New Delhi/Rohtak, June 25 -- The crack of a hammer, a marriage procession, or the whirring of construction equipment is enough to agitate 84-year-old Abdul Razzak. His family is quick to reassure him - it has been 50 years since the Emergency was imposed. No one is coming to force a vasectomy. In the months that followed the imposition of the Emergency in June 1975, the bylanes of Turkman Gate shook with fear. Backed by the government, local authorities earmarked the area for intensified action under Sanjay Gandhi's population control programme, with sterilisation camps springing up at Turkman gate in dispensaries, school buildings, even municipal halls - hotspots where countless people were either forcefully subjected to a vasectomy, or were lured in with promises of food and even a roof over their head. "These were mostly poor people who were lured in at first. Rickshaw-pullers. I remember people telling us how touts became active almost instantly and would bring these really poor people by promising them a few litres of ghee. Some even promised them houses. For the poor, there was nothing to lose," said Razzak, who sells furniture near Chandni Chowk. As more and more camps began to be set up across the neighbourhood and in other parts of Old Delhi, including around Jama Masjid, Dujana House and Chitli Qabar, the fear of being picked up grew. Razzak said he was repeatedly approached by government workers and also once targeted near the local mosque, but managed to outrun the touts who specialised in getting young, mostly poor, men into the clinics. "There was always fear. What if we are caught and made to undergo vasectomy? We refused to step out," Razzak said, stating touts also had targets - to bring a fixed number of people so they could be paid. People such as Razzak were at the centre of what became one of the showpieces of the government's 20-point programme during the Emergency, plugging into the national obsession with population control in the 1970s and 80s. Sanjay Gandhi toured the country and asked chief ministers to meet mass sterilisation targets, encouraging officials to exceed them. This misplaced zeal percolated through the government system - lower-rank officers were asked to undergo operations or their arrears were not cleared, truck drivers could not get their licences renewed without an operation, and slum dwellers and residents needed a sterilisation certificate to get resettlement plots. Eventually, according to Marika Vicziany's 1982 book Coercion In A Soft State: The Family Planning Program of India, around 11 million men and women were sterilised and one million women were fitted with intrauterine devices (IUDs) in India between 1975 and 1977. Later work revealed that fertility rates were already falling in India and the coercion actually hurt population control programmes because ordinary people started distrusting government schemes. That population was behind most of young India's ills was an idea that took root in the early years of Independence. By the 1970s, it had morphed into a national, and official, obsession. Sanjay Gandhi once said in an interview that "family planning" would solve half of the country's problems....