 I did my masters and my PhD at SOAS, so it's a very familiar place, although I have to say that was very long time ago. Some of it was actually last century, which certainly makes it sound a long time ago. So I'm going to stand up to do this simply because I need to change the slides from time to time. Okay, well I want to start this talk by remembering the 15 women who died in the second week of November 2014 after undergoing sterilization surgery under appalling conditions in camps in Bilaspur district of Chhattisgarh in India. According to a fact finding report by the Sama resource group for women and health, these women were all in their 20s and 30s and they were all from Dalit, Adivasi and other backward classes communities. Most of them were from landless households and the main source of income was agricultural wage labor or other forms of daily wage labor. But while their deaths made headlines, albeit briefly, these tragic events cannot be seen as an aberration. Rather I argue that they're inherent within approaches to what's called family planning, which can be better understood as population control policy. So I want to begin by thinking about four interlinked aspects of these sort of atrocities and of India's population policies which produce them. Firstly I want to think about coercive sterilizations as a form of embodied gendered violence perpetrated by the state and transnational actors. Both in the sense of direct embodied violence, which these sterilizations involved, but also in terms of the way they depend on wider structural violence of social and economic inequality, which also itself has embodied effects. So when feminists and left activists and others referred to the sterilization deaths in Chhattisgarh in 2014 as a massacre, they were consciously evoking comparisons with the whole history of gendered violence against poor women and Dalit and Adivasi women in particular by the state and other powerful forces. Now although sterilizations are a long-term feature of Indian policy, they're currently being extended and intensified within a framework of neoliberal economic policies and patterns of global capital accumulation. And what I suggest is that the 21st century resurgence of population control globally, which I'll go into in more detail, and it's reframing in terms of reproductive rights cannot be fully understood except in relation to certain current processes. And these are processes of accumulation by dispossession to which the intensification of women's labor and its mobilization for global capital is absolutely central. So far from giving the women in the global south much needed access to safe contraception, which they can control, these policies actually dehumanize them as excessively reproductive and set targets which make atrocities like those of Chhattisgarh possible. Now thirdly, at the same time population control discourse I'd suggest demonstrates a particular characteristic of contemporary neoliberalism and that's its ability to appropriate and transform critical ideas. So since the 1990s it's been increasingly reframed in terms of feminist ideas about reproductive rights. And this discourse of rights and choices operates to make the violence of population control less visible. Finally, I want to suggest that this violence has been intensified in India in the current context of a symbiotic relationship between neoliberal development and the Hindu right in contemporary India. So now in terms of the global context as part of my ongoing research on race, racism and development which Faisi mentioned I've been looking at population control as a racialized project of capital. As you probably know it's very much rooted in the twin ideologies of Malthusianism on the one hand and eugenics on the other. Now when we think of Malthusianism we tend to think about Thomas Malthus' theories of overpopulation. But one can also argue that his primary legacy is broader than that. It's been to provide an enduring argument for the prevention of social and economic change by suggesting that the poverty which is associated with capitalist development is an inevitable consequence of population increase rather than of the logical capital accumulation. So Malthusianism has not only shaped specifically population control policies but has also influenced a lot of key theories and practices of development which is similarly based on the assumption that the poverty stems from the behavior of the poor themselves which then becomes a target for intervention. Now this of course was combined with eugenicist ideas and more broadly with ideologies of racial supremacy. But it's also important to note that the Malthusianism of the 19th century was intimately linked to the imperialist project and continued to shape policy in colonies long after it was marginalized in Britain. Now the influence of Malthusian ideas in England declined over the course of the 19th century with the beginnings of a demographic transition to lower birth rates as well as the mass immigration of the poor as part of the colonial project although of course more broad Malthusian ideas which blamed the poor for their own poverty continued to be evoked. It was in the later part of the 19th century when the cumulative effects of a number of different processes deindustrialization, taxation, forced cultivation of cash crops and other forms of integration into world markets combined as Mike Davis has written so compellingly with El Nino crop failures to produce a series of devastating famines across the global south that Malthusian ideas really came into their own in shaping colonial responses to famine. So in the Indian context colonial officials like Lord Lytton who is the viceroy during the famine of 1876 to 9 in which up to 10.3 million people are estimated to have died invoke Malthusian principles to justify the colonial state's refusal to take any action to prevent these deaths. The finance minister later Lord Cromer stated every benevolent attempt made to mitigate the effects of famine and defective sanitation serves but to enhance the evils resulting from overpopulation. And Sir Richard Temple who is appointed to ensure that India continued to produce immense revenues for Britain and it's at that time imperial war in Afghanistan even at the height of the famine implemented the notorious temple rage in relief camps which combined with hard labour could only lead to slow death by starvation. Now in the first half of the 20th century with the rise of anti-colonial struggles you had a shift in the way populations in the global south were represented and they came to be represented as a racialized threat. So it's quite interesting if you look at the kind of change in the language used about these people and these populations so whereas earlier they were described in terms of apathy and indolence and fatalism all tropes which are used to justify colonial inaction in the face of famine and starvation these same populations now became portrayed as ominously hyperactive and you constantly come across these words like swarming and teeming and seething in relation to populations but it was in the context of the Cold War and the reconfiguration of imperialism after formal independence and the rise of often communist led national liberation movements challenging the control over and distribution of resources and the population control really came into its own with extensive support from both states and a very wide range of representatives of corporate capital and this is something which I look at in more detail in my book. In 1952 coming to India in 1952 birth control advocate Margaret Sanger who herself famously shifted from being a feminist and a socialist sympathizer to a confirmed eugenicist along with Lady Hanvanthi Rama Rao launched the International Planned Parenthood Federation in Bombay The funding for the International Planned Parenthood Federation initially came from the Humor Fund and the Rockefeller Foundation It attracted funding from DuPont Chemicals, Standard Oil and Shell the US Sugar Corporation, General Motors, Jays Manhattan Bank, Goldfoil and many others which have been described as a veritable who's who of America's corporate and finance capital at the time In the same year India became one of the first countries to initiate an official family planning program Between 1952 and 1975 the Ford Foundation spent 35 million dollars to finance family planning programs and India received more than 20 million dollars of this A sterilization of women has been the main method used in India's population control policy since the late 1970s As many of you may know during the emergency of 1975 to 1977 under Indira Gandhi men were taken in large numbers forcibly to camps for the sector means This is interesting because it's one of the few examples where men have been targeted on a mass scale and it generated massive opposition and in fact it's seen as one of the main contributors to the historic electoral defeat of the Congress Party in 1977 The drive for females sterilization which then became the main method used in population policies further intensified in the context of the neoliberal reforms from the 90s onwards Since 2000 approximately 4.5 million tubectomies have been taking place every year in India And data suggests for example that in 2005 to 2006 around 37% of married women had actually undergone sterilization It's by far the most common form of contraception counted for about 75% of all contraceptive use In Bilaspur district where the sterilization camp deaths which I mentioned at the beginning took place The figure of women who had undergone sterilization was as high as 47.2% Now a major feature of this recent period has been the privatization of family planning programs So surgeries are outsourced to private clinics and hospitals and doctors, private health centers and NGOs have paid incentives for every woman that they can sterilize The doctor who single-handedly conducted 83 surgeries in less than 3 hours at one of the Chhattisar camps actually received an award previously from the state health ministry for performing a record 50,000 surgeries during his career And this scale of doing things is ongoing, for example there was another case in Varanasi at the end of January 2015 where 73 women were sterilized in 4 hours So you can imagine the degree of care and precautions which are being taken and the kind of risks involved when operations are being carried out on that scale in relatively small spaces Further as Human Rights Watch reported in 2012 in much of the country authorities aggressively pursue targets especially for female sterilization And health workers are routinely threatened with salary cuts or with losing their jobs if they don't produce women to be sterilized Now after the 1994 Cairo conference on population the Indian government claimed that it was abandoning targets which was identified as being one of the main drivers of abuses like the Chhattisgarh massacre But in fact these have simply been replaced with the euphemistically named expected levels of achievement at state level Now the Indian government's program implementation plan shows a target for Chhattisgarh state of 150,000 tubectomies for the current financial year And an increase in targets in subsequent years Now on a national level there are some officially recorded statistics and officially recorded deaths caused by sterilization between 2003 and 2012 Translating to 12 deaths a month on average and actual figures are almost certainly much higher than that These women died after being lied to about the operation and what it involved Threatened with the loss of ration cards or access to government welfare schemes Or bribed with small amounts of cash or food, sometimes just a few eggs and a handful of lentils Or as with the Chhattisgarh 2014 case actually being forcibly taken into account Now when we look at these escalation of population control interventions in India We also have to look at the contemporary resurgence of population control ideas and practices globally How they're increasingly corporate led and of course this is something we can see in many different areas of development And how this has impacted on and been incorporated into the Indian states approach Now about three and a half years ago just before the London Olympics On World Population Day in 2012 David Cameron hosted a very different kind of event in London Which was the London Family Planning Summit And it was hosted by the British government along with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Which has been very instrumental in this whole field and in influencing Britain to take the lead on population issues Along with USAID, UNFPA and other international organisations They announced a $2.6 billion family planning strategy which is called FB 2020 To get 120 million more girls and women in the poorest countries you use voluntary family planning by 2020 Now this relies very heavily on the mass promotion of long-acting hormonal, injectable and implantable contraceptives Such as Dipo Provera, Implanon and Jadel which is also known as No Plant 2 All of which have been campaigned against extensively by reproductive health activists in South Asia and elsewhere Because of the debilitating side effects they have and this is something which I'll come back to later Now on one level these new population initiatives as in earlier versions dating right back to Malthus Are geared towards shifting responsibility for poverty away from capital and onto the poor themselves So population growth in the global south is today variously held responsible for climate change For food crisis generated by the takeover of land by corporates and foreign governments For migration from the south to the north and is also being linked now to terrorism In a revival of the CIA's youth bulge theory which they had during the Cold War Which suggests that populations with a large young component are more likely to pose a security threat Now I think this concept of stratified reproduction is particularly useful here Both at a global level and as we'll see later at a national level Stratified reproduction has been defined by Reina Rapp as the hierarchical organization of reproductive health For conditiy birth experiences and child rearing that supports and rewards the maternity of some women While despising or outlawing the mother work of others So applying this notion of stratified reproduction globally We find that population discourse increasingly focuses on differences in the compositions of population Rather than only their growth So as Suzanne Schultz and Daniel Bendix note Economic development is thought to be directly linked to the age composition of a population That is the global age dependency ratios meaning a higher proportion of people of employable age Than of older people and children and adolescents Controlling fertility they suggest above all in African countries and supporting pro-natalist measures in the north Thus do not appear as new colonial policies of racist difference But as rational answers to differing age constellations Now this approach also insists that if only poor people in the global south can be persuaded or compelled not to reproduce Then the World Bank and IMF inspired new liberal policies In which health provision along with education, sanitation and other essential public services have been decimated since the 1980s Can remain in place So for example we have the former British development secretary Andrew Mitchell Describing population policies as excellent value for money And he cited Tanzania which he claims would need 131,000 fewer teachers by 2035 if fertility declines Saving millions of pounds in the long run So now both sterilization campaigns and the promotion of long-acting hormonal contraceptives Are taking place in the context of a wider withdrawal and neglect of health provision Which is central to neoliberalism So Schultz and Bendig note in their study of German development aid That it is shaped by an imbalance between population and basic health care programs For example in 2012 the German development department spent 169 million euros on population programs Which is 22 million euros more than it spent on basic health care Within population programs there's also an increase in money spent on standalone family planning programs In contrast to those dedicated to broader reproductive health Now in particular long-acting injectable and implantable hormonal contraceptives Such as Implanon produced by Merck and Cianna Press Which is the new version of DEPO-Pravera Currently being promoted by collaboration between the Gates Foundation, USID, DFID, UNFPA and Pfizer And Jadel or Norplant produced by Bayer Are specifically being promoted because they can be used in contexts where basic health provision is absent They can be administered by minimally trained health workers Who as we know are in fact often unpaid women workers And I think it's worth looking in more detail at the British government, DFID's recent initiative with Merck Which has aimed to promote the long-lasting implant Implanon To as they put it 14.5 million of the poorest women by 2015 Now if we look at what Implanon is it was actually discontinued in the UK in 2010 Because trained medical personnel were finding it too difficult to insert And there were fears about safety As well as debilitating side effects the implant was reported as disappearing inside women's bodies So what Merck has done is introduced a new version called Nexplanon Which is detectable by X-ray But they've been allowed to continue to sell their existing stocks of Implanon And it's this discontinued drug in fact which is being promoted in DFID and UNFPA programs in the poorest countries Despite these countries huge deficit of trained health personnel For example in Ethiopia one of the target countries mass insertions of Implanon Are part of what's called task shifting Where hastily trained health extension workers are being made to take on roles of doctors and nurses Now in India the increased pressure of meeting FB 2020 commitments on family planning Has been accompanied by the further undermining of already inadequate health provisions Since the Narendra Modi government came to power in 2014 Ahead of the publication on 12 December of a major study by Indian health experts Which highlighted this recently The editor of the Lancet Richard Horton commented The problem in India is that health has completely dropped off the political agenda Before Modi came in health was an issue that wasn't as high in the agenda as it should have been But it was definitely on the agenda Since Modi has come in health has completely vanished and this is a desperate predicament But I would argue however that there's another reason that population control has emerged As a central aspect of neoliberalism And this is because controlling women's fertility has become inextricably linked to a strategy of the extension And intensification of women's labour for global capital Now if you look at processes which have been taking place globally since the 1990s On the one hand you have the global contraction of the share which direct producers are getting In profits Part of what David Harvey calls accumulation by dispossession And this is partly being achieved through intensifying the unwaged and waged labour of women Through which increasingly poor households attempt to survive So there's this on the one hand and on the other hand The further incorporation of women into global labour markets and value chains Is seen as an important ongoing source for the expanded reproduction of capital So as I've argued elsewhere it's this which underpins ideas like the World Bank's slogan Gender equality is smart economics The Nike Foundation's Girl Effect All of these very catchy slogans which we see being promoted by the World Bank Like DFID and corporates and so on At the core of these ideas I'd suggest are gendered and also racialized ideas Of poor women and girls in the global south as having this infinitely elastic capacity For labour as well as for altruism Which makes them potentially ideal neoliberal subjects And I'll come back to this later As in Puerto Rico in the 1950s Which where coercive mass sterilization drives were pioneered As one of the earliest experiments in increasing profits by outsourcing manufacturing To low paid women workers in the global south in what was called at the time Operation Bootstrap Similar to today a reduction in women's fertility is being promoted within the smart economics framework Primarily as it's regarded as facilitating women's entry into labour markets And enhancing their productivity for global capital And we can see this quite explicitly explained in a whole series of documents Coming out to the World Bank and so on Thus it's the drive to intensify and incorporate the labour of women In poor households in the global south Rather than concern for rights and choices Underpins the now ubiquitous slogan of investing in women within population discourse So this is a context in which we have population control being reframed In the language of reproductive rights and choices Population control and smart economics policies are now linked Through a neoliberal discourse of potential and possibility In which adolescent girls are to be helped to become hyper-industrious neoliberal subjects Via education and access to contraception But when we look at the actual practices of population control Which rather than giving women in the global south much needed access to safe contraception Which they can control More usually involves coercive sterilizations and the testing and dumping By pharmaceutical corporations of hormonal contraceptives We can understand that the underlying connection is not one of possibility But of certain workers and their bodies being constructed in terms of racialized and gendered disposability In the sense which Melissa Wright has coined the term Now the Indian states population policies actually illustrate these connections very clearly The day after the 2012 World Population Summit which I talked about in London A human rights watch report warned that the commitments made by the Indian government at the summit would lead to further abuses And this was confirmed by a letter which was dated October 10th 2014 From the National Rural Health Mission under the aegis of the Indian Union Ministry for Health and Family Welfare Now this letter states that an increase in sterilizations is essential To meet the family planning 2020 commitment made by India at the summit Especially for 11 high focus states And it rules out the importance of other possible methods of contraception The letter ordered an increase in the payment given to all those involved in carrying out sterilizations in these states Meanwhile it emerged that aid from Britain's DFID Had helped to fund forcible sterilizations in the Indian states of Madhya Pradesh and Bihar In which a number of women had died in 2012 under similar conditions to those in Chhattisgarh But to fully understand the complex of forces which lead to such deaths We also have to look at the specificities of the Indian neoliberal state at this moment We need to understand the neoliberal state controlled as it is present by the Hindu right In terms of both the withdrawal from social provision as well as the intensification of state intervention on behalf of globalized capital And in the context of resistance escalation of repression and state violence So this then leads us to highlight three related processes Which shape the targeting of the fertility of women who are marked by their gender class caste and community So first of all as I've talked about there's the strategy of extending and intensifying women's labor Now in the Indian context this is epitomized by Modi's current campaign which is called Make in India And it's based on the promotion of India as a location for low cost efficient and largely female labor Now a recent study of the experiences of mainly Dalit young women migrant workers in Tamil Nadu's textile industry By the Centre for Research on Multinational Cooperation and the India Committee of the Netherlands Showed how gender and caste based restrictions on mobility and interaction And other coercive and abusive practices are central to the operations of the factories Which supply European and US clothing brands As Kavita Krishnan points out while practices such as the strict segregation of workers The bans on going out, the bans on having a cell phone are all being enforced in the name of culture And in the name of providing reassurance to parents of the young women workers They're extremely effective for capital as well She says by preventing workers from interacting with other male workers or activists from outside And discouraging socialization even among women workers on the factory floor The women workers are very effectively prevented from even visualizing the possibility of unionizing This suggests that rather than challenging gender norms The expansion of this form of employment actually builds on and reinforces factory up agenda values It also gives an indication I think of the symbiotic relationship between the Hindu right With its violent so-called moral policing of gender norms on the one hand And the neoliberal economic project on the other Which I suggest are not only compatible but actually interdependent in contemporary India Now women's labour is also being mobilized through the expansion and the deepening financialization Of microfinance and self-help groups I mentioned earlier how the discourse of gender equality is smart economics Reinforces an understanding of some groups of women as having this infinite capacity for labour And I came across an example a couple of years ago which I think illustrates this very well It was a report which was commissioned by the government of Orisha To look at the conditions experienced by mainly Dalit landless agricultural labour women And basically what this report found was that these women When you looked at the work they were doing in the fields, the wage labour And the domestic labour they were doing at home They were generally working about 16 hours a day And in the peak season when there was more wage labour available It was actually longer than that So the report acknowledged this but then when it came to making recommendations The first recommendation was that these women should be provided with income generating activities In their leisure time And the report actually bemoaned the fact that these women were using their leisure time Unproductively They were apparently watching television playing cards Gossiping and even sleeping So you know I think that gives a sense of what underpins some of these ideologies about women's labour Now a third way in which women's labour is being mobilized Is through the recruitment of rural women as unpaid volunteers Who receive a kind of very uncertain honorarium rather than a wage In a number of schemes for social provision So you have the Asha workers accredited social health activists You have Kresh workers and you have school midday meal workers Who are all termed not as state employees but as volunteers In fact the Asha workers are among those who are expected to recruit women for sterilization as part of their tasks Currently I've been doing some work around the struggles of midday meal workers in Bihar Who are organizing to demand the rights of state employees But what has really struck me is that these women are extremely clear That the violence which they face in their day to day work At the intersection of gender, caste and class Is really central to how their exploitation operates Now equally important as the extension of women's labour In the Indian context is the process of dispossession and displacement of populations Through corporate takeover of land and destruction of livelihoods And population control initiatives in India can also be understood in these terms So if we look for example at the state of Chhattisgarh Which is a mineral rich state and which is ruled by the BJP Also the party of Narendra Modi which is in power at the center Where the sterilization camp deaths took place in November 2014 You can see a very clear illustration of this Not only is it one of India's poorest states with abysmal health care provision But in the last decade and a half the region has been overrun With transnational mining corporations, security forces to clear the way for them And international NGOs Now these corporations are taking over fertile agricultural land And uprooting whole villages, displacing thousands of Adivasi or indigenous people State paramilitaries and armed vigilante groups Among them the recently relaunched Salwa Judam Set up with initial funding from steel companies Tata and Essar Have played a very key role in this displacement And women and girls have been targeted for horrific sexual violence At the hands of the police and paramilitaries The most widely known case is that of activist Soni Sohri Who is targeted for exposing police atrocities But there are many others It's within this framework where poor people and their livelihoods Are simply an obstacle to be swept aside in the name of development Which we can read as corporate land grab essentially That we need to place the intensified targeting of women From these poorest groups for coercive sterilization Now thirdly I want to look at the question of embodied and discursive violence Being promoted by the forces of what I call Hindu supremacism Associated with Modi and the RSS Which is the kind of core group around which all the other Hindu right wing organizations are organized And its relationship to population control Now so far we've looked at the impact of the Hindu rights Ascendants to power at the center and the formation of the Modi government In 2014 primarily in terms of kind of things being intensified The intensification of the violence of population control The appropriation of resources and the extension of women's labor So the mark deepening and widening of processes is already underway But when considering population control We also need to think about the dominance of Hindu supremacist ideology And how this affects these processes and facilitates and legitimizes them And I think it's useful in this context to return here To the notion of stratified reproduction Of some people's reproduction being valued and others being demonized Now the trope of higher population growth rates Among India's minority Muslim community In relation to the Hindu majority is a central element In a whole arsenal of myths Which are repeatedly mobilized by Hindu right wing groups In order to orchestrate communal or inter-religious violence Which particularly targets women's bodies and those of their children Now public discourse has been permeated with this notion About Muslim population growth recently With a whole series of statements For example on August 26th last year An MP of the ruling BJP Asked the Prime Minister to implement a population control law Specifically for Muslims In October the RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat made a statement That India needed to address population imbalances between communities And earlier we had the BJP MP Sakshi Maharaj's statement That Hindu women should have at least four children To redress this supposed imbalance So this very much echoes of course eugenicist ideas As Margaret Sanger famously stated in 1919 More children from the fit and less from the unfit That is the chief issue of birth control And as Thanika Sarkar has written so memorably Women and children are particularly targeted during communal violence In ways which explicitly focus on this question of reproduction And of preventing it So the idea of killing children and killing women Who will otherwise produce children in the future And subjecting them to horrific forms of mutilation Targeting their reproductive organs And this is something we had seen of course in Goodrath in 2002 In the genocide against the Muslim minority But it was also seen in many different contexts Like for example the massacres of Dalits And other agricultural labourers in Bihar By Apakast, by the Ranveer Singh in the late 90s You had the same sort of thing of killing women Who would otherwise become the mothers of Naxalites and so on And the other aspect which is certainly not new in any way But has been intensified and institutionalized in new ways Is the dehumanization of Dalits in particular So now we're seeing that getting legitimization Of the highest levels of government For example when two young children Three year old Vaibhav and nine month old Divya Were burnt to death in BJP ruled Haryana The home was set on fire by Apakast men As the family slept inside You had a minister in the Modi government Vaibhav Singh absolving the government of responsibility And likening the murder to someone throwing stones at a dog So I'd suggest that there's a very close relationship Within this kind of dehumanization And the possibility of escalating population control Atrocities of the kind we're seeing I'd suggest that these discourses Are not in contradiction with But actually complement and reinforce The neoliberal approach to population control And its eugenicist and neo-malthusian roots Whereas ultimately those women who constitute this Not belonging to the nation In a variety of ways who are targeted While those who belong are constructed Is having an obligation to reproduce the nation So Hindu women having four children and so on So just then to conclude In the context we've discussed I think it's very evident how Talking about reproductive rights and choices As population policies increasingly do Serves to obscure the acute violence Such policies entail And to invisibilize the structural inequalities Of power and resources Which make this violence possible Given this many feminists and sexual And reproductive rights activists in India and elsewhere Have instead adopted a demand for reproductive justice Which as you may know was originally developed By black feminist activists in the US And continues to be used in a variety of contexts Now whereas the reproductive rights approach Claims to grant choices to individuals Within a neoliberal framework Which remains unquestioned The demand for reproductive justice Makes visible much broader structural forces Economic, political and social Which deny women control over their bodies And over wider processes of reproduction But having said this I think we need to be aware of how This notion too of reproductive justice Is being appropriated and transformed For example it's now being used extensively By the Ford Foundation to focus exclusively On what they call cultural practices For example early marriage To really think about the possibility Of reproductive justice we need to engage Not only with gender relations of power In households and communities Although these are extremely important But also with the complex of local, National and global forces Which as we've been suggesting Combine with them to render certain bodies disposable This also implies locating struggles For reproductive justice in the context Of other forms of ongoing resistance To neoliberal dispossession And in turn it's extremely important That the demands for reproductive justice Are incorporated as a central element In resistance to communal violence Of the Hindu right, corporate land grab The destruction of livelihoods And the environment Resistance to occupation and militarization And to struggles of women workers Which are taking place in multiple contexts In India at present So I'm going to leave it there Thank you very much Thanks very much So now we'll hear from Diana Diana Kuhl is a professor Of political and social theory At the School of Politics and Sociology At Birkbeck Her research focuses on modern and contemporary Political and social theory Primarily on critical theory Existential phenomenology Post-structuralism and feminism She's a theorist And she's also published widely Her 1993 book was called Political theory from ancient misogyny To contemporary feminism And more recently with Samantha Frost New materialisms, ontology, agency And politics So she's going to Just kind of frame some of the issues About which Kalpana has raised And then we will open it to the floor Thank you Thank you so much for inviting me To comment on such an interesting paper You may have thought from my introduction That I'm not a very appropriate person To respond to this But in fact I've been working on a project On the population question For the last few years Funded by a Liberhume grant In which I've been looking at The broader theoretical issues That underpin some of the More specific debates That you raise And I think India is probably A very interesting case study Of somewhere where Population control policies Went horribly, horribly wrong And where there's been a very lively debate About the kind of issues Of reducing fertility And population growth And the relationship to development On the one hand And on the other The egregious practices Of human rights I think overall the structure Of your paper That really interested me Was the way you take on a huge challenge Which is to show the interconnections Between official neo-Malthusian policies Between neoliberal economics And with the Hindu right And it's really those connections That I wanted to make a few comments on To ask you about because They're clearly extremely complicated Historically variable And I think maybe at times more complex But also I think A significant issue here Is how necessary those relationships are And how contingent they are So whether we could envisage them Being played out rather differently And I think what you bring out Incredibly well in the Indian case And what makes this triangulation Particularly interesting there Is the way all this is happening In a very particular context Of specifically caste And gender hierarchies As we know there's a huge amount Of gender violence against women In India and that's big And that plus caste violence Has been always very much entangled With India's neo-Malthusian Family planning programs So I think there are three particular Relationships here that are interesting To perhaps disentangle First of all is the relationship Between population control policies As such and the contingencies Of the Indian situation Obviously population control Is a very emotive term I think it's noticeable that More recent Indian literature And particularly for example The response to the 2011 census The language is much more shifted Towards population stabilisation And I wonder in that context Can we say as you seem to That all population stabilisation Policies are necessarily Motivated by racism and eugenics Or are there some particularities In the Indian context Which make that link much stronger Because these are often spoken of As synonyms but for example Some environmentalists would argue That it's precisely affluent populations Which have hyper-capita incomes Greenhouse gas emissions and so on Who are the greatest threat To the environment so It's possible there are other Relatives it seems to me That may make this a particularly Indian story Secondly the relationship Between the state and its Official family planning policies And Indian society Because it seems as if The kind of hierarchies You refer to really infiltrate So much of the policy repertoire In India Do you think that population Is a particular vehicle Which has been used for advancing An uncivil society Are the connections there Unbreakable? Again Is the source of violence The state's population policies as such Or should we be looking much more Towards the kind of everyday violence That pervades the state And thirdly Neoliberal anti-natalism And it seems to me Really interesting the connections You're making between the Hindu right And a resurgence of neoliberal Or particularly neoliberal Neomathusionism And it reminds me really of the 1980s When preceding this in the west There'd been a real sense among feminists That planning was something that they wanted to campaign for That was emancipatory In which a small family norm Allowed women to go out and work And that this was a really important element Of their freedom So on the one hand I think that the connection Between the new policies And the rise of the Hindu right Reminds me of the rise of neoliberalism In the states originally Where all the limits to growth arguments Were thrown out In the name of a social conservatism Which both argued that population growth Was not dangerous to economies On the contrary Population growth and economic growth Became closely entangled thereafter But also with socially conservative views On abortion And I would just note here You said a lot about the violence Of compulsory sterilization So you're obviously right In the Indian context This has a very long history But what are also about The kind of violence Involved in women who are obliged To take pregnancies to term Who don't have access To decent family planning Services who find with privatization That they can't access safe contraception Is it here the particular form That reproductive technologies Have taken in India That is the problem Or is it that you seem Sometimes to suggest that family planning Policies are always motivated By some kind of sinister Either corporate or racist interests It would seem to me that it's really important To keep in mind all those surveys That show women in the global south Some 200 million have an unmet need For contraception That perhaps funding isn't always used For egregious purposes of control And that women's access to safe abortion To reproductive health To not having repeated pregnancies Which we know hurt maternal health Are these not also aspects that we That perhaps just make the situation Rather more complex Having said that also I've got another couple of minutes The issue of incentives, disincentives and targets I think is a really fascinating one Because clearly in India They have been used for coercive means And I thought it was really interesting That at the Cairo conference It was actually the Indian delegation Which put this onto the agenda And had it written into the plan of action But the paragraphs dealing with that After Cairo are really ambiguous Because on the one hand they fully recognize Their use for coercive purposes in India And yet at the same time They note that this is the kind of bread and butter Of liberal governance That incentives, targets Absolutely caught in neoliberal governmentality You know the NHS may not have targets For sterilizing people But it has targets for almost everything else Incentives and disincentives In the form of market mechanisms Absolutely pervade the whole The whole field of liberal governance So I think it's an interesting question Why they became such sinister Instruments in India Whether we want to throw out Whether the language of targets And incentives is always coercive And if so where that leaves liberal governance So I think there are lots of interesting Biopolitical measures here Which are in play And which perhaps are not particular to India But are also common to many countries But with very different degrees Of coercion and voluntarism If there's anything else you can read Okay I would just say that I think the advantages or disadvantages Of fertility growth or decline For neoliberalism are really complex And they depend a great deal on the state Of the labour market and on human capital And so it's a really difficult field For neoliberals to negotiate Because actually they quite like to turn Fertility on and off as a tap In tandem with economic cycles But you know the two obviously out of sync Okay thank you Okay well thank you very much Diana For those very interesting responses And points I'm not going to respond to all of them Because I do want to have time For an open discussion with the audience But I would like to respond to a few of them One thing is I'd like to start off By saying that one point Where I think we clearly agreed Is that there is a tremendous need For particularly in the global south For access to safe contraception Which women can control And I think there's no doubt about that I think that though that When that access is shaped By the kind of forces Which are shaping it at the moment I don't think this is something specific to India Then I think that's not going to happen And I think that's what's extremely problematic And I think you know yes I've talked a lot about India And it's specific history with sterilizations But I think also there's a tremendous degree Of concern about the new long acting contraceptives Which are new only in the sense of New forms of delivery Which are supposed to be easier And are in fact a recycling of Contraceptives around which women in the global north Have actively campaigned about their dangers And so on So I think that is something where I would I would slightly disagree with your sort of In a way your picture of sort of Indian exceptionalism And I think you know you've got Sexual and reproductive health activists In sub-Saharan Africa And in Latin America Equally raising these kind of questions For example you know when the Gates Foundation Is promoting Sayana Press Which is Depopravera As the answer And they're saying that they are currently running tests In Africa to see if women can Inject themselves That is basically being put forward In the context of a continuing kind of Aviceration of health services So what that means is that You know women don't have access to Any kind of support Which is a very different context from The broadest situation of access to Contraceptives in this country For example where you see the NHS is there If something goes wrong If you have an implant Which is causing unbearable side effects Then you can have it removed in theory anyway And that's a very different context And I think we have to continue I think what activists are saying Is that they have to continue to press For women in the global south To have the same rights To those sorts of Levels of safety and care Coming on to this whole question You raised which I think is very important About the approach of feminists In the west in the 1980s And how important that was The whole question of freedom and so on And I think absolutely That's certainly the case Having said that I think In a way the 1980s was probably The time when the whole question Of reproductive rights became a very divisive one As I'm sure you're aware For the women's movement Because of the very different experiences Not only of women in the global south But also of black and ethnic minority women In the global north Where the right to choose to find Narrowly in terms of abortion rights Was not the only or perhaps Even the main question in terms of Reproductive rights because of Women being targeted for sterilization And this is still going on In fact for being specifically targeted For injectables for example And implantables Women in prison Women with disabilities Migrant women And ethnic minority women Being particularly targeted And this is something you know It's happening now As a student of mine Is doing some work at the moment About programs in Hackney Which you know of this type So I think you know that That is something to bear in mind I also think the whole question Of you know the rise of neoliberalism In the 80s in tandem with Social conservatism is very important But I think that we also have to look At kind of the way neoliberalism Has shaped shifted in terms of It's gender discourse and the way In which now you have a situation Where a kind of you know A lip service to gender equality Has become ubiquitous really With the neoliberalism And now you certainly do have A great deal of focus on Reproductive rights in the way That I've outlined And I don't think that is Specific to India certainly Having said that you know Abortion is still obviously a Massive issue across you know The US, Latin America, a lot of Africa and so on and you know If you look at for example The Gates Foundation a lot of the time You have implantable and injectable Long-term contraceptives being Promoted precisely in the context Of sort of preventing pregnancies And therefore abortions so it's not You know it's very much linked To continuing denial of access To abortion in a lot of places Having said that we do need To look at different places And the specificity of different places As you said and certainly in India That's not the case in fact One could argue that part of You know for many middle class Women part of being a good woman Has come to be defined as Going in for sex elective abortions In order to produce sons for the family So there are differences about Abortion but you know Still a very key issue In terms of population control Being necessarily racist or whether I don't think we can argue that That's a specifically Indian story In fact what I talked about In the context of the kind of Importance of race was much more About the global story really And much more about the way in Which there is still a kind of sense Of particular populations Being the one whose growth is problematic And I think you're right There are environmental activists Focusing on populations in the global north Who have a much bigger carbon footprint And so on and in fact you know It's arguable that in the few countries In the world which have increasing Population growth rates which are In sub-Saharan Africa They have some of the smallest Carbon footprints in the world There are a lot of contradictions Around the fact that it's those Parts of the world which are being Targeted not by the Indians Stay clearly but by global Institutions you know Including governments in the north Including the Gates foundation Which has become very central Including of course the pharmaceutical Corporations are very much part Of the story So I think I'll leave it at that There's lots of other things I could Stop in the discussion Okay great so we'll start with Ali I'm Steve Lepp Part of the National World Digitalising Nature is starting However I wonder If we can make a tour of the Gates About neoliberal exceptionalism Because effectively So in a sense my question to you Would be why would you I think it's neoliberalism In terms of what's happening now Instead there's a very long I think it's special to neoliberalism In relation to the international Because that would be the The first question The second question is in relation to What you define as this Intensification of women's labour Which I'll agree with you With something that we observe at Global level but instead India is an outlier If you look at estimates At least for wage labour So in a sense there's a lot of statistical work In the middle Et cetera that looks at How only by looking at Unwage contributions You're actually able to see What's going on in India because It doesn't really manifest In paid labour In fact the example you mentioned about Amataka is one of the very few cases Where you do observe humanisation in India So I wonder if also It just should be stressed with reference To the Indian case the way The channel in which this problem Is still in place As opposed to other places where It could be autographed at least In terms of opening up Experiences Why don't we take a few For five or something If you want to speak Just indicate My question is sort of related to The first question that she also raised Which is to sort of look at The realisation that you are looking at For instance liberalisation And also Hindu revivalism And the Hindu right when coming in Rather than looking at The political dispensations At different stages I would want you to sort of Link it up or sort of Have a thoughts on the relationship Between state itself as an institution And how women bodies are perceived Or female bodies are perceived As child bearers and rareers And in that context Probably we would see a more Of continuation in terms of How the Indian state has dealt with Women and the connection With population growth and control Of course which gets sort of Intensified with Three spaces coming in So just a quick answer Thank you Can you speak up? Yes One more question And you can answer One more question And you can answer Thanks for the lecture I can't really wrap my head around Modi is making an India campaign Gives the idea that there is Proper female labour available While on the same scale On the opposite end of the screen I have communal violence So I don't see How those two kind of fit into this Or the paradigm of what? Into the paradigm of what? Sorry? The idea of a developing nation Okay Okay So I think if you don't mind I'll kind of go backwards I'll just start with yours very briefly Which is that I think A lot of people have sort of suggested You know there's this huge contradiction Between Between the sort of ideas Of the Hindu right as well as the scale Of violence that we've seen Perpetrated by organizations associated With the BJP and the RSS and so on And you know More these economic policies That there's a contradiction there And in a way what I'm suggesting Is that in fact we need to think Of it much more in terms of actually Having quite a symbiotic relationship In the sense of The way in which These forms of violence actually You know don't They don't necessarily disrupt And they may in fact further The interests of Indian and global corporate capital You know which is why for example You've had so much support For The so-called Goodrath model From Corporates even though Who didn't really have a problem with The 2002 genocide Taking place in Goodrath under Modi You know so you have this kind of And in fact You know post the The violence and so on you had A lot of like Real estate being taken over All kinds of things happening as a result Of that displacement which it caused And so you know there are a lot of arguments To suggest that in fact there's a kind of There isn't a contradiction there And in fact you know the idea that there's Two strands within the Hindu right and so on In fact now that the Government is in power we can see How closely they're working together in fact So I think you know one needs to be careful About assuming that there's a contradiction there In terms of In terms of The Betty Bochow campaign I think you know you've already said Some of the key points about it I think it's I mean this was About the girl child right And about Against Female Feet side and You know which is a huge issue In India and in favour of girls Education so it was focusing on the Daughter so clearly you know It was framed within this quite sort of Battery Kind of notion of save our daughters and So on and as you said had this Undercurrent about You know the problems of Their imbalance in terms of marriage I think in a way it's quite A good example of the kind of gender Discourse we have In the sort of within the Development model which is now being Promoted because you do Have these two things going together On the one hand the kind of Idea of Women and girls as sort of having a Potential for the economy and so on But within a framework which is Highly socially conservative and You have this situation then where Women are You know where you have This mobilization To an extent and it's very much a Potential mobilization of women's Labour Making use of The of gender norms Which are assumed to sort of keep Women very docile which are assumed To You know not really Involved the kind of challenging Of Patriarchy prescribed ways of behaviour For women and I think Betty Butchelle kind of fits in with that Combination quite well actually so We can look at it that way And yes I mean there is The whole question of I mean pro natalism in terms of The Save Our Daughters campaign I mean that's in the context of This gender imbalance which has come Out of years of Sun preference so I don't know if Pro natalism in that sense Although obviously as I mentioned There are you know Hindu Writing ideologues talking about The need for Hindus to have more children Which is a slightly different issue I think And coming on to The point about Women's You know obviously yes India is a country which has a very low Participation rate of women officially And what we're not Seeing today the kind of thing for example We've seen even in Bangladesh Where you've got Women Entering factories and so on in large numbers And that has had certain impacts You know different Stories from different people but clearly It has had an impact to a certain extent On gender relations So I think it is Much more about then This being a kind of potential Which is being seen as something Which could happen is a kind of seen as An untapped resource But I think precisely because of this Low participation in particularly formal Wage labor I think you're absolutely right That in order to look at the way Women's Work has been intensified We have to look both at the kind of Extension of kind of Reproductive labor Which is accompanied New liberal reforms as well as The whole question of sort of informal Work and so on and that's really where You can see that process going on Of the intensification of women's labor But in terms of incorporating them Into the formal workforce it's very much You know this idea of untapped Potential which again fits in With things like the Betty butchow Campaign And I mean yes The whole question of the relationship Between sterilization And the advent of neoliberalism I mean yes clearly You know we know about What happened during the emergency And sterilization has continued since then As I said sterilization of women is the major Form of family planning And so on I think the point is really that It got a tremendous boost After the After this came to the fore globally Once again which has really Been relatively recently So you know as I said India kind of signing up to particular Commitments around FB 2020 And so on has had this kind of Direct effect that It's a counterbalance to the kind Of outrage and the kind of pressure From civil society after some of the The sterilization deaths which got A great deal of publicity because There is this pressure and I think That's really the point that You know sterilization Was there all along but it's had a tremendous Boost and it's now been kind of incorporated Into this wider Kind of international drive So that's why I kind of Associated which and I think that International drive can very clearly be Understood in the context of neoliberalism And it does very much fit in with that And in terms of your point About the The state as As an institution I think the state as an institution Is very important to look at the tremendous Continuities and I think we can see You know I mean we can see it manifested In a lot of different levels in the terms of As you said the way women's bodies Are seen and perceived and understood And treated and I think You know I mean You know if you look at for example Women's experience of childbirth In government hospitals you know It's pretty horrific and you know It reflects that again You know the sense of disposability Really this complete dehumanization Which women are experiencing And I think that is very Very important to look at the continuity I think the point is really that You know I think it is Important to look at what difference it Makes At a particular time the kind of Forces which are in power So I think you need to look at both Continuities but I also think You need to look at the difference It makes when When these things are happening And they are kind of described Or you know at the highest levels As being mistakes or aberrations There's a difference when you then When you have statements being made at the Highest levels which really say well This is our policy which is essentially The message which is given by the Kind of statements which we've had From ministers and so on Which is something to think about Okay Other questions Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah I mean I think the thing is You know Again you know these are These are very important feminist issues And they are not you know Questions to neglect But I think the point is that like When reproductive justice Increasingly becomes something which is Talked about only in this particular Context and in the context of cultural Practices Then a lot of things get excluded A lot of things get made invisible You know like the kind of You know the other things which are Involved in reproductive justice So for example the experience of a woman You know going to a sterilization Camp of the type I've described Would not then come within a Reproductive justice framework If reproductive justice is increasingly Understood purely in terms of The thing the The pressure she experiences Within the household Or within her community you know Because then you wouldn't look for example At the question of targets By the stage you wouldn't look at The relationship between You know a landless woman worker And a health functionary And the imbalance of power there You wouldn't look at You know the impact On that woman of You know losing access to land Which she previously had And why that might mean That you know She felt it was necessary to Accept An offer of sort of a small amount of Lentils and be sterilized in return So a lot of questions then get excluded And I think this has happened already In terms of reproductive rights Which become like Okay you know which of The contraceptives Are being promoted And that's your choice And I think it's in danger of happening a little bit With reproductive justice as well so I just Kind of highlighting that this is a kind of On-going process when new ideas get developed To kind of In a way address Broader questions than earlier words And they tend to get kind of Taken on board in a much more limited way Which then transforms their meaning So that's what it was So we have time for one possibly two more Questions, we have one here Yeah go ahead Right Right Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah Go ahead which was in Delhi, so they look at issues of how to get here by the standardization, but Ford is one of their major donors. So do you think, do you necessarily think that if it is with the money coming from Ford, it is bad? I mean, it could be a certain good thing or... Yeah, should I say, should I say there's any... Yeah, just if there's any other kind of... Yeah. I think the Gates Foundation and the support of these programs, I just wondered if you could mention other key big companies which maybe we could take on and maybe initiate some kind of campaign on it. And perhaps one final one, did you have your hand up? No? No. We can get conditions. Okay. Okay, do you want to take this? Yeah, okay, so in terms of the whole question of Sargassi, yes, I mean, thank you for bringing that up because I think it's very relevant. And in fact, as you probably know, it's a huge issue in India where in fact India is positioning itself in the Sargassi market in a very big way. And I think, yes, I mean, I think it does bring up a lot of kind of quite similar issues, as you said, in a different way. I mean, I think the idea of... I think what's interesting is the idea that if you look at the way companies who are involved in Sargassi are marketing themselves, it's very much about... That, I mean, not only obviously the nature of commercial Sargassi is that the woman will not have any rights over the baby, but the fact that the woman... They market themselves on the basis that the woman is completely removed from her own context. So she does... And I think that is very interesting in terms of the attempt in a way to kind of disconnect the woman's body from her life, in a way, and also from the associations of poverty. And there's also a lot of NRIs who go for this. And so there are questions of caste and so on and all of that. So I think it's very interesting. I mean, I think that certainly is relevant. And I think it also shows that it isn't ultimately about a kind of an anti-natal or pro-natal approach, but really about the kind of... About, as you said, this notion of gender disposability, I mean, gender in a very intersectional sense. In terms of your point about... Yeah, I mean, I'm not in the business of saying like something is always bad or that... And I think I do appreciate that also, NGOs are in a situation very often of kind of needing to take funding from various sources and so on. But I think there is a problem about very often the kind of limitations which funders place on what can be raised and what can't. And the fact that very often there are... There are particular buzzwords, there are particular themes which are considered to be the ones that NGOs should be focusing on and others which simply aren't, which then fall off the agenda. So I think there is, I mean, I think the whole question of NGOs'ization of the women's movement is a huge issue, not only in India and South Asia, but also elsewhere. Do it's been written about extensively in Latin America and so on. So I think it's a question to go on being aware of I think in a way what's on a more positive note, I think that, and this is not the case everywhere, but I think certainly in India we can't see quite a vibrant women's movement which is not NGO led. And there are a lot of contradictions there and there are a lot of kind of conflicts and so on, but it is there. And I think that's something to bear in mind because very often there is a sense that NGOs would like, international NGOs would like to really equate themselves with society and the NGOs which they find represent social movements and they don't. So we have to keep kind of visualizing those movements which are actually not NGO's. Sorry, there was, so can you just remind me of the question which is, yeah, okay. So yeah, and that was, yeah, I mean the main ones at the moment there are a number of corporates which are very involved in this whole process. I mean there's Merck which is the manufacturer of Implanon. There's Pfizer which is now taken over the manufacturer of depoprovera and they're promoting this thing called Cyanopress. I mean that's very interesting because that's basically saying that women should ultimately be able to inject it themselves. But in a way like the whole argument about long-acting hormonal contraceptives has been that women need something which isn't necessarily going to be known about by their partners and families. And now they're saying, well, you know, women should do this in their own homes and they shouldn't have to go to clinics or have any contact with any health workers. So there's a lot of contradictions and I feel that it fits in very much with a kind of, as I said, a kind of cutting away of all kind of connection with state-provided health services. And then there's Bayer which is a big German company very much very closely linked up to German aid and development so on. So yeah, that's a few of them. So join me in thanking Kalpana for a wonderful talk with us in the talk. And I'd just like to draw your attention to this leaflet. This is the rest of the seminar series and you can find them over there if you don't have one. Next week we'll be meeting here, Tuesday 5 p.m. for Marianna Mazzaccato and she's going to be speaking on economic policy for market fixing to market making and creating. So do come along for that. And if you're around, join us in the SCR on the first floor for reception. Thank you. Yeah, it's great. It's really nice to be here. I think it's like the difference. Yeah, and it's really that link which with the neoliberal policies I think is really an interesting one. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's great. Yeah. Is it juicy here? Yes, yes, I have a shop still.