It wasn't just men, the program targeted both men and women. This during the "Emergency", a period when the government assumed near dictatorial powers and suspended individual rights.

Briefly, the context begins with the incredible consolidation of power under the administration of Indira Gandhi, who became Prime Minister in 1967. She started a massive program of concentrating the government's executive power into her own office.

This was met by fierce opposition, but she managed to prevail by systematically destroying the leaders of the opposition parties. There was dissent within her own party (Congress Party) as well, which she solved by splitting it up into the Congress (I) named after herself, and the Congress (O) for others, the dissenters. This effectively removed the "Others" from government. She legalized her position by forcing through an amendment to the Indian Constitution - the 24th Amendment, which allowed parliament to greatly dilute individual rights without the review of the courts.

All of this produced much discontent through the country, but she was very good at silencing it. But in 1971, a man named Raj Narain, riding on the wave of public discontent, managed to almost defeat her in the election for her own seat in Parliament, from a constituency called Rae Bareily.

Raj Narain filed a suit against her in the Allahabad High Court, alleging that she rigged the election and won through bribery and fraud. The court eventually decided in favor of him, and found Indira Gandhi guilty of "dishonest election practices", including her use of government money and resources to win the election. The court declared the Rae Bareily election null and void.

This created a constitutional problem. By Indian law, any candidate for Prime Minister must be an elected member of the lower or upper house (Lok Sabha or Rajya Sabha). The party which wins a majority of the seats in the Lok Sabha then gets to choose the Prime Minister from among its elected members. This is how Indira Gandhi came to be Prime Minister. She was the elected representative from Rae Bareily in the Lok Sabha, and also president of the Congress Party (I). Her party then nominated her as Prime Minister. With her election from Rae Bareily voided by the court, she was no longer eligible to be Prime Minister. There were calls from many political leaders asking for her resignation.

She refused to resign, and challenged the verdict of the Allahabad High Court in the Indian Supreme Court. On June 24, 1975 the Supreme Court handed down its verdict, confirming the verdict of the High Court, and declaring that she was no longer a member of Parliament and barred from voting for 6 years.

The next day, on June 25, 1975, Indira Gandhi declared a "national Emergency" and used the 24th Amendment to assume dictatorial powers.

She immediately arrested Raj Narain, Jay Prakash Narayan (another opposition leader who had been calling for her resignation) and threw them in jail. Over the next several months, she jailed hundreds of other political opponents, all without a trial.

The "Emergency" provisions gave Indira Gandhi a huge range of powers, but it was actually her son, Sanjay Gandhi, who was responsible for the sterilization program you mentioned.

Sanjay Gandhi was a young man at the time, being groomed by Congress to carry on the Nehru dynasty after his mother. He held no government office. But it was common belief in India at the time that he actually ran the government during the Emergency, not his mother. Sanjay and a few of his friends (mainly Bansi Lal) ran the government. Party officials said that he pretty much controlled his mother. It was a joke in India at the time that the country was no longer run by the PMO (Prime Minister's Office) but by the PMH (Prime Minister's House).

Birth control was one of Sanjay's pet programs, and the forced sterilizations you refer to were started by him in Sept 1976, and lasted about 6 months to March 1977.

As for how the program worked, it was mostly through laws that punished people who didn't get birth control. Different states used different laws. In Madhya Pradesh, the government withheld irrigation water from farmers if their villages didn't meet sterilization quotas. In Bihar, public food distribution was withheld from families with more than two kids. In Uttar Pradesh, government employees had their pay withheld until they met sterilization quotas. In Rajasthan, people with 3 or more kids were banned from holding government jobs unless they underwent sterilization.

These tactics were responsible for the vast majority of sterilizations, but there are also some reports of actual physical force, specially from the state of Haryana. The best known is from a small village called Uttawar, where one morning the villagers woke up to find their village surrounded by the Haryana police. The men and women were separated, then police swept the village going through houses to see if anyone was hiding. They were then sorted to select those eligible for sterilization (those who were married and had 2 or more kids), and led to two camps, one for men and one for women. The men were given vasectomies and the women underwent tubal ligation.

When this story broke, there was outrage across the country. The government tried to control the situation, but massive riots broke out all over, police stations were torched, several officials were killed and government offices destroyed by angry mobs.

As a result, Indira Gandhi was forced to suspend the sterilization program. It had run for a bit under 6 months. A few months later, she was kicked out of office and the Janata Party coalition took over, with Morarji Desai as the new Prime Minister.

People held bitter memories of those 6 months. There was an assassination attempt on Sanjay Gandhi in 1977 when unidentified gunmen riddled his car, but he escaped. He was found guilty of excesses during the Emergency in 1979, and sentenced to two years in jail, but the verdict was later overturned. In 1980, he was killed in the crash of a private airplane, along with pilot Subhash Saxena. Many Indians think that it was sabotage, and that Sanjay Gandhi was assassinated for his actions during the Emergency, but nothing was proven. His wife left the Congress Party, and is now a member of the opposition party, the BJP.

Sanjay Gandhi's sterilization program significantly set back birth control in India. For many decades after, family planning workers would be attacked and chased out of villages because of people's memories of 1976. To this day, when any Indian government, no matter which party control it, talks about birth control, they tread on eggs. They spend a lot of effort in reassuring people that it's 100% voluntary, that there is no compulsion whatsoever. And for the same reason, it's politically very difficult to pass Chinese-style laws in India which might favor people for having fewer kids or punish them for having more.

Would you mind providing me with some suggestions on reading material about this? I think India's history is fascinating, but I don't know much about it.