For reproductive justice in an era of Gates and Modi – the violence of India’s population policies

This article addresses India’s contemporary population control policies and practices as a form of gendered violence perpetrated by the state and transnational actors, arguing that the targeting of poor, Adivasi and Dalit women for coercive mass sterilizations and unsafe injectable and implantable contraceptives is made possible by the long-term construction of particular women’s lives as devalued and disposable, and of their bodies as excessively fertile and therefore inimical to development and progress. It further considers how population policy is currently embedded in the neoliberal framework of development being pursued by the Indian state. In particular, it argues that the violence of population policies is being deepened as a result of three central and interrelated aspects of this framework: corporate dispossession and displacement, the intensification and extension of women’s labour for global capital, and the discourses and embodied practices of Hindu supremacism. At the same time, India’s population policies cannot be understood in isolation from the global population control establishment, which is increasingly corporate led, and from broader structures of racialised global capital accumulation. The gendered violence of India’s contemporary population policies and the practices they produce operates at several different scales, all of which involve the construction of certain bodies as ‘unfit’ to reproduce and requiring intervention and control