Scalpels and Signals

World Vasectomy Day is just around the corner. For some, it’s a neat little dot on the global health calendar. For us in India it’s a living reminder that medical tools can sometimes cut more than tubes—they can slice clean through civil liberties, dignity, and the social contract.

And 2025 isn’t just any year. It marks the 50th anniversary of the Emergency — a 21-month national time-out declared by then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi that put democracy in a chokehold, censored the press, jailed opponents, and unleashed a sterilisation drive that was less “family planning” and more “state planning your family out of existence.”

If you lived through it, you remember. If you didn’t, think of it this way: the state took it upon itself to manage India’s birth rate with the same finesse and empathy as someone removing bedbugs with a bulldozer.

The Patriotic Snip

Now, I’m no medical practitioner — nor do I pretend to be the Dr. Dre of medical rhymes. But for the benefit of even the average Indian backbencher (the sort who dishonoured his family by first skipping both — engineering and medical career options and later flunked the UPSC prelims), let me describe vasectomy in the most delicate way possible in a family friendly publication. One that is true to both the procedure and the labyrinthine legalese of the legendary Indian judiciary that rubber-stamped this tyranny:

"A minimally invasive, outpatient procedural intervention characterised by the bilateral strategic occlusion of the vas deferens — those discreet yet vital conduits of gametic propulsion — thereby effecting a permanent, pre-ejaculatory redirection of reproductive potential, without compromise to the hormonal, performative, or psycho-social dimensions of masculinity, as currently understood in contemporary socio-cultural discourse."

Roughly translated for the aam janta: a quick snip, and you’re still the same man — just with a disconnected delivery service.

Radio Silence and Surgical Camps

In theory, vasectomy is a voluntary, safe procedure. In 1975 India, it was a mandatory miracle wrapped in propaganda and driven by quotas. The infamous nasbandi campaign — spearheaded by Sanjay Gandhi, the unelected princeling of the Emergency — promised sterilisation in exchange for progress. Or more often than not: sterilisation in exchange for a free transistor radio.

Except the transistor didn’t come with batteries. You had to buy those separately. And once you did, the only thing it played was All India Radio, which, during the Emergency, was basically state karaoke: a dull loop of population control jingles, party-line radio plays, and songs so neutral they made elevator music sound like Rage Against the Machine.

It was a masterclass in cynical policy design. You lose your reproductive agency and get rewarded with a lifeless radio playing state-approved lullabies. And still, the state propaganda claimed it was “voluntary.” Of course it was — in the same way that a mugger holding a knife offers you a “choice” to hand over your wallet. Such was the self-confidence that some of the doctors at India's premier medical institution who led the entire enterprise, even hit the seminar circuit gloating over this dubious achievement.

They weren’t lone wolves in this vile circus. The Ford Foundation — that shining beacon of international philanthropy — had been laying the groundwork in India for years and now applauded from the front row. Not surprising, given their founder Henry Ford himself was a huge fan of authoritarian efficiency—after all, the Dearborn automaker supplied engines and know-how to the OG of jackboot thuggery: Nazi Germany. So impressed were they by ol’ Henry’s philanthropic impulses that, just two years after he had ponied up the cash for his son to set up the Ford Foundation, the Führer sent a delegation to Detroit to bestow upon him Nazi Germany’s Padma Vibhushan equivalent—the “Order of the German Eagle” medal. Compared to the Reich’s outrages across Europe, the mass snippings by Sarkari doctors in India looked like a teddy bear’s picnic.

Snip First, Ask Later

In 1976-1977 alone, 8.3 million sterilisations were carried out — most of them vasectomies. Residents of entire villages were scooped up and dumped into sterilisation camps like overripe vegetables at a wholesale mandi. The toolkit? Buses, batons, and a bloodless obsession with monthly quotas. Some of the males were elderly; some were minors that hadn’t even reached the marriage market. Consent? A bureaucratic formality — like pressing an illiterate villager’s inked thumb on a faint cyclostyled form after his second kidney had already been removed, iced, and couriered to some wealthy recipient’s hospital.

And what did these patriotic snippees receive in return? A bandage, an ice pack, a make shift certificate, and if they were lucky, the fabled battery-less transistor. It was like being handed the burnt toast of nation-building — and told to thank the chef.

Intellectual Acrobatics and Red Kurta Nostalgia

But what really put the Emergency into top gear wasn’t the government. It was the eerie, near unanimous silence from much of Indian civil society elites — artists, actors, poets, painters, bureaucrats, filmmakers, journalists, corporate honchos and red-kurta revolutionaries— suddenly all starstruck by “order.”

Even today, some retired bureaucrats-turned-gyan-givers and sundry commentariat — who crawled when merely asked to bend, (to borrow the then-jailed opposition leader L. K. Advani’s phrase) — rationalise, or even romanticise, that era of 'decisive leadership' and 'disciplined modernisation.' And, in the mother of all ironies, many now flaunt a feigned fury against fascism that they claim keeps them up at night — when the real culprits may be fading memory and a faulty bladder.

A case in point: my alma mater, JNU — the gold standard of dissent since 1969. While a few spirited Young Turks among the student body did raise their voices — and some, like Sitaram Yechury and D. P. Tripathi, were promptly chauffeured to Tihar — not a single member of the university’s storied faculty so much as cleared their throat in public protest. The silence was not just deafening; it was positively dignified.

Only one member of the university staff found himself behind bars — and alas, it wasn’t some firebrand academic whose principled defiance required delicate backchannel negotiations with members of the uniformed forces, but rather one of my professors’ cook, whose only offence, as it turned out, was sharing a name with a wanted dissident. He was, however, released once the overworked members of the (un)informed forces realised their clerical error.

And overseas, the much-lionised Indian occupants of prestigious ivory towers on both sides of the pond (Oxbridge and the Ivy Leagues), also kept their heads down. Like a family too petrified to red flag their wealthy patriarch who is brilliant in his daytime business, but bit of a whoremonger in after hours.

And lest anyone imagine this Bhishma Pitamah-level silence was uniquely subcontinental — rest assured, it was, and remains, a global condition. From Ivy League lounges to Parisian cafés, generations of intellectuals, artists, journalists, and moral fog machines in liberal societies have always found ways to excuse or romanticise their preferred strongmen — so long as the trains ran on time and the uniforms came in the right ideological shade.

Consider Stalin — the legendary butcher of Georgia — who not only has a Parisian train station christened in his honour, but also a generous scattering of places and personalities named after him across East and West. His polite defenders in the Dantewada jungles, subsidised Indian college canteens, and expensive Western sanctums of scholarship treat his scorecard — some 20 million annihilated via famines and gulags — like regrettable traffic violations on the road to utopia.

Even the most decorated doyens of Western thought — Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir — once happily enjoyed Castro’s mehman nawazi while he and his cigar-chomping comrades in fatigues were mass-executing or jailing so-called class enemies. His newly minted Minister of Industries and head of the National Institute of Agrarian Reform, Che Guevara, had helpfully clarified, “Human rights is a bourgeois concept, used to oppress the working class.” Clearly, for the ultra-enlightened or the extensively (nay, expensively) educated, the idea of top-down control always feels more seductive than a Parisian perfume — so long as it’s bottled in one’s favourite utopian rhetoric.

Heroism on Credit

If Indian democracy fifty years ago was defined by censorship, it was also sustained by something far more insidious: self-censorship. Aside from a handful of brave voices — like Kuldip Nayar — the media establishment fell into line with breath-taking compliance. So deeply ingrained has this become that we now censor even the memory of censorship.

Consider the case of veteran actress Surekha Sikri, whose four-decade career earned her three National Awards. When she passed away in 2021, obituaries were widespread and glowing. Many even mentioned her debut in the political satire Kissa Kursi Ka (Tale of a Chair) in 1978.

Except that was false. The film — featuring some of India’s finest arthouse actors — was actually made in 1975 and produced by a sitting parliamentarian. Yet its screening prints and source negatives were seized and incinerated inside the very automobile factory lampooned in the film — on the direct orders of the same non-elected, non-engineer (factory in-charge) princeling it dared to mock on celluloid. This remains one of the rarest instances in global cinema history where a film wasn’t merely banned — it was literally burned.

Only after the Emergency was lifted was the film painstakingly reshot and finally released to the public in 1978. Both the princeling and the then Information & Broadcasting Minister were later convicted — albeit briefly — for this Gestapo-style cultural arson. And yet, in the saturation coverage of a fine thespian’s passing — nearly half a century later — the Indian media managed to tiptoe around this dark chapter, as if still trapped in Emergency-era muscle memory.

The story of nasbandi met a similar fate. Not only were supply lines in the male anatomy severed — but so too were channels of expression. Copies of the Shah Commission findings, which later documented many such abuses, were quietly withdrawn from official circulation and largely destroyed. Records were wiped, statistics sanitised, and the national memory scrubbed down with the phenyl of bureaucratic amnesia.

Decades later, India’s most decorated and widely published author and journalist — the very man who served as the Emergency’s leading cheerleader — even penned a bestseller explaining why he still thought it was a great idea.

When Facts Falter, Fiction Takes the Scalpel

Where facts go missing, fiction steps in. And it did — with scalpels sharpened. Salman Rushdie, in his Booker of Bookers-winning Midnight’s Children, gave us the most lasting (and grotesquely poetic) account of the Emergency-era sterilisation drive. His protagonist, Saleem Sinai, loses more than his reproductive capacity. As Rushdie puts it:

“An avenging Goddess ensured that certain ectomised parts were curried with onions and green chillies, and fed to the pie-dogs of Benares.”

A fitting metaphor for the policy itself: state brutality dressed up in nationalist spice, then dumped in the back alleys of memory. One can only imagine what might have been served, had the idea pushed by gloating medical seminarists, foreign donors, and devout Malthusians, gone global. Just like Saleem’s testicles, dignity too would have been diced and devoured worldwide. Of course, the side dishes would have varied region by region — fried cassava in Uganda, squash and potatoes in Argentina, sweet plantain in Bolivia — because even dystopia has local flavours.

Reclaiming the Snip: Now with Informed Consent!

The tragedy of the Emergency-era sterilisation drive isn’t just the sheer number of coerced procedures. It’s also the stories that were never told — or worse, never allowed to be. So, as World Vasectomy Day rolls around again, let’s not kid ourselves. Beneath the clean, clinical “snip” may lie a mess of politics, coercion, donor hubris, and irony so thick you could cut it and serve it to the current avatars of Emergency cheerleaders-turned-Constitution-warriors.

And as we have been reminded — from dubious COVID-era vaccine mandates for babies to irreversible gender-affirming mutilation of teens in the most open and advanced of all democracies — the line between top-down, glorious goals and the violation of bodily autonomy can sometimes be thinner than a scalpel’s edge.