Along the Delhi-Ghaziabad border, adjoining Loni, lies ‘Nasbandi Colony’. The name has stuck, 50 years on after the Emergency’s sterilisation and resettlement drives uprooted residents of Turkman Gate, located in the Capital’s heart, and dispatched many of them here, to its fringes.
There are other things that remain the same in this colony, since it got the first of its Turkman Gate evacuees in the Eighties. Open drains line bumpy, pothole-marked roads, where two-wheelers weave their way through cattle. The smell of open garbage is pervasive. Residents say the government gave land, but no livelihood or shot at a new life – not even a school.
Lady doctor of ESI Dispensary explaining regarding vasectomy operation at the one day camp at Paharganj dispensary. (Express archive photo by RK Sharma from1976)
Around 16 km away, at Turkman Gate, located in Delhi’s Walled City, other families whose houses were razed during the Emergency now live in DDA flats they got as compensation. The flats, built 48 years ago, are in need of repair, while the cramped lanes sport endless electrical repair shops. As many here make a living as scrap dealers, used air-conditioners and coolers crowd public spaces.
As per the Shah Commission that went into the Emergency excesses, six people were killed when police opened fire in the Turkman Gate area on April 19, 1976, on protesters, days into a demolition drive. Over 1.5 lakh structures were pulled down across Delhi during the Emergency, but Turkman Gate remains the most vivid example of the drive.
While the protests at Turkman Gate on April 19, 1976, were over the demolitions, anger was also bubbling over sterilisations. On April 15, a sterilisation camp had been inaugurated at nearby Dujana House by Sanjay Gandhi and then Lieutenant Governor Krishan Chand.
Overall, as per the Shah Commission, over 1.1 crore sterilisations were carried out between 1975 and 1977, against the government’s target of 65 lakh, and over 1,774 died during the sterilisation procedures.
Amid the steady clatter of machines turning out envelopes at a small factory near the same Dujana House, Zakir Ahmed, 69, sits quietly at his dispensary unit. He first started working at the age of 7 at a wedding card workshop, which still exists across the road, and was not yet a teen when the sterilisation teams arrived.
Zakir Ahmed, 69, first started working at the age of 7 at a wedding card workshop
“They targeted outsiders – labourers, beggars, construction workers… those just walking by,” Ahmed says. Officials offered inducements to meet their sterilisation targets – sometimes money, often a 4-litre tin of Dalda (refined oil), rarely a transistor.
Ahmed remembers one incident in particular. On April 18, 1976, as a van carrying men and boys for sterilisation crossed the neighbourhood, a woman snuck up and opened the back door. “Unko azad kara diya nasbandi se pehle (She freed them from sterilisation).”
Ahmed adds: “Nobody could be saved from nasbandi in those days. Those who said anything would be jailed under the MISA (Maintenance of Internal Security Act).”
The very next day, April 19, came the bulldozers. “Those months were very difficult,” Ahmed says. “People were terrified… Families… Hindu, Muslim… all would beg their loved ones not to travel after dark, offer each other shelter. Every time one left home, one was scared.”
To ward off action, “many put up photographs of Indira Gandhi at their shops”.
Such was the contempt for the PM and her son, says Muhammed Shahid Gangohi, one of the founding members of the Turkman Gate Welfare and Coordination Committee, that “people referred to the MISA Act as Mata Indira Sanjay Act”.
If there is another name that invites similar derision, it is Rukhsana Sultana, a socialite and boutique owner who had risen quickly within the Congress in Delhi due to her proximity to Sanjay.
Safi Dehlvi, 75, a former Congress leader, says Sultana took the lead in implementing Sanjay’s sterilisation targets in the Walled City, as the one overseeing the camp at Dujana House. “In April 1976, Sanjay came here and received a hostile reception… He looked around and said he saw a ‘mini-Pakistan’. Within a few days, bulldozers were at Turkman Gate’s doors.”
The afternoon of April 19, Gangohi recalls, he was on his way for his BA first-year exams at Zakir Husain College. “Around 4.30 pm, there was an announcement that students from our area should meet the Principal. We sensed something had happened… We were told that at 1.45 pm, police and military had come, there was a lathicharge as well as police firing. Around 500 people were arrested… beaten so brutally that it was equivalent to being killed.”
Gangohi’s family house shared a boundary wall with a mosque; they thought that gave them some immunity. “But it was also demolished.”
Most of the displaced were sent to Trilokpuri initially, while a few were moved to Nand Nagri, Ranjit Nagar and Shahdara. Gangohi says that the two appeals the displaced made were that “families not be split” and that they get “built-up area” as compensation. “But the accommodations at Trilokpuri and Nand Nagri were completely barren… with no roads. It was a jungle.”
Mohd Rizwan, 75, points to a spot along Asif Ali Road near Turkman Gate: “This is where Sanjay Gandhi addressed the public, telling them the benefits of the sterilisation programme… After four-five days, the demolitions started.” One of his relatives, Abdul Malik, 23, was among those killed, Rizwan says.
Another old-time resident of Turkman Gate, who was in school then and is now a senior government official, says on the condition of anonymity: “Teachers would pressure us (on the issue). Near Chandni Chowk Market, we would run into Youth Congress volunteers raising slogans of ‘Hum do, hamare do (Us two, ours two).” Government employees were afraid their promotions would be stalled if they put up resistance, he says.
Historian Sohail Hashmi, who was himself a witness to Emergency crackdowns as a student at Jawaharlal Nehru University, talks about the experience of his mother, the headmistress of a government school in Kidwai Nagar. “Teachers were expected to present two sterilisation certificates every month… It were the poor, the rickshaw-pullers, the drug addicts, who bore the brunt of this policy.”
Santosh Gupta, who was among the first settlers at the ‘Nasbandi Colony’ and continues to live there, says his mother Sashi Bala was among those who volunteered for sterilisation. His father, who earned a living as a tailor, his brother and he never discussed the subject, Gupta says. “I was too young to ask, and she never told us anything.”
He wonders though if it was for land. In exchange for undergoing the procedure, Bala received a 90 sq yard plot in ‘Nasbandi Colony’. In 1985, the family moved there. In 1998, Gupta opened a small shop on the plot, and lives in an adjoining house with his wife and four children. Bala and her husband are now deceased, as is Gupta’s elder brother.
He is now thinking of moving, perhaps to Karawal Nagar, which offers at least better amenities as well as connectivity, Gupta says. His ‘Nasbandi Colony’ plot could fetch Rs 55 lakh, he says.
But could the ghosts of Emergency end with that? Ahmed, who has lived his lifetime in the shadows of it, still recalls the lifting of the provision, and their anticipation of a new start. “The streets erupted in celebration, Delhi felt as joyous as Eid or Diwali. Outside the Tiz Hazari court, there were such long queues that shops ran out of liquor,” he says, before he breaks into a cough that has become chronic, a reminder of decades spent inhaling paper dust.
