Most of the books in this series are doctrine. This one is a data set. Victor Petrov's India: Spotlight on Population, issued in English by Progress Publishers in 1985 and translated from the Russian by Glenys Ann Kozlov, is a Soviet demographer's monograph on the movement of India's population "from 1872 to 1981" — the run of the great Indian censuses, from the first universal counts under the Raj to the fourth taken by the independent Republic. The publisher's own blurb describes it accurately: "This book by the Soviet scholar, Professor V. Petrov, is devoted to the movement of population in India from 1872 to 1981. The author deals with the numbers, density and composition of the population, its natural growth, migration, and so forth." Its chapters march through size, density and distribution; national and religious composition; sex and age structure; mortality and natural increase; migration; urbanisation; literacy; and the relation of population to the economy. It is a genuine Progress book — the imprint occurs where the front and back matter place it and nowhere it does not belong — and, unlike a good deal of what this house exported, most of it is real scholarship performed with care.
That is the first thing to establish, because a reader who comes to a Progress title expecting a tract will misread this one. Petrov reconstructs India's population back through the pre-census centuries by triangulating tax rolls, army sizes, epidemic mortality and the accounts of foreign travellers; he weighs the competing estimates of Kingsley Davis and the Indian demographers J. M. Datta and P. Nath against one another and declines to pretend the record is cleaner than it is; he is candid that once the indirect indices multiply, "we may become utterly confused by these contradictory indices, since the greater their number, the less likely they are to tally." He knows the Indian census literature — Gopalasvami, Gozulov, the margins of error argued over the 1951, 1961 and 1971 counts — and he uses it. Where the book states its own date it states it plainly enough: the latest hard material is the preliminary 1981 census and the UN forecasts revised in 1981, and the newest policy instrument it discusses is the Sixth Five-Year Plan (1980–85). The Russian manuscript therefore closed around 1982–83 and reached English in 1985. Nothing in the argument turns on the two-year lag; what matters is that everything the book might have said about the previous decade was fully available to its author.
The core of the book is an argument against Malthus, and it is the right argument. Petrov sets himself squarely against the neo-Malthusian claim "that today's population growth exceeds that of material benefits and that the situation will get worse as time goes on," and he answers it not with slogans but with India's own history. If sheer numbers determined welfare, he observes, then Indians ought to have been better off when there were fewer of them — and they were not:
"there were almost threefold less people in India at the beginning of the century than there are at present, but at the same time the standard of living of the Indians was no better than it is today. On the contrary, they were even more poverty-stricken at that time, which means that the number of people on the subcontinent in itself by no means determines their standard of living. As always and everywhere, the well-being enjoyed by the masses is determined by the development of the productive forces and the share of the benefits that the people can retain for themselves."
From this he draws the correct structural conclusion: that "population growth cannot be regarded as a self-sufficient phenomenon and the restriction of that growth as an aim in itself," and that under India's existing "relations of production" the poor will stay poor whatever the birth-rate does. He notes, pointedly, that at the 1965 World Population Conference in Belgrade "India's representatives referred to the poverty in their country as the consequence of the numerousness of its population" — and he rejects that alibi. Throughout, he ties India's demographic weight to colonial underdevelopment, to the caste barriers that immobilise labour, to agrarian overpopulation and the "relative agrarian overpopulation" that drives men into the towns, rather than to any biological failing of the poor to control themselves.
This deserves to be said without hedging, because in 1985 it was the honourable side of a real argument. The Western population-control establishment — the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, the World Bank, the population-planning apparatus of the American state — had spent two decades insisting that the poverty of the global South was a problem of too many babies, and had put money and pressure behind programmes to reduce their number. Petrov's Marxist demography, which locates the problem in the distribution of land and product rather than in the fertility of the poor, was analytically the stronger position, and the coercive disasters of the very population-control movement he was arguing against would prove him more right than its funders. On the level of theory, India: Spotlight on Population wins its case.
Which makes the book's central omission all the more telling. A Soviet volume published in 1985, "spotlighting" India's population, devoting a full treatment to the family-planning programme, and arguing on principle against the coercion of the poor in the name of the birth-rate — such a book runs directly at the largest coercive population-control programme in human history, which had taken place in India less than a decade before it was written. And it does not mention it.
Between 1975 and 1977, under the Emergency that Indira Gandhi declared on 26 June 1975 and that suspended civil liberties for twenty-one months, her son Sanjay Gandhi's family-planning drive carried out mass sterilisation on a scale never attempted before or since — on the order of six million operations in 1976–77 alone, overwhelmingly of the poor, and falling with particular weight on Muslims and on slum and pavement dwellers who were sterilised as the price of a ration card, a house plot, or freedom from the bulldozer. It produced riots, police shootings and deaths, and it was a principal reason Gandhi lost the general election of March 1977. It is the single most important fact about India's population policy in the twentieth century, and it is exactly the sort of thing Petrov's own argument exists to condemn.
Petrov writes it out of the record. The words Emergency, Indira, Sanjay, coercion and vasectomy do not appear in the book at all; sterilisation appears once. The check for scanner-mangled names confirms these are true absences and not artefacts of the digitisation — there is no damaged "Indira," no damaged "Sanjay," nothing but the ordinary words emergence and indirect. What Petrov gives instead is a bureaucrat's chronicle of the family-planning programme as an administrative project: "For many years now the government of India has pursued a policy of so-called family planning which really boils down to decreasing the birth-rate." He tabulates its budgets plan by plan, describes the training of personnel and the building-up of Family Planning Departments in Delhi and the states, and reports the Sixth Plan's forward target — clinics "where it is planned for 22 million Indians to undergo sterilisation." The single occurrence of the word is a projection of future operations, cited as a neutral planning figure. Of what had actually been done to millions of Indians under that same programme in 1976, there is not a syllable.
The shape of the omission is precise. Petrov's roll-call of five-year plans names the first, second, third, fourth and sixth — every one but the fifth. The Fifth Five-Year Plan (1974–79) is the one that brackets the Emergency, and it is the one plan missing from his account. The narrative of the family-planning programme thus steps neatly from the fourth plan to the sixth, across the exact years in which the programme became a machine for hauling men off the street. This is not the reticence of a demographer who lacked the data. Coercive sterilisation was headline news across the world in 1976; the campaign's collapse and Gandhi's defeat were headline news in 1977; and by the time Petrov's manuscript closed, the Shah Commission had already reported on the abuses in India itself. The absence is a choice.
This series has learned to test a Soviet book not by how often it condemns coercion or opportunism or Malthusianism, but by whether the category it wields can ever be turned on its own side. Petrov passes the easy half of that test and fails the hard half. He is genuinely, and correctly, against the coercion of the poor in the name of population control — but only when the coercers are Western foundations or the neo-Malthusian conference circuit or the Indian delegates who blame numbers for poverty. When the coercer is the government of India itself, executing precisely the programme his theory indicts, the category shuts off. The critique of coercive population control, sharp in the abstract, never once reaches the actual episode of coercive population control that took place on the ground he is writing about.
The reason is not far to seek, and it is a matter of state rather than of scholarship. India was the Soviet Union's closest partner in the non-aligned world; the Indo-Soviet Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation had been signed in 1971, and Moscow backed Indira Gandhi's government throughout the Emergency and its sterilisation drive. The Fourth International's press documented that backing as it happened. Intercontinental Press reported in its issue of 21 July 1975 that "Moscow, which hailed Gandhi's June 26 coup, gave its stamp of approval to her economic program as well," and noted that the pro-Moscow Communist Party of India "hailed Gandhi's state of emergency from the very beginning" (19 January 1976). When the Emergency ended and Gandhi was swept from office, the same paper recorded the CPI conceding that it had "overestimated" her "progressive potentiality" (16 May 1977). Petrov's silence is the scholarly form of that alliance. A book that named the sterilisation campaign for what it was would have had to name it as the work of a government the USSR was underwriting — and so the demographer who can see the neo-Malthusians clearly cannot see the bulldozers in Delhi at all.
There is a smaller, parallel blindness worth noting. Petrov refers to China some forty times, always and only as a demographic magnitude — the one country larger than India, the great uncertainty in the world totals. He never once mentions that China had, in 1979–80, launched the other giant coercive population programme of the age, the one-child policy. For a Soviet author writing at the height of the Sino-Soviet quarrel, with every polemical incentive to point at Beijing's compulsion, the omission is striking; but it follows the same logic. To attack China's coercion would have invited the obvious question about India's, and about the Soviet friendships that made one sayable and the other not. Easier to treat both as columns of figures.
The answer Petrov declined to give had already been given, week by week, in the press of the tradition from which this introduction is written. Where the Soviet demographer left a blank, Intercontinental Press — the Fourth International's English-language weekly, and the outlet of a movement with a long-standing Indian and Ceylonese section — filed the story in full.
On 31 May 1976 it ran the events under the headline "Riot Police Crush Protest Against Forced Sterilization / Muslim Demonstrators Gunned Down in Delhi," and described the mechanism of the "voluntary" programme without euphemism: "The Gandhi regime offered to relocate them only if they underwent 'voluntary' sterilization." A month later, on 28 June 1976, it printed a small report titled "How Indian Authorities Meet Sterilization Quotas," on the town of Barsi in Maharashtra, whose "municipal authorities... met their targeted amount of sterilizations for the week of January 27 to February 3" by having the police drag men off the streets — including one who, protesting that he had already been operated on, "was held down and sterilized once again." When the Emergency fell, the paper of 23 May 1977 summed up what Petrov would eight years later leave out: "Mandatory sterilization was adopted as government policy during former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's two years of emergency rule. As administered by her son, Sanjay, the policy was bitterly opposed and contributed to the former prime minister's recent election defeat" — with more than a million operations recorded in January 1977 alone before the campaign collapsed.
The contrast is the whole point. It is not that a Soviet author could not know these things — a weekly printed in New York knew them contemporaneously and in detail. It is that the anti-Stalinist tradition could name the coercion of the poor whoever committed it, including a government its own Indian comrades were fighting, while the Progress author could name it only where the culprit was a class enemy. Both were against Malthus; only one was against Malthus's methods when a friendly state employed them.
That is where India: Spotlight on Population should be left — credited for the demography and the argument, which are better than the Western orthodoxy they oppose, and convicted of the silence, which is not an oversight but the exact shape a scholar's caution takes when the facts embarrass an ally. The census tables are sound. The chapter on the birth-rate is the one to read against the record, for what it declines to see.