The crack of a hammer, a marriage procession, or the whirring of construction equipment is enough to agitate 84-year-old Abdul Razzak. His family is quick to reassure him – it has been 50 years since the Emergency was imposed. No one is coming to force a vasectomy. There was a sterilisation camp inside Turkman Gate itself. The poor, particularly those who did not have food, were being lured. (HT File)

In the months that followed the imposition of the Emergency in June 1975, the bylanes of Turkman Gate shook with fear. Backed by the government, local authorities earmarked the area for intensified action under Sanjay Gandhi’s population control programme, with sterilisation camps springing up at Turkman gate in dispensaries, school buildings, even municipal halls – hotspots where countless people were either forcefully subjected to a vasectomy, or were lured in with promises of food and even a roof over their head.

“These were mostly poor people who were lured in at first. Rickshaw-pullers. I remember people telling us how touts became active almost instantly and would bring these really poor people by promising them a few litres of ghee. Some even promised them houses. For the poor, there was nothing to lose,” said Razzak, who sells furniture near Chandni Chowk. As more and more camps began to be set up across the neighbourhood and in other parts of Old Delhi, including around Jama Masjid, Dujana House and Chitli Qabar, the fear of being picked up grew.

Razzak said he was repeatedly approached by government workers and also once targeted near the local mosque, but managed to outrun the touts who specialised in getting young, mostly poor, men into the clinics. “There was always fear. What if we are caught and made to undergo vasectomy? We refused to step out,” Razzak said, stating touts also had targets – to bring a fixed number of people so they could be paid.

People such as Razzak were at the centre of what became one of the showpieces of the government’s 20-point programme during the Emergency, plugging into the national obsession with population control in the 1970s and 80s. Sanjay Gandhi toured the country and asked chief ministers to meet mass sterilisation targets, encouraging officials to exceed them. This misplaced zeal percolated through the government system – lower-rank officers were asked to undergo operations or their arrears were not cleared, truck drivers could not get their licences renewed without an operation, and slum dwellers and residents needed a sterilisation certificate to get resettlement plots. Eventually, according to Marika Vicziany’s 1982 book Coercion In A Soft State: The Family Planning Program of India, around 11 million men and women were sterilised and one million women were fitted with intrauterine devices (IUDs) in India between 1975 and 1977. Later work revealed that fertility rates were already falling in India and the coercion actually hurt population control programmes because ordinary people started distrusting government schemes.

That population was behind most of young India’s ills was an idea that took root in the early years of Independence. By the 1970s, it had morphed into a national, and official, obsession. Sanjay Gandhi once said in an interview that “family planning” would solve half of the country’s problems.

Decades have since passed, but the memories of that time continue to scar locals. “On one hand, there was the fear that your home would get demolished and so staying indoors was scary. If you stepped out, there was a fear you would be taken for nasbandi,” Raghunath Singh, a 75-year-old local, said.

There was a sterilisation camp inside Turkman Gate itself. The poor, particularly those who did not have food, were being lured. “We heard people were getting sterilised for a litre of ghee,” he said.

Dharam Das, 70, who lives a few hundred metres away from Raghunath, said touts would go from home to home. “I recall a sterilisation camp right outside Delite cinema too.”

City chronicler Sohail Hashmi said people were given targets to get a fixed number of people sterilised; the police, even schoolteachers had targets to meet. “My mother was a headmistress at a school and she was given such a target, where she had to get two people sterilised. She also told me there used to be touts, particularly outside AIIMS and they would take money and in exchange provide you with sterilisation certificates which could then be deposited with the government,” said Hashmi.

In old Delhi’s Dujana House area, a small basement of DDA flats was used as a sterilisation camp by two doctors who set up a tent inside.

Mohammad Afaq, 48, a local, said his uncle Rajjo was an aide to the political leaders in the area and made people undergo sterilisation. “He owned a general store in Chitli Qabar. My father,Qayyum, would tell us how Rajjo chacha would go and ask men to undergo sterilisation. He mainly targeted auto-rickshaw drivers, garbage collectors, workers and labourers in the area. I remember soon after the sterilisation drive, riots broke out because people were being forced for nasbandi and also to leave their homes,” he said.

Rayeezuddin, 52, a businessman, told HT that the camp in the basement of DDA flats in Dujana House was later converted into a dispensary, and then into a school. It is now vacant and locked.

In Ajay Bose and John Dayal’s For Reasons of State – Delhi Under Emergency, the authors say government officials were given quotas of 1,200-1,300 vasectomies and tubectomies in a month and how Sanjay Gandhi’s associate Rukhsana Sultana converted her sewing classes for old women into a sterilisation camp. She chose Dujana House, set up a shamiana and prepped a basement into a sterilisation camp which was to be inaugurated by the lieutenant governor. However, the local women refused to come. Instead, the authorities forced men, beggars, labourers and outsiders, into trucks and got them to Dujana House for vasectomies.

Not that the women escaped. Razia Qureshi, 76, said it was difficult for both men and women in her Chawri Bazar area.

Qureshi said she also knew women, although far less in number, who were also being forced for sterilisation.

“These were women who had already had kids. There was pressure from touts and instead of the men in the family being sterilised, some women were opting in instead. They would go to hospitals nearby and get the procedure done. There were teachers, policemen and party workers who would also force few women to undergo sterilization”

The excesses weren’t limited to Delhi.

In Bhiwani, 86-year-old retired teacher Dharam Singh said officials and police took turns in villages to convince locals for sterilisation. He said that announcements were made from a loudspeaker, asking every man aged above 18 to assemble at either a government school or a ‘chaupal (community hall)’.

“Nasbandi was not voluntary but it was mandatory for all the men aged above 18 and in some villages, boys aged 16-17 were also sterilised. The officers had to fulfil their target. The policemen along with administration officials used to take a large group of people in buses to a nearby police station from there they were rushed to a government hospital where they were being sterilised,” he added. In all, 222, 0000 people were sterilised in Haryana in 1976-77.

Jagroop Singh, 84, a farmer from Rohtak district, said that police would even sneak into houses to catch men and send them to hospital for sterilisation. “Men avoided going to market, government offices and even from going to their relatives homes with a fear of police arrest, which eventually sent them to hospitals for nasbandi. Whenever men got a tip-off about police movement, they ran away towards fields.”

“Officials would stop irrigation water in the canals from flowing to villages with fewer sterilisations.”

Back in old Delhi, Razzak said decadal shifts had blunted public memory of the coercive drives, and other survivors have left the area. But his generation still remembers the protests, violence, protests, and radio announcements “How can one forget what happened to our friends and neighbours?”