8.1 Million Sterilised in 12 Months. The Government Printed the Report in 1978. Two Years Later It Had Vanished From India's Libraries

A village with the lights cut off

Uttawar is a village in what was then Gurgaon district of Haryana, about ninety kilometres south of Delhi. In 1976 roughly 8,000 people lived there, most of them Meo Muslims — farmers.

On 12 October 1976 the electricity to Uttawar and the villages around it was switched off. The lineman of the Haryana State Electricity Board, a man named Tevatia, later told a judge that the Deputy Commissioner of the district — the senior-most government officer in charge of the district — had ordered him to cut the supply because the villagers "were not co-operating with the family planning programmes of the Government." He had written the order in his message book, which was later produced before the judge.

Some days later the power was restored by a senior engineer. On 5 November the Deputy Commissioner called the lineman to a rest house, reprimanded him for restoring it, and told him to cut it again. He did. The lineman also told the judge that he was detained in that rest house and beaten by the police.

The next morning, 6 November 1976, about 700 policemen — 23 police "reserves", armed with rifles and tear-gas — surrounded Uttawar. That is one policeman for every eleven people in the village, counting babies. They searched the houses and found no firearms; they found some lathis, spears and farm tools. They loaded about 550 villagers into trucks and took them to the police station at Hathin. From there, 180 of them were taken to the "family planning centres" at Nuh and Mandkola and sterilised.

None of this is from a newspaper or a memoir. It is from paragraphs 17.95 to 17.101 of a report written by a retired Chief Justice of India and printed by the Government of India in August 1978. The judge's finding, at paragraph 17.96, was that the raid "was, it appears, planned deliberately by the State officials because of the opposition of the local population to submit to the sterilisation programme of the State Government."

That report is the subject of this Investigation. It is called the Shah Commission Report. For about thirty years after 1980 it was, for practical purposes, impossible to find in India.

At a glance

• The Emergency was declared on the night of 25 June 1975 on the advice of the Prime Minister alone. The Cabinet learned of it at a meeting called for 6 a.m. the next morning. (Shah Commission, Interim Report I, paras 5.52–5.55, 5.68)
• 48,500 complaints reached the Commission after it invited them; it held 100 open sittings and finished in "a little over one year". (Interim Report I, para 1.4; Third and Final Report, paras 25.1–25.3)
• Sterilisations rose from 2.67 million in 1975–76 to 8.1 million in 1976–77 — figures the Ministry of Health itself gave the Commission — against a central target of 4.3 million. (Final Report, paras 21.13, 21.47)
• 1,774 reports or complaints of death following sterilisation were received by state governments, led by Rajasthan (217) and Uttar Pradesh (201). (Final Report, para 21.48)
• Indira Gandhi was summoned, appeared, and declined to take the oath or give evidence. Her written reply is printed in the report. (Interim Report I, para 5.61)

First, the words a beginner needs

The Emergency. Under Article 352 of the Constitution, the President can declare that "a grave emergency exists" if India's security is threatened by war, outside attack or "internal disturbance". While it lasts, the government can suspend citizens' basic rights, including the right to go to court against being locked up. One was declared on 25 June 1975 and lifted on 21 March 1977. Those 21 months are what Indians call "the Emergency".

A Commission of Inquiry. When the government wants a serious, public fact-finding exercise into something that has gone wrong, it can appoint one under a 1952 law, the Commissions of Inquiry Act. A commission is not a court — it cannot jail anyone — but it can summon witnesses, demand files, take evidence on oath, and publish findings. Its report goes to the government and, usually, to Parliament.

The Shah Commission. Appointed on 28 May 1977 by the new Janata government, two months after it won the election. It had one member: Jayantilal Chhotalal Shah, a retired Chief Justice of India. The notification appointing him asked him to inquire into "excesses, malpractices and misdeeds during the Emergency", and named three things in particular: misuse of arrest and detention, "compulsion and use of force in the implementation of the family planning programme", and demolitions of homes and shops in the name of slum clearance.

Sterilisation. A permanent surgical method of birth control — a vasectomy for men, a tubectomy for women. In the 1970s India's family planning programme treated it as the main tool, because unlike a condom or a pill it needs no follow-up.

A "target". Each year the Health Ministry in Delhi told each state how many sterilisations it should aim for. Targets had existed since the 1960s. What changed in 1976 was who was setting them, how high, and what happened to an official who missed his.

The claim we are testing

The story most people know goes: "During the Emergency Sanjay Gandhi ran a forced sterilisation drive; millions were sterilised; the Shah Commission exposed it all; then Indira Gandhi came back and had the report destroyed." Let us separate the layers.

1. The Government of India's own report found that the Emergency was declared by one person, that the family planning programme was run by coercion, and it printed the numbers. True, and this Investigation shows you where in the report each finding sits.
2. "8.3 million" — or any other single figure — is the count of forced sterilisations. Unsupported as usually stated. The report gives 8.1 million as the total number of sterilisations in 1976–77, from the Ministry's own figures. It does not, and could not, say how many of those were forced. We use the report's number, not the popular one.
3. Indira Gandhi ordered every copy destroyed, and no copy survived in India. Partly myth. That the 1980 government withdrew the report from circulation is stated by the man who republished it and has never been contradicted. That there was an order to destroy copies, or that none survived, is not something we could find in any document. Copies survived in Parliament's library, in a Chennai bookshelf, and, famously, in Australia.

Document one: how the Emergency was declared (Interim Report I, 11 March 1978)

Justice Shah's first report deals with the night of 25 June 1975. He had the President's office file. In it was the Prime Minister's letter, which the report prints in full at paragraph 5.52. It is marked TOP SECRET and it says:

"As already explained to you, a little while ago, information has reached us which indicates that there is an imminent danger to the security of India being threatened by internal disturbance. The matter is extremely urgent. I would have liked to have taken this to Cabinet but unfortunately this is not possible tonight … I shall mention the matter to the Cabinet first thing tomorrow morning … I recommend that such a Proclamation should be issued tonight, however late it may be."

Then Justice Shah went through who knew. The Secretary to the Prime Minister, P.N. Dhar, learnt of it at about 11.30 p.m. that night, when he was handed the draft of the speech she would give on All India Radio (para 5.54). The Cabinet Secretary, B.D. Pande — the head of the whole civil service — got a phone call at 4.30 a.m. telling him a Cabinet meeting was fixed for 6 a.m. That was the first he heard of it (para 5.55). He told the Commission that the need for an Emergency "had not figured in any of the Cabinet meetings" before that morning (para 5.56). The Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, H.N. Bahuguna, learnt of it at breakfast on 26 June, sitting with two Union ministers who were "as surprised as he was" (para 5.60).

Paragraph 5.60 is a list. Every item comes from a government file:

• on the economic front "there was nothing alarming" — wholesale prices had actually fallen 7.4 per cent between December 1974 and March 1975;
• the fortnightly law-and-order reports from Governors and Chief Secretaries said the situation was "under complete control all over the country";
• the Home Ministry had received no report of any deterioration, had prepared no contingency plan, and had not sent the Prime Minister any note of concern;
• the Intelligence Bureau had sent no report between 12 and 25 June suggesting an Emergency was needed;
• the Director of the Intelligence Bureau, the Home Secretary, the Cabinet Secretary and the Prime Minister's own Secretary "had not been taken into confidence" — but R.K. Dhawan, her Additional Private Secretary, had been "associated with the preparation and promulgation of the Emergency right from the early stage";
• the Home Minister, K. Brahmananda Reddy, "came into the picture only when the draft proclamation was forwarded to the President".

The judge's conclusion, at paragraph 5.68: the decision "was exclusively the decision of the Prime Minister. None of her Cabinet Ministers, except Shri Brahmananda Reddy was even aware of the proposal." And at 5.70: "This was more in the nature of a shock treatment, than a legally permissible Emergency."

Document two: the numbers (Third and Final Report, 6 August 1978)

Chapter XXI of the Final Report opens by quoting the Health Ministry's own 1974 policy — "there should be no compulsion about or insistence on any particular method" (para 21.3) — and then shows, file by file, how that changed.

On 10 October 1975 the Health Minister, Karan Singh, sent the Prime Minister a note on a "Crash programme to intensify family planning". It said that "there seems to be no alternative but to think in terms of introduction of some element of compulsion in the larger national interest", and that "the present emergency … [has] provided an appropriate atmosphere for tackling the problem" (para 21.4). The Ministry told the Commission it had advised states not to raise targets; its own files showed no such advice (para 21.14).

Then come the figures, at paragraph 21.47, "according to information furnished by the Ministry of Health & Family Welfare to the Commission":

"the performance graph touched 2.67 million sterilisations in 1975–76 and rose to the peak level of 8.1 million in 1976–77. Whereas 10 States and 4 Union Territories had exceeded the targets in 1975–76, 18 States and 5 Union Territories exceeded the targets in 1976–77."

Feel that number. 8.1 million operations in twelve months is one every four seconds, day and night. It is more than the populations of Delhi and Madras put together at the 1971 census. And it was nearly double the target Delhi itself had set: 4.3 million (para 21.13), a figure the former Health Minister later called "reasonable and attainable" (para 21.310).

Who raised the targets? The states. The Commission's annexure to the chapter lays it out state by state. Uttar Pradesh was given 4 lakh by Delhi; it set itself 15 lakh, and did 8.37 lakh. Maharashtra: given 5.62 lakh, set 12 lakh, did 8.33 lakh. Madhya Pradesh: given 2.675 lakh, set 7 lakh, did 10.01 lakh — nearly four times the central figure. West Bengal: given 3.92 lakh, set 11 lakh, did 8.8 lakh. Bihar doubled its target to 6 lakh and did 6.8 lakh. The Union Health Secretary had personally gone to Lucknow in November 1976 to tell UP that Delhi "would be very happy" with 4 lakh (para 21.13). UP did more than twice that.

The Commission then asked every state: how many unmarried people did you sterilise, and how many people died? On deaths, paragraph 21.48 records that reports or complaints of death "have been received in 1,774 cases" — Rajasthan 217, Uttar Pradesh 201, Maharashtra 151, Andhra Pradesh 135, Haryana 132, Madhya Pradesh 132, Karnataka 123 — and so on down to Mizoram, 1. Several states returned "NIL". Nearly five reported deaths a day, for a year, in a programme that the Ministry's own policy said should be voluntary.

Read the actual document

The most chilling pages of the report are not the judge's words. They are the government's own telegrams, which he simply reprinted. This is page 165 of the Final Report. The Chief Secretary of Uttar Pradesh — the top civil servant of the state — sent this "crash wireless message" to every District Magistrate and Divisional Commissioner on 7 July 1976:

"GOVERNMENT ATTACH HIGHEST IMPORTANCE TO ACHIEVEMENT OF FAMILY PLANNING TARGETS (.) PRESUME YOU HAVE ALREADY FIXED TARGETS FOR EACH DISTRICT AND DIVISIONAL LEVEL OFFICER (.) INFORM EVERYBODY THAT FAILURE TO ACHIEVE MONTHLY TARGETS WILL NOT ONLY RESULT IN STOPPAGE OF SALARY BUT ALSO SUSPENSION AND SEVEREST PENALTIES (.) GALVANISE ENTIRE ADMINISTRATIVE MACHINERY INTO ACTION FORTHWITH REPEAT FORTHWITH AND CONTINUE TO REPORT DAILY PROGRESS BY CRASH WIRELESS TO ME AND SECRETARY TO CHIEF MINISTER (.)"

On the same two pages the Commission reprints Rule 11 of the UP Government Servants (Special Provisions relating to Family Planning) Rules, notified 2 July 1976, which made it "part of the duties of every Government servant" to motivate "eligible persons to get themselves sterilised", failing which "the payment of his salary and allowances or his annual increments or both shall be liable to be stopped"; a Bihar Health Commissioner's letter of 12 August 1976 saying a field worker's "salary … is to be released only after target prescribed is achieved"; and a Haryana Chief Secretary's letter of 28 August 1976 that "all eligible Government servants with three or more children are to get sterilised by October 31, 1976".

Read those and Uttawar stops being a mystery. A Deputy Commissioner whose own career depended on a number had been told, in capitals, that failure meant "severest penalties". The Commission, at paragraph 17.127, "takes a lenient view" of the three officers because they "were powerless to resist the express wishes of the Government of the time" — while stating that this "is not to minimise the gravity and illegality of what was done to the people of the village".

Document three: the man who ran it, in the report's own words

The Commission did not put a name on the "express wishes of the Government". It let the state governments do that. On 30 September 1976 the Joint Director of Family Planning in Maharashtra wrote to his district officers: "Shri Sanjay Gandhi is visiting Maharashtra State about October 28, 1976 and the Chief Minister desires that before the visit of Shri Sanjay Gandhi, Maharashtra State must have completed 5 lakhs sterilisations" (para 21.43). Orissa's Health Secretary told his Collectors on 17 January 1977 that "Shri Sanjay Gandhi, our national youth leader will be visiting Orissa on the 29th and 30th" and that the state would "observe a Special Family Planning Month" in his honour (para 21.45).

Sanjay Gandhi held no office — not minister, not MP, not civil servant. The Commission's phrase for that, in its list of recommendations, is "extra-constitutional centres of power", and its advice to the government was to "snuff them out ruthlessly" (Final Report, summary of Chapter XV, para 15.22).

The former Health Minister, Karan Singh, appearing before the Commission on 7 July 1978, said the same thing more plainly. His prepared statement is printed at paragraph 21.310: "at that time an extra-constitutional centre of power was operating in the country, and Chief Ministers who owed special allegiance to that centre vied with each other in raising their sterilisation targets in order to gain favour. Once the targets were raised, the whole machinery of governmental power in those States was thrust into use to achieve them, and in the process an atmosphere of fear and coercion became widespread." He also recorded that a Maharashtra bill to make sterilisation compulsory by law had reached the Union Cabinet and "at the last minute … was withdrawn on the directions of the former Prime Minister" — a fact that cuts both ways, and we return to it below.

Document four: what happened to the report

The three reports were laid before Parliament in 1978. The Commission suggested that each state set up its own authority to hear the 48,000-odd individual complaints it could not reach (para 25.1). Parliament passed a Special Courts Act in 1979 so that cases arising from the findings could be tried quickly.

Then the Janata government fell, and in January 1980 Indira Gandhi won the general election and returned as Prime Minister.

Here is exactly what the record supports about what happened next. Era Sezhiyan, a Janata MP in the Rajya Sabha from 1978 to 1984, had kept the three volumes since the late 1970s. In his 2010 foreword he wrote that when he later went looking for other copies, he found "conclusive declarations on the complete disappearance of the copies of the Shah Commission Report in India", including the claim that "the third and final report of the Commission seems to have slipped out and is currently held by the National Library of Australia", and his own conclusion that "the government of 1980 thought that by withdrawing and destroying the copies of the Shah Commission Report in India, they had succeeded in ending the book's life."

Sezhiyan found his own set "on the top row of my bookshelves … with all my markings and notes", and republished all three reports as Shah Commission Report: Lost, and Regained (Aazhi Publishers, Chennai). It was released on 19 December 2010, and the Times of India report of the launch the next day quoted the speaker calling it "a book that was released three decades ago by the government of India, which unfortunately [had] been suppressed". He was 87.

The reprint is why you can read the report today. In 2013 scans of all three volumes went up on the Internet Archive. And Parliament's own digital library catalogue lists the Final Report as it was laid in the Lok Sabha, with the government's "Memorandum of Action Taken" — so at least one copy never left the building.

The strongest case for the other side

The report prints Indira Gandhi's own defence. On 21 November 1977 she wrote to the Commission that its terms of reference were "one-sided and politically motivated", because they covered the excesses but were "silent about the circumstances which led to its declaration". She argued that "for two years preceding the emergency the country was in the grip of grave crisis", that "duly elected legislators were beaten and intimidated into resigning" in Gujarat, and that a minister in the Janata cabinet had "proudly claimed" credit for the derailment of 52 trains in Karnataka in November 1975. On the sterilisations, she wrote: "Some excesses in their implementation cannot always be avoided nor do they always come to notice at that time. I have publicly expressed regret for any unjust hardship caused to any individual." (Interim Report I, para 5.61 and following.)

Three more points in her favour are in the report. First, the central target of 4.3 million was, as Karan Singh said, "reasonable and attainable"; it was the states that "unilaterally raised their targets, some of them by almost 400 per cent" (para 21.310). Second, the Ministry told the Commission that its letter of 9 September 1976 and later circulars had stressed quality of service and post-operative care (para 21.13). Third, the one attempt to make sterilisation compulsory by statute — Maharashtra's bill — was stopped by her.

The Commission's answer to the first two is in paragraph 21.14: the files showed no actual instruction to the states to bring their targets down, and the wireless messages reprinted above were sent by Chief Secretaries who, as Karan Singh put it, "owed special allegiance to that centre". A target can be reasonable on paper in Delhi and a threat of "severest penalties" in Lucknow on the same day.

On the legality of the Emergency, Justice Shah's view — that an Emergency could not be declared on top of the one already in force since 1971 (para 5.69) — was his opinion, not a court ruling. The 39th Amendment had put the Proclamation beyond judicial challenge, and no court ever tested his view.

What we could not prove

• That any written order to destroy the report exists. Sezhiyan says copies were withdrawn and destroyed; every later account repeats him. We found no gazette notification, no Cabinet decision, no Lok Sabha answer saying so. "Withdrawn from circulation" is the safest phrase the record supports.
• That only two copies survived, in London and Canberra. Sezhiyan quotes this claim in order to reject it. Parliament's library catalogue, Sezhiyan's own set and the party library scan show it was never true. We could not open the National Library of Australia catalogue record (the site blocks automated readers), so we rely on Sezhiyan and Wikipedia's citation of it.
• The exact fate of the Special Courts. Secondary sources say the Supreme Court's rulings after 1980 left them without effect. We did not read those judgments for this piece and do not characterise them.
• How many of the 8.1 million were coerced. The report does not say and no document could. It gives the numbers, the deaths, the telegrams and the raids.
• Item (a) of paragraph 21.48 — the number of unmarried persons sterilised — is missing from the OCR text we worked from; we quote only item (b), the deaths, which is legible in the scan.

Why it still matters today

Turkman Gate in Old Delhi still stands. In April 1976 the houses behind it were demolished, the residents rioted and the police opened fire; the Commission's second Interim Report has separate sections on the demolitions and on the firing (paras 13.145–13.153 and the chapter on the firing). You can walk past the gate today; there is no plaque.

Uttawar is now in Nuh district, which NITI Aayog ranked last of the 101 "aspirational" districts in its 2018 baseline — the most backward district in the country. Nothing on the record connects the two facts. But the village that had its electricity cut for refusing sterilisation in 1976 is still, fifty years on, one of the poorest places in India.

And the report itself is now something anyone with a phone can read — 525 pages, free — which is exactly what a government in 1980 spent some effort to prevent. By a gazette notification of 12 July 2024 the Government of India marks 25 June as "Samvidhaan Hatya Diwas". Whatever one thinks of that name, it is the case that for most of the intervening years the official account of what happened was not available to the public that was being asked to remember it.

Verdict

The Shah Commission Report is not an opposition pamphlet. It is the Government of India, one year after the Emergency, reading its own files aloud — the Prime Minister's letter, the Cabinet Secretary's 4.30 a.m. phone call, the UP Chief Secretary's wireless, the Ministry's own graph from 2.67 million to 8.1 million, the 1,774 reports of death, the trucks at Uttawar. Every one of those is cited here by paragraph so you can check it.

The popular figure of "8.3 million" is not in the report; 8.1 million is, and it is bad enough. The popular story that every copy was destroyed is not proven; that the report was withdrawn from circulation and became, for three decades, a thing you had to know a retired MP to read, is.

A country is entitled to read the report its own government wrote about itself. For thirty years India, for practical purposes, could not. That fact belongs in the record next to everything the report found.