Coercion in a Soft State: The Family-Planning Program of India: Part I: The Myth of Voluntarism

Abstract

The coercion practiced during the Indian of the mid 1970s during which government officials of all kinds virtually forced men to accept vasectomies is contrasted with the voluntary nature of the family planning program prior to these events. The author argues that this assumed voluntarism is a deeply entrenched idea though not basically correct. The idea is based on 3 supports which the author examines in turn: 1) Gunnar Myrdals notion of India as a which uses persuasion and incentives (as opposed to a hard state which uses regulations backed by compulsion); 2) the Classical Diffusion Model of innovations and its applicability to the financial incentives of the family planning program; and 3) the Bucharest Conference of 1974 where the slogan development is the best contraceptive was coined. The author concludes that incidents of coercion in the period before the emergency have been treated as aberrations while less blatant evidence has been incorporated into a predetermined model of voluntarism. By 1975 the 3 supports of this myth were well established. However the author shows that the idea of the soft state did not exclude the possibility of ad hoc coercion; sterilization by financial incentive could not be assimilated to a diffusion model of economic change; and the Bucharest era did not substantiate its motto. The hollowness of the myth thus exposed can help show a more direct relationship between the sterilization excesses of the and the earlier experiments with family planning.