abstract
This article addresses India’s contemporary population control policies and practices as a form of gender violence perpetrated by the state and transnational actors against poor, Adivasi and Dalit women. It argues that rather than meeting the needs and demands of these women for access to safe contraception that they can control, the Indian state has targeted them for coercive mass sterilisations and unsafe injectable contraceptives. This is made possible by the long-term construction of particular women’s lives as devalued and disposable, and of their bodies as excessively fertile and therefore inimical to development and progress. It further considers how population policy is currently embedded in the neoliberal framework of development being pursued by the Indian state. In particular, it argues that the violence of population policies is being deepened as a result of three central and interrelated aspects of this framework: corporate dispossession and displacement, the intensification and extension of women’s labour for global capital, and the discourses and embodied practices of far-right Hindu supremacism. At the same time, India’s population policies cannot be understood in isolation from the global population control establishment, which is increasingly corporate-led, and from broader structures of racialised global capital accumulation. The violence of India’s contemporary population policies and the practices they produce operate at several different scales, all of which involve the construction of certain bodies as unfit to reproduce and requiring intervention and control.
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Notes
Attempts to regulate sexuality in the interests of imperialism have a long history with a plethora of colonial discourses, laws and practices including those relating to marriage, children of mixed race, prostitution and sexually transmitted infections.
The denial of reproductive rights under India’s population policies is further underlined by evidence that since the 2014 deaths, women in Chhattisgarh belonging to ‘Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups’ (PVTGs) with high infant mortality rates are being prevented from accessing sterilisation under a 1979 government order aimed at ‘preserving the community’, while other forms of contraception remain unavailable (Lavtepatil and Sijwali, 2017).
The introduction of the ‘two child norm’ involved a plethora of coercive incentives and disincentives in several Indian states, including exclusion from eligibility to contest Panchayat (local government) elections of women and men who have more than two children (Rao, 2003).
Implicit in the exclusive focus on long-acting hormonal contraceptives despite the known risks is the emphasis on ‘cost-effectiveness’ and minimising the risk of contraceptive failure, and hence minimising the need for safe abortion. This is another consequence of the Gates Foundation’s now dominant position in the field, since Melinda Gates does not support abortion rights (Fried and Hendrixson, 2014). In 2017, Melinda Gates reiterated her position in support of the Mexico City policy that ‘US funding can never go to an abortion organisation, ever’ while criticising President Trump’s broadening of the application of the rule for its impact on reducing funding for family planning (Revesz, 2017).
In recent years, globally dominant development institutions have been promoting an explicitly neoliberal approach to gender, epitomised by The World Bank’s (2006, 2011) slogan ‘Gender Equality as Smart Economics’ and the current corporate-initiated global development focus on adolescent girls. Smart Economics is premised on highly gendered assumptions that women will always work harder, and be more productive, than their male counterparts (Wilson, 2015). Furthermore, Smart Economics also presupposes that women will use additional income more productively than men would, and that this behaviour is inherent (ibid.). Therefore, it argues that greater gender ‘equality’, understood as an increase in women’s participation in labour markets, will have a significant impact on economic growth.
The reality is that family size among Muslims saw a greater reduction between 2001 and 2011 than any other community, as recently released government census data reveals (see Hindustan Times, 2016).
Adityanath, who is notorious for his record of hate-mongering and violence, was appointed Chief Minister of the state of Uttar Pradesh after the BJP won state Assembly elections there in March 2017.
National Health Mission: Ministry of Health & Family Welfare, Government of India, ‘Background’, http://nhm.gov.in/nrhm-components/rmnch-a/family-planning/background.html [last accessed 5 March 2018].
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I am grateful to Mohan Rao, Jennifer Ung Loh and the two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article.
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Wilson, K. for reproductive justice in an era of Gates and Modi: the violence of India’s population policies. Fem Rev 119, 89–105 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41305-018-0112-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41305-018-0112-0