Declaration of The Emergency
On this day, 45 years back, on 25 June 1975, the then President of India Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed declared a State of Emergency at midnight after a meeting with Indira Gandhi who was the prime minister of India back then. The ordinance issued by the president granted all the powers to the prime minister without any restriction. The decision of National Emergency was taken the next day after Indira Gandhi was convicted and unseated from her MP post by the Supreme Court against the charges of exploiting the government machinery and staff for her election campaign. Indira Gandhi sent all her political rivals to prison and reduced the power of the judiciary after imposing emergency all over India. Though the emergency was welcomed by the public at the beginning, this belief changed after they witnessed denial of fundamental rights and human rights violence. One of the cruelest human rights violations that took place during the emergency was forced sterilization.
Population threat to developed nation
The pressure for mass sterilization in India began far earlier before the emergency was imposed. It all started when “The Population Bomb,” a 1968 book by Paul Ehrlich convinced the Industrialised and developed countries that India and other developing countries would pose a threat to their Food security. The author mentioned that population explosion in India can lead to famine in India while it can have indirect effects on other developed countries too. The rising population of India was seen as a threat by the developed countries. Hence, through the financial help of the World Bank and a few American based Philanthropic foundations the Indian Government agreed to control its population vigorously.
Implementation of mass sterilisation by the Indian government
In 1970, the government followed ‘the camp approach’ which stressed on district authority for intensifying the sterilisation campaign. This campaign saw an all time high in sterilisation number exceeding 3-million in the year 1972-73. However, ‘the camp approach’ was abandoned by the government in the following year. But this number skyrocketed during the period of emergency. Sanjay Gandhi, son of Indira Gandhi, spearheaded the sterilisation campaign. The campaign which previously used incentives to convince the people for sterilization was forcing people to undergo sterilisation process against their will. The most affected people by this scheme were the poor peasants because of their economic vulnerability. While the patients were charged extra if they didn’t possess the sterilisation certificate, the government servants were threatened with transfer punishment if they didn’t procure any sterilization cases. Steps like this pressurised both the authorities and the poor to take part in aggressive sterilization goals.
Brutal human rights violation
But the scene became brutal when the government authorities forcefully captured people returning from late night shows, work etc, They even raided the public transport buses to catch people to conduct vasectomy on them. Vasectomy is a sterilization process for the men. The main targets were men because they were more likely to come out of their houses. It is reported that at some places, the police took all the men from a village to conduct vasectomy on them. It is estimated that around 7 million such victims were affected during the emergency throughout the country.
End of brutality
The tragic situation came to end when the national emergency was withdrawn on 21 march 1977. This was one of the significant reasons for the fall of Congress in the following election. Since then the population of India has doubled while India has never witnessed any famine till date.
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