Sanjay's laboratory

Bookless and with plenty of time to kill, I picked up Vinod Mehta's The Sanjay Story at the airport a few weeks ago. Mehta wrote it in 1978. The paperback I bought for Rs 299 was published by HarperCollins this year.

As I dug into it, the riveting story of Indira and Feroze Gandhi's second son unfolded in great detail. Sanjay was unremarkable as a child, but became reckless when he entered his youth - so much so that when he died while flying a plane in 1980, aged just 34, he had on his feet plain Kolhapuri chappals!

By the time the Emergency was declared in 1975, he had developed a strong dictatorial streak. Sanjay was an unimpressive speaker, but was feared by all. Like any other man in a hurry, he had no time for dissenters. All his initiatives - small car, removal of slums and family planning - ended up as misadventures. What perhaps scared ordinary folk was the third: family planning through sterilisation.

Unlike today, when India's large population is counted as one of its strengths, it was a serious concern in the decades after Independence. The first programme was too simplistic: women were given red and green necklaces to wear and they had to slip one bead every day. Green indicated intercourse was safe and red meant it wasn't. Since the beads were plastic, there was no intrinsic value in the necklace and women didn't wear it. Many gave it to their kids to play with. Result? Out of every 100 women who were given the necklace, 50 got pregnant.

The next programme had an elephant going around villages to distribute condoms. Dom Moraes, in A Matter of People, recounted how these elephants ended up giving the condoms to children in a village near Delhi who blew them into balloons. "A slogan in family planning is that your children should be happy. In that sense I suppose the campaign succeeded - these children most certainly were."

Subsequently, couples were offered transistors as an incentive if they volunteered to get sterilised. Transistors were a prized possession at that time. Many people lined up for sterilisation and soon the government ran out of transistors. A fresh order was placed on Japanese companies. But the Reserve Bank of India would have none of it, thanks to the outgo of foreign exchange!

By 1975, multilateral aid agencies had started to put pressure on India to control its population. Indira Gandhi bought into it. Since it was a mission, it was only natural for Sanjay to lead it. He launched into it in 1976. His first target was the walled city of Delhi where Muslims lived in large numbers. Reduced to a minority, they sought security in numbers. Coercive family planning made them nervous.

What unfolded over the next few months was a sordid story of deception and official ham-handedness. Teenagers, old and invalid men, TB patients - all were put under the knife.

The chief ministers of various states, aware that Sanjay could have them removed in no time, vied with each other to announce bigger and bigger targets. In Delhi, the authorities, when they ran out of volunteers, rounded up workers from the pavements where they slept and sterilised them. Such was the fear that casual workers, all migrants from different parts of the country, soon became hard to find in the city.

At various places, forgers shifted from mark sheets and college degrees to sterilisation certificates. Teachers were given quotas to fill and their salaries were withheld if they failed to meet them. Many would pay money out of their own pockets to unsuspecting bakras in order to get their salaries released.

The worst was when Maharashtra came up with the Family Size Limitation Bill, which required men up to 55 and women up to 45 to be sterilised within 180 days of the birth of their third living child. The Bill was passed by the state legislature and was sent to the president for his assent. Then elections were announced and the Bill was forgotten.

And that ended another of Sanjay's grand projects.

bhupesh.bhandari@bsmail.in