Uttawar, India — When everybody ran, towards the jungles and nearby villages, or dived into a well to hide from government officials, Mohammad Deenu stayed put.
His village, Uttawar, in the Mewat region of northern India’s Haryana state, about 90km (56 miles) from the capital, New Delhi, was surrounded by the police on that cold night in November 1976. Their ask: men of fertile age must assemble in the village ground.
India was 17 months into its closest brush with dictatorship – a state of national emergency imposed by then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, during which civil liberties were suspended. Thousands of political opponents were jailed without a trial, an otherwise rambunctious press was censored, and, backed by financial incentives from the World Bank and the United States, India embarked on a massive forced sterilisation programme.
Deenu and his 14 friends were among its targets. They were pushed into the forces’ vehicles and taken to ill-managed sterilisation camps. To Deenu, it was a “sacrifice” that saved the village and its future generations.
“When everyone was running to save themselves, some elders [of the village] realised that if no one is found, it would create even bigger, long-lasting troubles,” Deenu recalled, sitting on a torn wooden cot. “So, some men from the village were collected and given away.”
“We saved this village by our sacrifice. See around, the village is full of God’s children running around today,” he said, now in his late 90s.
As the world’s largest democracy marks 50 years since the imposition of the emergency on June 25, Deenu is the only man who had been targeted in Uttawar as part of the forced sterilisation project who is still alive.
More than 8 million men were forced to undergo a vasectomy during that period, which lasted until March 1977, when the state of emergency was lifted. This included 6 million men in just 1976. Nearly 2,000 people died in botched surgeries.
Five decades on, those scars live on in Uttawar.
‘A graveyard, just silence’
In 1952, just five years after securing its freedom from the British, India became the world’s first country to adopt a national family planning programme. At the time, the idea was to encourage families to have no more than two children.
By the 1960s, at a time when birth rates were close to six children per woman, the government of Indira Gandhi began adopting more aggressive measures. India’s booming population was seen as a burden on its economy, which grew at an average of 4 percent from the 1950s until the 1990s.
The West seemed to share that view: The World Bank loaned India $66m for sterilisation initiatives, and the US made food aid to a starving India contingent on its success at population control.
But it was during the emergency, with all the democratic checks and balances removed, that the Indira Gandhi government went into overdrive, using a mix of coercion and punishment to pressure government officials into implementing forced sterilisation, and communities into accepting it.
Government officials were given quotas of how many people they had to sterilise. Those who failed their targets had their salaries withheld or faced the threat of dismissal from their jobs. Meanwhile, irrigation water was cut off from villages that refused to cooperate.
Security forces were also unleashed on those who resisted – including in the village of Uttawar, which had a predominantly Muslim population, like many of the communities targeted. The Muslim birthrate in India at the time was significantly higher than that of other communities, making members of the religion a particular focus of the mass sterilisation initiative.
In the lane next to Deenu’s house, Mohammad Noor, then a 13-year-old, was sleeping in his father’s arms in a cot outside their house when policemen, some of them riding horses, raided their home. His father ran towards a nearby jungle, and Noor rushed inside.
“They broke the doors and everything that came in their way; they shattered everything they could see,” Noor recalled. “To make our lives worse, they mixed sand in flour. There was not even a single home in the village that could cook food for the next four days.”
Noor was picked up in the raid, taken to a local police station and beaten before he was let go. He said that because he was under 15, he was deemed too young for a vasectomy.
That night of scare, as the village calls it now, also gave birth to a local folklore: the words of Abdul Rehman, then the village head. “Outside our village, no one would remember this name, but we do,” said Tajamul Mohammad, Noor’s childhood friend. Both are now 63 years old.
Before raiding Uttawar, several officials had come to the village, asking Rehman to give away some men. “But he remained steadfast and denied them, saying, ‘I cannot put any family in this place’,” said Tajamul, with Noor nodding passionately. Rehman also did not agree to give away men from neighbouring areas either, who were sheltering in Uttawar.
According to a local Uttawar legend, Rehman told the officials: “I will not give away a dog from my area, and you are demanding humans from me. Never!”
But Rehman’s resolve could not save the village, which was left in a state of mourning after the raids, said Noor, sucking tobacco from a hookah.
“People who ran away, or those who were taken away by the police, did not return for weeks,” he said. “Uttawar was like a graveyard, just silence.”
In the years that followed, the impact became more visible and dreadful. Neighbouring villages would not allow marriages with men of Uttawar, even those who were not sterilised, while some broke their existing engagements.
“Some of the people [men in Uttawar] were never able to recover from that mental shock, and spent years of their lives anxious or disturbed,” said Kasim, a local social worker who goes by his first name. “The tension and the social taboo killed them and cut their lives short.”
Echoes in today’s India
Today, India no longer has a coercive population control programme, and the country’s fertility rate is now just more than two children per woman.
But the atmosphere of fear and intimidation that marked the emergency has returned in a new avatar, under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, believe some experts.
For 75-year-old Shiv Visvanathan, a renowned Indian social scientist, the emergency helped perpetuate authoritarianism.
In the face of a rising student movement and a resurgent political opposition, the Allahabad High Court on June 12, 1975, found Indira Gandhi guilty of misusing state machinery to win the 1971 elections. The verdict disqualified her from holding elected office for six years. Thirteen days later, Gandhi declared a state of emergency.
“It was the banalisation of authoritarianism that created the emergency, with no moment of regret,” Visvanathan told Al Jazeera. “In fact, the emergency has created the emergencies that have followed in today’s India. It was the foundation of post-modern India.”
Indira Gandhi’s loyalists compared her with Hindu goddess Durga, and, in a play with phonetics, to India, the country itself, much like Modi’s supporters have compared the current prime minister with the the Hindu god Vishnu.
As the culture of the personality cult grew under Indira Gandhi, “the country lost the sense of understanding”, said Visvanathan. “With the emergency, authoritarianism became an instrument of governance.”
Visvanathan believes that even though the state of emergency was lifted in 1977, India has since slid towards complete authoritarianism. “All the way from Indira Gandhi up to Narendra Modi, each one of them contributed and created an authoritarian society while pretending to be a democracy.”
Since Modi came to power in 2014, India’s rankings have fallen swiftly on democratic indices and press freedom charts, due to the jailing of political dissidents and journalists as well as the imposition of curbs on speech.
Geeta Seshu, the cofounder of Free Speech Collective, a group that advocates for freedom of expression in India, said a similarity between the emergency years and today’s India lies in “the manner that mainstream media has caved in”.
“Then and now, the impact is felt in the denial of information to people,” she said. “Then, civil liberties were suspended by law, but today, the law has been weaponised. The fear and self-censorship prevalent then is being experienced today, despite no formal declaration of emergency.”
For Asim Ali, a political analyst, the defining legacy of the emergency “is how easily institutional checks melted away in the face of a determined and powerful executive leadership”.
But another of the emergency’s legacies is the successful backlash that followed, he said. Indira Gandhi and her Congress party were voted out of power in a landslide in 1977, as the opposition highlighted the government’s excesses – including the mass sterilisation drives – in its campaign pitch.
“[Like the 1970s], whether Indian democracy is able to move beyond this phase and regenerate again [after Modi] remains to be seen,” Ali said.
‘Seven generations!’
Back in November 1976, Deenu said he only thought of his pregnant wife, Saleema, as he sat inside the police van while he was being taken away. Saleema was at home at the time.
“A lot of men, unmarried or childless, pleaded with the policemen to let them go,” Deenu recalled. None of Deenu’s 14 friends was let go. “Nasbandi ek aisa shrap hai jisne Uttawar ko tabse har raat pareshan kiya hai,” he said. (Sterilisation is a curse that has haunted Uttawar every night since.)
After eight days under police custody, Deenu was taken to a sterilisation camp in Palwal, the nearest town to Uttawar, where he was operated upon.
A month later, after he returned from the vasectomy, Saleema gave birth to their only child, a son.
Today, Deenu has three grandsons and several great-grandchildren.
“We are the ones who saved this village,” he said, grinning. “Otherwise, Indira would have lit this village on fire.”
In 2024, Saleema passed away after a prolonged illness. Deenu, meanwhile, revels in his longevity. He once used to play with his grandfather, and now plays with his great-grandchildren.
“Seven generations!” he said, sipping from his plastic cup of a bubbly cold drink. “How many people have you seen that enjoy this privilege?”
