Reference Tarlo2003, 37). Voter turnout especially increased in the northern states of Bihar, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Punjab, and Uttar Pradesh, which had been deeply affected by sterilization drives, and where nasbandi (vasectomy) was the focal term of the 1977 election campaigns (Weiner Reference Weiner1978, 35, 85–86). As one congressman commented, “these damned vasectomies have become something like the greased cartridges of 1857” (Weiner Reference Weiner1978, 38).Footnote ³

The succeeding Janata Party government established a Commission of Inquiry headed by Justice J. C. Shah to inquire into the “excesses, malpractices, and abuse of authority” committed during the Emergency (Dayal and Bose Reference Dayal and Bose1978). The Shah Commission was, however, only a “fact finding” inquiry with no authority to convict (Shah Commission of Inquiry 1977, 2). The Commission published its findings in 1978, in a three-volume report that documented the worst “excesses,” including a lengthy chapter on the “Implementation of the Family Planning Programme under the Emergency” (Shah Commission of Inquiry 1978d, 153–207). Yet, Gandhi was reelected in 1980 and, remarkably, was awarded the United Nations Population Award in 1983 in recognition of her “outstanding contribution to the awareness of population questions or to their solutions” (Population and Development Review 1983, 747). The head of the UN Fund for Population Activities, who had either not read or not believed the Shah Commission Report, defended the award on the basis that the allegations of “mandated sterilization” made during the 1977 elections had “never been proven” (Salas Reference Salas1983, 1–5).

This, in brief, is the story of family planning under the Emergency. Family planning was a defining Emergency-era project: both for its architects, who pushed the program beyond what the Indian electorate would tolerate, and for its targets, for whom the term “Emergency” became synonymous with “sterilization” (Tarlo Reference Tarlo and Das2000, 242). Why, in the context of the Emergency, was family planning pursued so forcefully? How, in the aftermath, was this national program dismissed as a series of unproven allegations, or a case of “excess” in implementation? In this article, I seek to understand the trajectory of the family planning program during the Emergency, and explain that it was envisaged as a technocratic fix for the problem of poverty in India. Although the tempo of the program had been increasing since its inception, it was bolstered in 1975–77 by Gandhi's focus on economic development as justification for the Emergency. Although absent from Gandhi's initial twenty-point economic program, family planning nevertheless became a key Emergency-era project by virtue of its already-established position as a cornerstone of economic development. Below, I discuss how the link between population and development was consolidated, and the consequences of this for India's Emergency experience. However, I must first address the intertwined issues of archives, politically motivated accounts of the Emergency, and the new possibilities to write “unauthorized” versions of this history. To understand both the prevailing narrative of “excess” and how it might be challenged, I will now turn to a flurry of Emergency-related news stories in the Indian media.

The Shah Commission: Never Lost and Also Found

During 2010–11, several Emergency-related news stories appeared in the Indian media. The first of these stories concerned government documents and the Right to Information (RTI) Act. Questions had been raised regarding the location of Emergency-era documents following two separate RTI requests earlier in the year.Footnote ⁴ A request to see the proclamation of emergency issued by Gandhi in June 1975 had been shunted from the Prime Minister's Office to the Ministry of Home Affairs, and finally to the National Archives of India, which, having initially denied that any such records had been transferred to its keeping, finally located and released the file containing the proclamation in December 2010 (Menon Reference Menon2010; Mitta Reference Mitta2010; Times of India 2010). Meanwhile, the President's Secretariat responded to a similar RTI request by refusing to make public any communications between Gandhi and (then) President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed (Sezhiyan Reference Sezhiyan2010, 5). The issue was reignited in June 2011 when the Central Information Commission, citing “immense” public interest in the disclosure, ordered the President's Secretariat to make public all documents relating to the proclamation (Indian Express 2011).

Parallel to this, a second flurry of media coverage began, inspired by the December 2010 release of The Congress and the Making of the Indian Nation, a commemorative history brought out to mark the Congress Party's 125th year. Of the two-volume history, the newspapers focused almost exclusively on the book's representation of the Emergency. Although the book acknowledges that “normal political procedures and fundamental rights” were suspended during the Emergency, it also claims that “vast sections of the population welcomed it initially” (Indian National Congress 2010, 2:115–16). Importantly, the authors of this official history attribute responsibility for the most controversial actions of the Emergency—the so-called “excesses”—squarely in the hands of one individual: not Indira Gandhi, but her son Sanjay. They write:

While most of the newspapers accepted this version of history, one journalist objected. An editorial in the Indian Express described the book as an “authorised version” by a “panel of friendly historians.” Connecting this critique with the ongoing question of undisclosed documents, the editorial concluded that “the beginnings of openness in authorised histories are all very well; but this is also a reminder that the [Congress] party's strangle-hold over the telling of modern India's history is far from weakening. A genuinely modern party would be willing to open archives, to let a thousand unauthorised histories bloom” (Indian Express 2010, 12).

Next, the press coverage surrounding the RTI requests, combined with a rumor—that the Shah Commission Report had been “buried without epitaph” by the Congress Party after Gandhi's return to power in 1980—led to a further Emergency-related story. Former member of Parliament Era Sezhiyan realized that he could himself supply the much sought-after proclamation of emergency from evidence published in the Shah Commission Report, copies of which he held in his personal collection. Citing rumors circulating on the Internet that “not a single copy of the report now exists in India,” Sezhiyan had the report reproduced in full under the title Shah Commission Report: Lost, and Regained (Sezhiyan Reference Sezhiyan2010, 6–7). These rumors were not new; the Congress Party has long been suspected to have suppressed the Shah Commission Report (Hewitt Reference Hewitt2008, 165; Tarlo Reference Tarlo2003, 53). However, if the Congress Party did attempt to “bury” the report in India, it did not succeed. I found copies in the library of Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. Moreover, while the author of the Indian Express editorial criticized Congress's “stranglehold” over the telling of Indian history, I was in the National Archives of India, requisitioning files from a newly released collection: the records of the Shah Commission of Inquiry. The thousands of documents contained within these files—memos, minutes, correspondence, and questionnaires collected by the Shah Commission during the course of its inquiries—help to make the writing of “unauthorized histories,” as envisaged by the Indian Express journalist, possible.

“Excess” versus “Normality”

Before this archive was opened, the published report of the Shah Commission of Inquiry was a key source for scholars writing about the Emergency (e.g., Connelly Reference Connelly2008, 317–26; Gwatkin Reference Gwatkin1979; Hewitt Reference Hewitt2008; Rao Reference Rao2004, 47–49; Vicziany Reference Vicziany1982, Reference Vicziany1982–83). However, the report is problematic as a source for historical research. It certainly documents the worst of the so-called “excesses” of the Emergency in great detail, but it is precisely this preoccupation with the idea of “excess” that is the report's greatest weakness. Arvind Rajagopal (Reference Rajagopal2011, 1015) argues that “excess . . . set against an unspecified standard of normalcy” became “the critical term for assessing the Emergency” propagated by the Shah Commission, despite the fact that “excesses,” such as forced sterilization, were not distinct to the period. Yet, “excess” can, by definition, exist only in relation to that which is “normal,” “moderate,” or “reasonable”; the Shah Commission did not simply utilize the category of “excess,” but produced its own definitions of normality in the process of its inquiries. When applied to family planning, the term “excess” functions within the Shah Commission Report not only to identify abuses, but also to normalize inherent coercion in the program. For example, the Shah Commission did not question the wisdom of the preexisting system of targets, incentives, and disincentives per se, only their “upward revision” by the states during the Emergency (Shah Commission of Inquiry 1978d, 155). By implication, centrally authorized coercion is considered “normal”; only its increase during 1975–77 is “excessive.” The Shah Commission furthermore drew artificial distinctions between the nature of the family planning before and during the Emergency. The Commission worked on the false assumption that prior to June 1975 the family planning program had been entirely voluntary, and characterized by a “cafeteria approach” to contraception (Vicziany Reference Vicziany1982, 374). It claimed that there had been decisive shifts towards coercion, and in favor of the single method of sterilization during the Emergency; evidence is arranged in the Shah Commission Report in such a way as to demonstrate these supposed shifts. Thus, material presented in the reports is constantly mediated through the Commission's (implicit and explicit) definitions of “normality” and “excess.”

However, the Shah Commission can hardly be faulted for this strategy given that inquiry into “excess” was precisely its remit (Shah Commission of Inquiry 1978c, 1). In its 1977 election campaign manifesto, the Janata Party did not promise to inquire into systemic problems within the family planning program, only into “allegations of excesses” on the basis that “a distinct disservice has been done to this national cause by abandoning methods of persuasion and education and by invoking coercive force and compulsion” (Paul Reference Paul1977, 125). Here, as elsewhere, the depiction of Emergency-era family planning as a series of “excesses,” distinct from the program before June 1975, serves to deflect criticism from the underlying program; as I will show below, the assumption made by the Janata Party—that family planning was a “national cause” to be preserved—was also shared by the Shah Commission, which propagated the term “excess” to similar effect. Moreover, while the Shah Commission talked of “excess,” others (and one might include the authors of Congress and the Making of the Indian Nation among them) “emphasised the uniqueness of the Emergency by talking of the ‘Sanjay factor’” (Vicziany Reference Vicziany1982, 374). While notions of sudden change, the will of Sanjay Gandhi, and bureaucratic “excess” pervade the Shah Commission Report and much scholarship on the Emergency, the newly released archival files have great potential as sources for historical research. Unlike the published Shah Commission Report, material in these files has not been subject to the same degree of ordering and filtration, and thus offers new insight into the events of the Emergency.

Several themes recur throughout the files. One of these is the deliberate targeting of minorities, particularly Muslim and tribal groups, under the Emergency-era family planning program. Though the forcible sterilization of Old Delhi's Muslim community at Dujana House rightly became the subject of much criticism in the immediate post-Emergency period (Gangadharan, Koshy, and Radhakrishnan Reference Gangadharan, Koshy and Radhakrishnan1978, 33–46; Nayar Reference Nayar1977, 134–40; Sinha Reference Sinha1977, chap. 10; Tarlo Reference Tarlo2003; Weiner Reference Weiner1978, 38), the files also contain “top secret” reports of clashes between Muslim groups and government family planning officials in West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Haryana, Rajasthan, and Bihar (Chakraborti Reference Chakraborti1976, 1–4; Government of India 1976a, 1–15). Meanwhile, in Gujarat, special incentives were provided for sterilization “acceptors” in tribal areas (Government of India 1975a). At times, the targeting of particular communities carried distinctly eugenicist overtones: in Bangalore, family planning methods were made available “on an urgent and priority basis” to “alleviate the sufferings in certain special sections of the population like the beggars and those suffering from leprosy” (Government of India 1976b).Footnote ⁵

However, by far the most dominant theme running through the Shah Commission's family planning files is that of poverty eradication. Crucially, the evidence contained within the files suggests that the abuses of the Emergency-era family planning program were not simply a result of “excess,” or the personal influence of Sanjay Gandhi, but a product of the combination of a demographic discourse with a modernizing impulse. I argue that family planning under the Emergency should be viewed not as a string of arbitrary “excesses,” but as a manifestation of what James C. Scott calls “authoritarian high modernism.” Scott argues that the most catastrophic incidents of state-led “development” in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries originated in a combination of three elements: “high modernist” ideology, defined as a faith, shared across the political spectrum, in rational social engineering to improve the human condition; “unrestrained use” of the apparatus of the state to achieve these designs; and a weakened civil society unable to resist. “The ideology of high modernism provides, as it were, the desire; the modern state provides the means of acting on that desire; and the incapacitated civil society provides the levelled terrain on which to build (dis)utopias” (Scott Reference Scott1998, 88–89).

The family planning program under Emergency bears all the hallmarks of an authoritarian high modernist project, with an important qualification: the whole of “civil society” was not simply unable to resist, but in some cases was complicit in the family planning/garibi hatao project. During the Emergency, the Government of India actively sought to increase middle-class collaboration and to “stage popular consent” for its development practices via the twenty-point program and through propaganda (Hewitt Reference Hewitt2008, 128; Rajagopal Reference Rajagopal2011, 1003). In the series of Emergency-era events narrated below, the presence of voluntary organizations and commercial companies hints at this collaboration. “The poor,” too, cannot be thought of as simply a homogenous group of passive victims. Tarlo's (Reference Tarlo2003) ethnographic work reveals the residents of a Delhi resettlement colony not only as targets of coercive family planning practices, but as buyers and sellers in a black market of sterilization certificates, needed to gain or retain access to civil amenities. Clearly, “civil society” must be disaggregated. While some of its members were unable to resist, others participated in the subjugation of their fellow citizens.

The family planning program before and during the Emergency began with a utopian vision of a modern India free from poverty. However, during the Emergency the program began to look less like an attempt to eradicate poverty, and more like an attempt to “eliminate the poor” (Gangadharan, Koshy, and Radhakrishnan Reference Gangadharan, Koshy and Radhakrishnan1978, 33). What, though, is the link between family planning and garibi hatao? I will now turn to the process by which family planning was linked to the project of poverty eradication via economic development in India, a history that I locate decades before the Emergency.

Consolidating the Poverty-Population Link

Before the Emergency, population already occupied a central position in schemes of national development. In the early twentieth century, Indian economists addressed population as part of a broader attempt to understand Indian poverty and its role as an obstacle to national modernity (Hodges Reference Hodges2004; Nair Reference Nair2006). During the 1930s and 40s, in anticipation of independence from British colonial rule, a number of Indians began to argue that population control was crucial to building an economically viable, independent India. Influential thinkers, such as economists Gyan Chand and Radhakamal Mukherjee, argued that a gap between population and national production was the root cause of poverty, which had to be addressed through a reduction in the birth rate if India was to plan for its future (Hodges Reference Hodges2004, 1160). Such prominent advocates of “overpopulation” theory served as advisors to the National Planning Committee of the Indian National Congress before independence, and then as advisors to the government in independent India (1160). Reflecting this influence, in 1947 the National Planning Committee recommended that “in the interest of social economy, family happiness and national planning, family planning and limitation of children are essential, and the State should adopt a policy to encourage these” (National Planning Committee 1947, 79).

Meanwhile, in the United States, academics were also beginning to address Third World population growth in the context of Cold War politics. Such population growth was understood to lead to resource shortages, economic stagnation, and political instability: in short, conditions believed ripe for the spread of communism. Demographers, led by Princeton's Office of Population Research, made a particularly important contribution to this debate in the form of demographic transition theory. The predominant demographic theory of the era, transition theory presented both an explanation for the demographic patterns of industrialized societies and a model for possible future patterns in the problematic “underdeveloped” nations (Furedi Reference Furedi1997, 75; Szreter Reference Szreter1993, 661). Significantly, in the 1940s these demographers presented a reformulated version of transition theory, which reconfigured the theoretical link between population growth and (under)development. The “classic” formulation of transition theory suggested that all populations passed through three principal demographic stages: a “traditional,” preindustrial stage characterized by high birth rates balanced by high death rates, when population grew very little; a period of large population increase caused by the onset of industrialization and modernization, which brought improvements in living standards that led to a reduction in mortality without a concurrent fall in the birth rate; and finally, a decline in the birth rate following the combined impact of modernization, urbanization, and industrialization (Szreter Reference Szreter1993, 662). Such factors as enhanced survival, a growing culture of individualism, and rising consumer aspirations induced people to limit their fertility, and population growth stabilized (Furedi Reference Furedi1997, 75). It thus followed that, by encouraging industrialization and associated social transformation, population growth could also be curtailed. However, while this “classic” model held that fertility would only fall as a result of the effects of full-scale industrialization and modernization, in the late 1940s the theory was altered. In order to provide a more immediate solution to Third World population growth, demographers “inverted” transition theory: they began to argue that in nonindustrialized countries, high fertility itself was impeding economic development. Under this new formulation, fertility would need to be controlled in order for economic development to proceed (Greenhalgh Reference Greenhalgh1996; Hodgson Reference Hodgson1983; Szreter Reference Szreter1993).

In a report he coauthored for the Rockefeller Foundation following a trip to Asia in 1948, Frank Notestein, director of the Princeton Office of Population Research, argued that “gains in production will be largely consumed by increasing numbers and that the processes of population change will function, like the governor of a machine, to keep the system in a stable equilibrium of poverty and ill health” (Balfour et al. Reference Balfour, Evans, Notestein and Taeuber1950, 111). In his influential work The Population of India and Pakistan, Notestein's colleague Kingsley Davis (Reference Davis1951, 90) likewise argued in that India's “enormous population itself shows signs of becoming a dampening factor on industrial progress.” This inverted version of transition theory was then established as national policy within India's First Five-Year Plan, which stated:

The necessary reduction in the birth rate, the plan stated, could be secured by family planning.

Yet, in the early 1950s, not all those in power in India were fully convinced that contraception was the solution to high fertility. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru argued that economic development, rather than family planning, would lower population growth. While maintaining that such growth “comes in the way of the higher standards for our people that we seek to attain,” Nehru stated:

Alongside Nehru, Minister of Health Rajkumari Amrit Kaur (who oversaw the national family planning program) was also reluctant to prioritize family planning over economic development. In January 1954, she wrote to one family planning advocate, “We do not need to be unduly alarmed about what is a very normal growth in our population. We have to concentrate on raising the standards of living of the people which will ipso facto bring down the birth rate” (Kaur Reference Kaur1954). However, by the end of the 1950s, such ambivalence had largely given way to consensus: that population growth was impeding economic development, and that a state-led family planning program was necessary for the progress of the nation. This consensus owed much to the work of two more Princeton academics, Ansley Coale and Edgar Hoover's Population Growth and Economic Development in Low-Income Countries (Reference Coale and Hoover1958).

It was Notestein who facilitated the Coale-Hoover project at Princeton, after a request from Eugene Black, president of the World Bank. Black asked Notestein to write an essay “explaining the importance of slower growth of population in helping economic progress in the poorer countries. Notestein responded that there was not enough soundly established knowledge of the topic, and that much substantive research was needed” (Coale Reference Coale2000, 34). Thus Princeton's Office of Population Research worked out an agreement with the World Bank to develop “some combined demographic and economic models for India . . . to discover what the implications of alternative paths of demographic change might be for the economy, and vice versa” (Notestein Reference Notestein1954). Coale and Hoover began work on the project in 1954, and visited India in 1955 to gather data (Coale Reference Coale2000, 36).

Yet, in spite of his reticence to write authoritatively on the issue for the World Bank, Notestein was willing to expound on the (presumed) negative impact of population growth on economic development to Kaur, even in the absence of the “soundly established knowledge” that the Coale-Hoover study had yet to deliver. After a visit to India in 1955, when Coale and Hoover were still in the early stages of their project, Notestein wrote to Kaur about “the demographic situation” in the country. He warned that the population was “likely to grow more rapidly than had been anticipated in most of the plans,” and advised Kaur to expect the population to double in number over the next thirty years if the birth rate did not decline. In the absence of evidence, Notestein stated: “To me, it seems clear, that the slower rate of population growth would assist the program of economic development in achieving its ultimate goals, i.e., relief from crushing poverty and sustained additional gains in the health of the population” (Notestein Reference Notestein1955). Kaur heeded this advice: in 1956, she explained to the Central Family Planning Board that population growth was impeding efforts to improve the standard of living and needed to be addressed through a national family planning campaign (Times of India 1956, 5).

Notestein's informal counsel became scientific “fact” in 1958, when Coale and Hoover completed their monograph. The book presented three projections for future per capita adult income in India under different rates of population growth, which showed that, the faster the rate of population growth, the slower income (and hence living standards) would rise. The key message was that a reduction in population growth would produce “important economic advantages” and that, the sooner a reduction in fertility occurred, the greater the benefits would be (Coale and Hoover Reference Coale and Hoover1958, 335).

Princeton and the New York-based Population Council ensured that the book was distributed among India's policymakers by sending copies directly to a number of government officials, including the prime minister, vice president, and members of the Planning Commission (Balfour Reference Balfour1958; Coale Reference Coale1958). The book was hugely influential (Connelly Reference Connelly2006, 638). Government officials began to cite the work as evidence of the negative impact of population growth on economic development. Referring to the book in 1959, India's (then) Minister of Health D. P. Karmarkar concluded that “clearly India cannot afford the luxury of having such a large population” (Agarwala Reference Agarwala1960, xiii–xx). In spite of his ambivalent public pronouncements on population, Nehru was said to quote the book to colleagues (Osborn Reference Osborn1959). Coale and Hoover's projections appeared in official government reports; for example, the Mudaliar Committee, which reported in 1961, cited their projections for income increase per adult under current and reduced levels of population growth as justification for the inclusion of the family planning program in India's five-year plans (Government of India 1961, 397). The Committee furthermore warned that “if the growth in population does not show any significant downward trend during the next five years, the introduction of appropriate legislative and administrative measures will have to be considered” (405–6). As I will show, those responsible for India's family planning program during the Emergency followed the same line of reasoning.

However, although Coale and Hoover provided scientific authority to efforts to control India's population growth, the situation was perhaps less critical than it seemed. In his autobiography, Coale stated that the conclusions of the project had “sometimes been misunderstood.” “In fact,” he wrote, “our conclusion indicated significant prospective economic progress even with continued high fertility, and . . . somewhat modest additional progress should fertility be substantially reduced” (Coale Reference Coale2000, 37–38). Nevertheless, the Coale-Hoover report remained the single most authoritative work on the negative impact of demographic growth on economic development, providing a theoretical framework that endured from the 1950s through the 1970s (Kelley Reference Kelley, Birdsall, Kelley and Sinding2001, 35).

This understanding of the relationship between population and development underpinned the family planning program in India before and during the Emergency. India's policymakers worked on the understanding that economic development could not succeed until population growth was controlled, and that family planning was therefore a prerequisite for national progress. The only moment of divergence from this line of argument came at the World Population Conference in Bucharest in 1974, when—reversing the Coale-Hoover hypothesis—Minister of Health Karan Singh famously declared that “development is the best contraceptive.” However, Singh's statement must be understood as part of a political struggle for state sovereignty and the international redistribution of wealth from the industrialized to the “developing” nations, for which the Bucharest conference served as a vehicle (Connelly Reference Connelly2008, 310–16; Finkle and Crane Reference Finkle and Crane1975). Singh's pronouncement had no impact on domestic policy in India, and he publicly reversed his stance during the Emergency, when the idea of population growth as an obstacle to development reigned supreme. Although it was absent from Gandhi's twenty-point program, the link that was understood to exist between population growth and underdevelopment meant that, when Gandhi's rhetoric turned to economic development in 1975, family planning was also brought to center stage. This connection is clearly evident in the directives issued by the central Ministry of Health during 1975–77, particularly the 1976 National Population Policy, to which I now turn.

Passing of the National Population Policy

Many of the measures incorporated in the 1976 NPP had in fact been outlined two months before the Emergency. In April 1975, the Central Family Planning Council passed a resolution recommending a reinvigorated family planning program, including an increased financial outlay, a “more scientific” system of targets, an enhanced scheme of incentives and penalties for “indifferent [family planning] workers,” and extra compensation for “acceptors” of sterilization. The Council justified these increased measures on the basis of the—by then familiar—claim that “the Family Planning Programme is an integral part of the strategy of achieving rapid socio-economic development” (Government of India 1977, 25–26). After the Emergency was declared, the intensification of the family planning program was quickly hitched to Gandhi's push for poverty eradication through economic development.

In a speech to Parliament in August 1975, Singh explained that family planning had been omitted from the twenty-point program “not because it was unimportant” but because it was “too important to be listed as one of the points.” Family planning, Singh explained, was “one of the important weapons in the battle against poverty.” “We must remember,” he said, “that the real problem that this nation faces is not people, it is poverty, and it is to help fight that poverty that family planning becomes extremely important” (Singh Reference Singh1975a, 122). In addition, Singh sought to elevate family planning beyond party-political boundaries, urging leaders from all of India's political parties to become involved in the program, which he said should be treated with the same consensus as the defense of the nation. Reproduction was thus conceptualized as a critical battleground in the war against poverty, in which sterilizations, pills, and IUDs could be used as weapons.

In his speech, Singh furthermore sought to reverse the stance he took at the 1974 World Population Conference by arguing that his statement had been “misinterpreted” by the Western press, who had misunderstood it to mean that India was “not interested in family planning, that it was prepared to wait until economic development took place.” “This is not true,” Singh claimed. Rather, Singh argued that family planning should be integrated into the “central development process.” He urged Parliament to consider family planning as “underlying and overriding” all of Gandhi's twenty points “so that in our efforts to build a New India and a better life for generations yet unborn, we do not neglect this very crucial and important aspect of our national policy.” Moreover, echoing the Mudaliar Committee Report of 1961, Singh warned that while the family planning program was voluntary, if the people of India did not act voluntarily “the House would have no option but to pass whatever legislation may be necessary” (Singh Reference Singh1975a, 122–25). Singh's rhetoric was swiftly followed by action.

Shortly after Singh's speech in Parliament, the Ministry of Health and Family Planning announced a “Family Welfare Planning Fortnight” for September 1975 (Government of India 1975b, 118). Though such events had been integral to the family planning program before the Emergency, Singh explicitly connected the event to the Emergency push for economic development. “As you know,” he wrote in a letter to the states' health ministers, lieutenant-governors, and chief commissioners,

Singh called upon the states to mobilize the full machinery of government for the fortnight, at the state, district, and village level. Singh's instructions were reinforced by a letter from Serla Grewal, joint secretary and commissioner (family planning), who emphasized the “special significance” of the fortnight “as part of the country's total effort to accelerate the process of growth.” She asked chief ministers to mobilize the national network of primary health centers, and to “carry the programme to its highest peak and thereafter to see that the tempo that is created does not slacken” (Grewal Reference Grewal1975a).

The Ministry of Health also sought to co-opt the Indian public by calling for “motivational personnel” to “create amongst the masses the urge to accept family planning as a way of life; as an investment in their own health and welfare and in the growth and future of their children.” Alongside the extensive network of governmental primary health centers, Grewal called for the involvement of trade unions, cooperative societies, women's organizations, and voluntary bodies. She furthermore claimed that meetings with panchayats (local self-government bodies) and local leaders in New Delhi had indicated that “they are as much enthusiastic about the programme as the Government is.” With their help, wrote Grewal, the family planning program could be converted “into a mass self-generating movement” (Grewal Reference Grewal1975a).

Following the September fortnight came another fortnight in December, “to keep up and accentuate the climate for acceptance of the small family norm” with particular emphasis on sterilization targets (Grewal Reference Grewal1975b). Next, the Ministry of Health and Family Planning announced a whole family planning month for February 1976 to provide another opportunity for states that were lagging behind to fulfill their targets, and to enable those states that had already met their targets to push the program further still (Grewal Reference Grewal1976a).

Alongside these events, the Ministry of Health and Family Planning announced national awards for family planning workers to generate a sense of “healthy competition.” Like the family planning fortnights, the granting of awards was an established practice; the first family planning award was awarded to the state of Maharashtra in 1960 for “outstanding progress,” particularly in sterilization operations (Government of India 1964, 16). The February 1976 awards included prizes for government bodies, such as “best performance” awards for states, union territories, railway zones, and defense commands, alongside “special awards” for individuals and nongovernmental organizations. Categories included “best family planning work” done by a medical or paramedical field worker, “best overall performance of a centre run by a voluntary organisation,” and “best family planning centre of a private or public sector industrial undertaking plantation mining areas.” Prizes ranged from trophies to cash prizes of up to 5,000 rupees. Simultaneously, the Ministry of Health also asked chief ministers to take disciplinary action against government staff who were not pulling their weight (Prakash Reference Prakash1975). Through such carrot-and-stick tactics, the Government of India sought to enlist the middle classes into its increasingly coercive population control project.

As well as issuing specific orders, the Ministry of Health issued a new publication entitled “Family Planning: The Vital Need Today.” Invoking the image of reproduction as a battleground in the war on poverty, the pamphlet stated that “poverty breeds over-population and over-population aggravates poverty. The two situations are inter-linked, and the family planning programme seeks to attack both.” Nationalism and high-modernism were powerfully combined in this publication, which requested that India's extensive network of primary health centers be mobilized as part of the “multi-pronged attack on the citadels of poverty.” “Population,” it affirmed, “must be a national commitment, directed towards helping to achieve Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's pledge to remove poverty from the face of India.” Furthermore, as the garibi hatao project increasingly targeted not the roots of poverty, but the bodies of the poor themselves, the pamphlet stated that since poverty was the crux of the problem, the main thrust of the program would be among the “lower strata of society, from villages and slums in cities” where “progress” had been slow (Government of India 1976c).

Meanwhile, while these messages were transmitted to the states, a discussion about population control was also occurring at the highest echelons of government. Singh wrote to Gandhi in October 1975 on the subject of the “Crash Programme to intensify family planning.” In this letter, Singh emphasized that “the problem is now so serious that there seems to be no alternative but to think in terms of introduction of some element of compulsion in the larger national interest.” He continued, somewhat contradictorily, to explain that “while I am not at this stage advocating compulsion, it is essential that our policy should exhibit the determination of the Govt. to bring home the realisation of the importance of the containment of population to individual families.” Singh suggested that this could be achieved through “a judicious and carefully selected mixture of incentives and disincentives.” Once again, Singh connected the “crash” program to Gandhi's economic development program. “The present Emergency,” he said, “and the declaration of the 20-point economic programme . . . have provided an appropriate atmosphere to tackle the problem” (Shah Commission of Inquiry 1978a, 2–3). Gandhi herself, in a speech to a joint conference of the Association of Physicians of India on January 22, 1976, stated that “we must now act decisively and bring down the birth rate speedily. . . . We should not hesitate to take steps which might be described as drastic. Some personal rights have to be kept in abeyance, for the human right of the nation, the right to live, the right to progress” (3). This was authoritarian high-modernism personified: both Gandhi and Singh were committed to the improvement of Indian society via technocratic means, and were willing to mobilize the full machinery of the state in the name of “progress.”

In this climate of urgency, Singh announced the NPP in April 1976. He justified the policy in typical fashion, stating that

The demographic lessons of the 1950s resonated in Singh's statement, which explained that India could not wait for economic development to cause a reduction in fertility, since population growth was impeding economic development. Singh again reiterated the connection between population control and the Emergency-era development agenda, stating that the president and prime minister had both recently “laid stress upon the crucial role that population control has to play in the movement towards economic independence and social transformation, especially in the light of the 20-Point Economic Programme” (Singh Reference Singh1976, 3).

Reflecting the perceived urgency of the problem, the NPP incorporated “a series of fundamental measures” to reduce population growth, including new targets and increased incentives for “acceptors” of family planning, especially sterilization (to 150 rupees for those with two living children or fewer, 100 rupees for three, and 70 rupees for four or more); disenfranchisement of those who failed to control their fertility by freezing states' representation in Parliament on the basis of the 1971 census figures; allocation of central assistance to states according to family planning performance; increased incentives for medical professionals; and, most controversially, provisions for state governments to pass compulsory sterilization legislation. Though the NPP noted that “the administrative and medical infrastructure in many parts of the country is still not adequate to cope with the vast implications of nation-wide compulsory sterilization,” it also stated that “we are of the view that where a State legislature, in the exercise of its own powers, decides that the time is ripe and it is necessary to pass legislation for compulsory sterilization, it may do so” (Singh Reference Singh1976). The NPP therefore explicitly authorized compulsory sterilization and a host of other coercive measures, while simultaneously seeking to co-opt the middle classes by “drawing in” voluntary organizations and providing incentives for the medical profession, teachers, and cooperative societies (3).

Following Singh's announcement of the NPP, the Ministry of Health issued a series of directives to the state governments emphasizing the importance of maintaining the tempo of the program in order to meet the high family planning targets. This spurred a flurry of activity within the states. The special secretary to the Ministry of Health appealed to chief ministers to make “stupendous efforts” and to use the “whole administrative machinery” to meet their allotted targets (Chandra Sekhar Reference Chandra Sekhar1976). The Ministry of Health announced another national family planning fortnight for September 1976, to “push up the programme to its highest peak” (Grewal Reference Grewal1976b). In November 1976, central government servants were told to ensure that they had no more than three children after September 1977 or face the loss of maternity leave, accommodation and allowances that would only be restored upon production of a sterilization certificate. Gandhi called upon “all agencies of Government” to be “fully involved” in the program, and asked chief ministers to keep her “personally informed of its progress” (Gandhi Reference Gandhi1976). By January 1977, most states had “over-reached” their allotted targets, some by as much as 200 percent (Grewal Reference Grewal1977a).

However, in January 1977, Gandhi called an election and revoked most Emergency powers, and government resolve crumbled. Recognizing that the family planning program had become wildly unpopular, Gandhi's government attempted to distance itself from the measures it had sanctioned. The Ministry of Health ordered all chief ministers to withdraw disincentives (Grewal Reference Grewal1977b). Gandhi personally instructed that the Maharashtra sterilization bill be returned to the state government to be “revised.” The Prime Minister's Secretariat wrote to all state governments instructing that “there can be and will be no compulsion in the Family Planning movement,” in spite of the fact that this was precisely what the central government had encouraged during the Emergency (Ramachandran Reference Ramachandran1977).

Moreover, these communications began to develop the idea of “excess” that would dominate the post-Emergency narrative. The Prime Minister's Secretariat claimed that “while working out the schemes of incentives and disincentives, a few administrations/agencies have in their over-enthusiasm” pushed the program “almost to the point of compulsion” (Ramachandran Reference Ramachandran1977). Echoing the Prime Minister's Secretariat, the secretary to the Ministry of Health wrote:

Grewal instructed chief secretaries to withdraw any orders linking the grant or renewal of firearm and driving licenses or permits with family planning that had been passed during the Emergency.

After the defeat of the Congress Party in the March 1977 elections, the former health secretary prepared a secret note, approved by Karan Singh, that further developed the narrative of “excess.” The note claimed that during the election campaigns, there had been “a lot of talk of coercion in promoting family planning,” but that “the policy of the Government of India has always been to promote family planning as a voluntary measure.” Forgetting the Ministry of Health's own instructions during 1975–77, the note furthermore claimed that “it was . . . nowhere suggested that there should be any coercion or force used in the promotion of family planning programme because it was felt that tactics of this kind would be counter-productive” (Prakash Reference Prakash1977, 1). Though the note accepted that “a few incidents of law and order in connection with family planning due to alleged excesses on the part of officials were reported from time to time,” it ultimately concluded that, since health and family planning were the purview of the states and not the central government, the state governments were solely responsible for these “excesses.” It explained that state governments were expected “to have acted responsibly and not to have indulged in coercion, particularly when it was not required and was against the declared policy of the Government of India. They had themselves fixed targets higher than indicated by the Government of India. It was not necessary for them to do so” (2–4). However, as I have shown, throughout the Emergency the Ministry of Health consistently encouraged competition between states, asked officials to surpass their targets, and threatened “underperforming” family planning workers with disciplinary action. Moreover, the central government had explicitly endorsed coercion and compulsion in the NPP of 1976.