Remembering "THE EMERGENCY": India 1970s

There was a time in India when men became the object of a gender biased policy. In 1976, Sanjay Gandhi launched a drive to cleanse the city of slums and force their residents to leave the Capital. Sanjay reportedly ordered officials of the Delhi Development Authority to clear the heavily populated, mostly Muslim slum. This forced resettlement of more than 250,000 people, which killed at least a dozen as recorded and became a touchstone for the opposition.
Sanjay publicly initiated a widespread family planning program to limit population growth. But this resulted in government officials and police officers forcibly performing vasectomies in order to meet quotas. Vasectomy became a condition not just for land allotments, but for irrigation water, electricity, ration cards, rickshaw licenses, medical care, pay raises, and promotions. Everyone, from senior government officials to train conductors to policemen, was given a vasectomy quota. Officially, men with two children or more had to submit to sterilization, but many unmarried young men, political opponents and ignorant, poor men were also been sterilized. Hundreds died from botched sterilizations - according to official statistics. There was no way to count the number who were being hauled away to sterilization camps against their will. This program is still remembered and criticized in India, and is blamed for creating a public aversion to family planning, which hampered Government programmes for decades.
At last, in the largest democratic election in history, the people of India produced one of history's great political upsets. Men became united against this gender biased policies. The prime minister Indira Gandhi was routed in her home district.. The Congress Party was defeated all across northern India. They lost 141 out of 142 seats in the states that had registered the largest increases in male sterilization. In Delhi the crowds stayed up through the night to cheer as the results came in. Something even more powerful, even more implacable, men had finally defeated the ideology of population control: People voting, one by one.