Merchants of Despair by Robert Zubrin

Author:Robert Zubrin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Encounter Books
Published: 2012-03-29T04:00:00+00:00

Mass sterilization camp in India.

These attacks provoked resistance, with thousands being killed in battles with the police, who used live ammunition to deal with protesters.25 When it became clear that Muslim villages were also being selectively targeted, the level of violence increased still further.26 The village of Pipli was only brought into submission when government officials threatened locals with aerial bombardment. As the director of family planning in Maharashtra explained, “You must consider it something like a war. . . . Whether you like it or not, there will be a few dead people.”27

The measures served their purpose. During 1976, eight million Indians were sterilized. Far from being dismayed by the massive violation of human rights committed by the campaign, its foreign sponsors expressed full support. Sweden increased its funding for Indian population control by $17 million. USAID population czar Reimert Ravenholt ordered 64 advanced laparoscope machines—altogether sufficient to sterilize 12,800 people per day—rushed to India to help the effort.28 World Bank president McNamara was absolutely delighted. In November 1976, he traveled to India to congratulate Indira Gandhi’s government for its excellent work. “At long last,” he said, “India is moving effectively to address its population problem.”29

Prime Minister Gandhi got her loans. She also got the boot in 1977, when in the largest democratic election in history, the people of India defied three decades of precedent and voted her Congress Party out of power in a landslide.30

Unfortunately, in most Third World countries, people lack such an option to protect themselves against population control. Equally unfortunately, despite the fall of the Gandhi government, the financial pressure on India from the World Bank and USAID to implement population control continued.31 By the early 1980s, four million sterilizations were being performed every year on India’s underclasses as part of a coercive two-child-per-family policy.32

Since in rural India sons are considered essential to continue the family line and provide support for parents in their old age, this limit caused many families to seek means of disposing of infant daughters, frequently through drowning, asphyxiation, abandonment in sewers or garbage dumps, or incineration on funeral pyres.33 More recently the primary means of eliminating the less-desirable sex has become sex-selective abortion, skewing the ratio of the sexes so that 112 boys are born for every hundred girls in India (far beyond the natural ratio of 103 to 106).34 A sense of the scale on which these murders were and are practiced, even just in the aspect of gendercide, can be gleaned from the fact that in India today there are 37 million more men than women.35

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