Indira Gandhi
Article
Indira Gandhi is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between September 14, 2021 and May 15, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “Indians took to the streets protesting Prime Minister Indira Gandhi (no relation to Mahatma Gandhi)”; “Indira Gandhi was voted back in as prime minister”; “From then until 1984 it was led by his daughter, Indira Gandhi”. It most often appears alongside Germany, India, Muslims.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: September 14, 2021
- Last seen: May 15, 2023
Appears In
Related Pages
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- Germany (2 shared issues)
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- India (2 shared issues)
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- Muslims (2 shared issues)
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- New York Times (2 shared issues)
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- 60 Minutes (1 shared issues)
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- Adam Mastroianni (1 shared issues)
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- Adivasis (1 shared issues)
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- Adraste (1 shared issues)
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- affirmative action (1 shared issues)
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- Ahmedabad (1 shared issues)
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- Amazon (1 shared issues)
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- Andy Marino (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
In unrelated news, there was a food shortage. Indians took to the streets protesting Prime Minister Indira Gandhi (no relation to Mahatma Gandhi). Gandhi was heavy-handed in crushing the protests, which caused more protests, one thing led to another, and finally Gandhi declared martial law, a period which has gone down in history as the Emergency.
It is more likely that in ending the Emergency Indira was thinking of herself, not India. She was aware of her growing international reputation as a tyrant, the daughter of a great democratic leader whose legacy she had damaged. As the journalist Tavleen Singh points out, the pressure to end the Emergency came simply from Indira Gandhi finding it unbearable that 'the Western media had taken to calling her a dictator.'
(but before you interpret this as too inspiring a story of the victory of good over evil, Indira Gandhi was voted back in as prime minister three years later. We’ll get to that.)
Before the Emergency, compulsory sterilization was considered in different states, but no concrete decision was ever made. At the time, only states had the authority to make a decision in the area of family planning. Once the Emergency was imposed, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, on her son’s insistence, amended the Constitution. The Constitution Act of 1976 gave the central government the right to execute family planning programs. Soon after, the central government mobilized the state political leadership and took decisive actions, such as setting up camps and sterilization targets.
By forcibly sterilizing millions of men during the 20-month emergency, the government of former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi may made some very limited inroads on the birthrate, but it probably set back by a generation all efforts to contain the exploding population of India.
Beroe: And it seems easy to me to draw a line between demanding that mental hospitals sterilize their patients - which would be evil whether or not it was done under the eugenic aegis - and having a sperm bank for talented people, or providing financial incentives to reproduce. You’re trying to take refuge in the exact sort of distinctions you wanted to deny me, under the argument that the harmless ideas were a “slippery slope” towards the harmful ones. Once you start saving the whales, you’re implicitly accepting a worldview which questions the sustainability of industrial civilization. And that worldview is a risk factor for demanding that Indira Gandhi sterilize millions of Indians. I’m not asserting this, mind you - I love whales! - just trying to point out the hypocrisy of your position.