cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/83651

In 1976, men across India were drastically changing their behavior. Some were abandoning the beds inside their homes to sleep in fields; others were skipping major festivals and public gatherings. Those who in the past had taken the train freely, without a ticket, were finding alternate routes. They were all trying to avoid government officials. On trains, inspectors were suddenly cracking down on ticketless passengers with heavy fines, but they would give fare dodgers a break on one condition: that they agreed to be sterilized.

Government workers, from train inspectors up to the top brass, were working to sterilize as many men as possible. Some even had monthly quotas for how many men they had to convince to get vasectomies. In turn, poor men in rural villages were doing everything they could to avoid government officials, because any such encounter might end with the villager on a dingy operating table where his genitals would be cut — whether or not he wanted the operation, whether or not he already had children.

Dr. Arvind Bhopalkar recalls losing count of the number of procedures he performed during this period. In 2015, the surgeon told the Indian Express, “We were told to do the operation on as many men as possible . . . a revenue department official, in his zeal for rounding up men, even brought a doctor’s father to us.” Bhopalkar would let unmarried men, and those who were married but childless, slip out without undergoing the procedure. “Doctors have hearts too,” he told the paper.

The mass sterilization drive of 1976 was one of the most infamous incidents of the 21-month period known as the “Emergency,” which Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had declared the year prior, suspending the Indian constitution. Gandhi justified her decision to dissolve human rights protections by citing internal security disturbances and a need to uplift the underprivileged. She implemented welfare-style programs, gave land to those without property, and artificially lowered the price of some basic goods to make them more affordable. But these policies, ostensibly meant to help poor people, often included a coercive element. In some parts of the country, poor men and women were offered plots of land in exchange for getting sterilized, or for “motivating” others to do so.

In 1976 alone, the Indian government sterilized 6.2 million men. Permanent methods of birth control remain very popular in India, but today women bear almost the entire sterilization burden — 93% of it, according to the most recent government statistics. The Indian government has switched its gender focus, but many of the methods used in recent years to recruit women for tubal ligations were pioneered during these early male sterilization drives.

India’s sterilization campaigns for both men and women have been part of international campaign intended to control the nation’s population: long after Indian independence, these measures were — and continue to be — rooted in imperialist ideas, and in long-held Western attitudes about Indian manhood and womanhood. Nearly half a century after the aggressive campaigns of the 1970s, women are still dying in sterilization camps, undergoing procedures that they understand to be the only option, without fully knowing the risks or the alternatives.

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