50 years to India’s darkest period: How Sanjay Gandhi became the villain of Emergency

Fifty years ago, India witnessed one of the darkest chapters in its democracy. On June 25, 1975, the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared Emergency.

“The President has declared an Emergency. There is nothing to panic about,” she announced late at night on All India Radio. She cited “internal disturbances” and threats to India’s security as the reason for the move.

As India entered a period where civil liberties were suspended and dissent suppressed, Indira Gandhi’s second son, Sanjay Gandhi, enjoyed unfettered power. His controversial role in the Emergency cannot be erased.

We turn the pages of history to recall how Sanjay Gandhi spearheaded one of the Emergency’s worst excesses – the forced mass sterilisation programme.

Sanjay Gandhi ‘pushes’ for Emergency

Sanjay Gandhi lived a short life. He died at the age of 33 in a plane crash in 1980. Years before, he was the de facto ruler of India as the country went through the Emergency.

Sanjay Gandhi is said to have encouraged his mother to take decisive action as the opposition prepared a rally at Ramlila Maidan on June 25, 1975. A day before, the Supreme Court had given partial relief to Indira Gandhi, allowing her to remain prime minister pending her appeal. However, her rights as an MP were restricted.

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The top court’s “conditional stay” was on the Allahabad High Court ruling that had declared Indira Gandhi’s Lok Sabha election void, leading to her immediate disqualification as an MP and dismissal as Prime Minister.

Indira was under immense political pressure to resign. However, her close associates, including the then West Bengal Chief Minister SS Ray, advised her against it.

While there is uncertainty, some reports say Sanjay Gandhi and Ray pushed Indira Gandhi to declare the Emergency to quell the opposition, which had called for “total revolution” at the rally in Delhi on June 25.

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Sanjay Gandhi’s role in Emergency

Sanjay Gandhi did not occupy any post in the government when his mother declared the Emergency in June 1975. However, he wielded immense power during the period.

At the time, India was unable to curb the rapid population growth , along with struggling to feed its people.

Ace demographer RA Gopalswami estimated India’s population would increase by nearly 500,000 every year. He predicted the country would not be able to meet the food demand of its population despite imports. Gopalswami’s solution for this was: mass sterilisation.

The Gandhi government launched the National Family Planning Programme in 1952, starting awareness campaigns and offering monetary incentives for getting sterilised. The idea did not have many takers, though.

The mass sterilisation took off during the Emergency when civil liberties were suspended. Men, from young to old and married to unmarried, were many times picked from the streets and forcibly sterilised.

Threats and coercion were deployed to sterilise men. States stopped salaries, threatened with dismissal from work and blocked irrigation water to villages.

Men were lured with promises of land, money, or other benefits to get a vasectomy, or nasbandi.

At the centre of it all was Sanjay Gandhi, who had made the mass sterilisation programme his personal agenda.

Prajakta R Gupte, who wrote The Emergency and the Politics of Mass Sterilization in Demographics, Social Policy, and Asia, 2017, said that Sanjay “allocated quotas to the chief ministers of every state that they were supposed to meet by any means possible… Nothing mattered when it came to meeting the targets.”

Population control was a part of the Gandhi scion’s 5-point programme, which also included afforestation, abolition of dowry, eradication of illiteracy, and slum clearance.

Sanjay Gandhi wanted results in a year and to meet his demand, the entire government and Congress party apparatus were pressed into action.

Sterilisation camps were set up, first in Delhi and then expanded to north Indian cities, and eventually to the south.

Forced vasectomy reflected the excesses of the Emergency. “In order to avoid sterilisation, villagers often hid in their fields for several days and nights,” Gupte wrote.

Government officials, who were pressured to meet targets, used state forces.

“…The real victims of forcible sterilisation and arbitrary demolition were Dalits and Muslims at the bottom of the social heap, most vulnerable to the depredations of the State,” authors Ajoy Bose and John Dayal wrote in their book, For Reasons of State: Delhi Under Emergency.

Besides hospitals, the aggressive campaign was carried out in makeshift sterilisation camps established across the country, especially in rural areas with limited healthcare. The sterilisation campaign led to infections and health crises.

As many as 11 million(1.1 crore)  Indians, mostly men, are estimated to have been forcibly sterilised between June 1975 and March 1977, according to the Justice Shah Commission of Enquiry of 1978.

About 2,000 people died in botched vasectomies, as per BBC. 

John Dayal wrote in a Scroll piece that the phrase “extra-constitutional centre of authority” was coined for Sanjay Gandhi.

The sterilisation programme was interrupted in January 1977 after Indira Gandhi announced general elections, according to Belgian academics Charlotte Pelras and Andréa Renk’s
paper, Sterilisations and immunisation in India: The Emergency experience.

The Emergency and forced sterilisations created anger among the public and Indira saw that ire when she lost the Lok Sabha polls in the summer of 1977.

For Sanjay, he showed how an official position in government was irrelevant to wield unchecked power.

With inputs from agencies