1

The Nehru Dynasty and Biopolitical Control: Riots, Sterilization and Slum Clearances in

Midnight’s Children

Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first post-Independence Prime Minister, wrote of the Mughal

Emperor Akbar that ‘Akbar became the great representative of the old Indian ideal of a

synthesis of differing elements and their fusion into a common nationality[...]so long as his

successors kept in line with this policy and with the genius of the nation, their empire

endured.’1 Here, he associates national stability and worth with a pluralist acceptance of

diversity, an idea which permeates Salman Rushdie’s politics and fiction, as demonstrated

vividly by his 1981 novel Midnight’s Children. In this text, Rushdie contrasts Nehru’s tenure

as India’s leader (though by no means leaves its shortcomings unexamined) with that of his

more autocratic daughter Indira Gandhi. He also posits his protagonist Saleem Sinai, and

the diverse collective of magical children that Saleem finds himself leading, as an (albeit

imperfect) symbol of a desirable pluralist India, and suggests by the children’s persecution

by Indira that true pluralism and tolerance may be inimical with the Indian nation-state.

However, despite the Indian state’s failure to actualize a creed of equality and diversity,

and its eventual turn towards oppression, Rushdie cannot help but inscribe within the novel

the possibility of hope for an inclusive, pluralistic Indian nation, while critiquing the related

but distinct formulation of the nation-state, which often engages in realpolitik and worse.

He is aware that the state is not the only way of imagining the nation. Thus, there are not

simply two approaches (Nehru’s and Indira’s) to ‘the idea of India’ but three. Rushdie may

provide a temporal sweep of Indian history, charting the decline from Nehru to Indira, but

uses Saleem’s own non-spatial, telepathic conception of the Indian nation – his collective

that ‘meets’ inside his head – as a counterpart to both. However, the ‘Midnight Children’s

Conference’ (MC, p. 331), or MCC, despite its ostensible status as a body with no physical

centre or regions, falls prey to communalism, hierarchy and exclusion, thus showing that

diverse communities inevitably fail to cohere in an egalitarian manner. Yet this is not the

primary function of Saleem’s group within the novel. Rushdie is more concerned with

asserting hybridity, pluralism and diversity than with critiquing these ideals and as such, the

overriding effect of the children’s multiplicity serves to denounce the anti-pluralist politics

of Indira Gandhi. The idea that Saleem’s conception of the nation is utopian, and as such ‘by

[its] very essence fundamentally unreal’,2 while present, is subsumed beneath Rushdie’s

assertion that this conception is preferable to the nation-state as headed by Indira Gandhi,

and even by Nehru. Rushdie’s attachment to his pluralist idea of India, in the end, will not

allow him to give up on the idea that its constituent elements may coalesce into a sum total

of accepted difference under the umbrella of ‘India’, even in the face of governmental

oppression, and the failure of Saleem’s conference to adequately provide a forum for the

representation of the sum of the nation’s diversity. 1 Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1969), p. 145. 2 Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias’, Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural

Theory, ed. Neil Leach (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 350-6, at p. 352.

2

This paper will examine key events in India’s history as represented in Midnight’s Children,

namely, the language riots in Bombay in the late 1950s, and the autocratic and extra-

juridical State of Emergency, instituted by Indira Gandhi between 1975 and 1977 in the face

of widespread opposition to her rule. It will also use the theory of biopolitics as a lens

through which to examine the leadership of these two members of the Nehru dynasty, and

the relationship between central government and India’s outlying regions and spaces under

these two epochs. Foucault conceived of biopolitics as a set of political technologies,

including categorization, the use of statistics, and mapping. These sought to ‘optimize’

human life by improving housing, medicine, education, and so on (on the basis that ‘with

government it is a question not of imposing law on men but of disposing things: that is, of

employing tactics rather than laws’3), in order to engender the optimization of economic

production and the orderly running of society. The corollary of these apparent benefits

comes, as Michael Dillon puts it in an essay on Foucault, from the paradigm that ‘where life

is improvable, biopolitics specifies continuous revision and reform. Where life is however

obdurately resistant to biopolitical revision, biopolitics specifies correction and

punishment.’4 If certain people endanger this new political paradigm, they can be sacrificed

for the greater good. Indira Gandhi, in Midnight’s Children, appears as a frequent user and

abuser of biopolitics, which Rushdie contrasts with Nehru’s pluralistic benevolence.

In Paul Brass’ summary,

[T]he Constitution of independent India is federal, but contains strong

unitary features, including a strong central government which retains

not only extensive emergency powers but the residuary powers of the

Union as well. The states are normally supposed to function autonomously,

but the Centre retains the ultimate power to control, even take over the

direct administration, of the states under certain conditions.5

With this federal system in mind, how pluralist a government is with regard to regional and

individual freedoms depends on the attitude of the central government and its Prime

Minister. Rushdie expounds upon this in Imaginary Homelands, where he writes,

‘Jawaharlal Nehru represents the dream’s noblest part, its most idealistic phase. Indira

Gandhi, always the pragmatist, often unscrupulously so, becomes a figure of decline’.6 The

first post-independence Indian government is headed by Nehru, whose famous ‘Tryst with

Destiny’ speech conceives of the nation as ‘the noble mansion of free India, where all her

children may dwell’ (MC, p. 158), a pluralist formulation with which both Rushdie and

3 Michel Foucault, ‘Governmentality’, Power: Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, Volume Three, ed. James

D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley and others (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2002), pp. 201-222, at p. 211. 4 Michael Dillon, ‘Security, Race and War’, Foucault on Politics, Security and War, eds. Michael Dillon and

Andrew W. Neal (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 166-196, at p. 168. 5 Paul R. Brass, The Politics of India since Independence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 2. 6 Salman Rushdie, ‘Dynasty’, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-91 (London: Granta, 1992), pp.

47-52, at p. 48.

3

Saleem have a clear affinity. This affinity is demonstrated by the letter sent by Nehru to the

newborn Saleem. In The Idea of India, Sunil Khilnani argues that ‘Nehru once described [his]

Congress [Party] as “the mirror of the nation”, and it is indeed best seen as a screen on

which the nation has projected its shifting politics rather than as itself a coherent agent with

a unified will.’7 The phrase ‘mirror of the nation’ is particularly important, as the letter

reads, ‘My belated congratulations on the happy accident of your moment of birth![...]We

shall be watching over your life with the closest attention; it will be, in a sense, the mirror of

our own.’ (MC, p. 167) This missive has the unfortunate side effect of making Saleem

believe that he is ‘mysteriously handcuffed to history’ (MC, p. 3) to the point of narcissism,

but also helps Rushdie to portray Nehru as a leader who welcomes the extraordinary and

the different in his nation. The ‘exotic multiplicity of [the children’s] gifts’ (MC, p. 275)

represents a Nehruvian plurality of India and Indians, a sense of supernatural and diverse

possibility that Indira Gandhi largely extinguishes when she has the children sterilized during

her biopolitical Emergency. Nehru’s avowed political ideology is based on socialism,

secularism, and democracy. It is egalitarian and, what is more, inclusive. As Khilnani writes,

‘Nehru’s idea of Indianness emerged through improvised responses to constrained

circumstances: its strength was not its ideological intensity, but its ability to steer towards

an Indianness seen as layered, adjustable, imagined, not as a fixed property’,8 and this tallies

with Rushdie’s preferred hybrid national ideal. This incorporative, pluralist and nebulous

conception of what it is to be Indian imagines a nation to which many different ethnic and

religious groups can affiliate themselves, as shown at the beginning of Midnight’s Children

by the attitude of Aadam Aziz, the patriarch of Saleem’s family, whose character is used by

Rushdie as an exemplar of the figure who makes a conscious choice to ‘be Indian’ within the

Nehruvian framework.

Neil ten Kortenaar’s study of Rushdie’s novel is aware of the affiliative nature of Indian

nationality, stating that ‘[o]nly someone inside India is free to choose the nation; yet, for the

choice to be meaningful, it must be possible for him or her not to be Indian.’9 As the post-

Independence political situation in Kashmir makes plain, the region’s status as ‘Indian’ is

hotly contested, but Midnight’s Children, through its focus on Saleem’s family, has much

more to say about the ways in which Kashmiris voluntarily embrace the Indian nation, than

it does about the often violent biopolitical methods by which the Indian nation-state retains

possession of this outlying province, a form of centralized oppression that is powerfully

emphasized in Rushdie’s later novel Shalimar the Clown. Midnight’s Children, in keeping

with its championing of an inclusive Indian nation, charts Aadam Aziz’s progression from

Kashmiri to Kashmiri Indian. His experiences and injuries at the Amritsar Massacre in 1919

7 Sunil Khilnani, The Idea of India (London: Penguin, 1997), p. 26. This, evidently, is a different conception of

the party to that of his daughter. 8 Khilnani, p. 167. 9 Neil ten Kortenaar, Self, Nation, Text in Salman Rushdie’s ‘Midnight’s Children’ (Montréal: McGill-Queen’s

University Press, 2004), p. 60.

4

produce an allegiance to the multiplicitous Indian nation attempting to resist British rule.

He says, ‘I started off as a Kashmiri and not much of a Muslim. Then I got a bruise on the

chest that turned me into an Indian.’ (MC, p. 47) He perceives ‘the narrowness, the

proximity of the horizon’ (MC, p. 5), and in a Nehruvian fashion, prizes a diverse, hybrid

community that incorporates many regions, including Kashmir. Aadam’s belief in Nehru’s

political project shows how even people from India’s most contentiously held region can

affiliate themselves with the post-Independence nation, and this is an affiliation that Saleem

shares. He is ‘infected with the alienness of Kashmiri blood, with the icy reserve of Kashmiri

sky’ (MC, p. 121), and is of the Muslim minority, but Indian nonetheless. However, political

events in late 1950s Bombay show how the Nehruvian ideal is often compromised in

practice, through having to deal with subnational forms of identity. This compromise is not

amenable to Saleem, who despite his belief in a plural nation is shown by Rushdie to be

overly idealistic in his reaction to the partition of the State of Bombay into Maharashtra and

Gujarat in 1960.

This event is one of the most significant examples of central government’s relation to its

constituent regions within Midnight’s Children, and stands as an indictment of the

limitations of an idealized version of Nehruvian pluralism. Bombay, in Rushdie’s early

fiction, is an exemplary site of the diversity and cultural hybridity cherished by the author

who once wrote that ‘[t]he selfhood of India is so capacious, so elastic, that it manages to

accommodate one billion kinds of difference.’10 Saleem calls Bombay ‘a mouth, always

open, always hungry, swallowing food and talent from everywhere else in India’ (MC, p.

172), and his descriptions of the city of his childhood are filled with exhilaration at the

vividness and diversity of life and sensations to be found there, but (as Rushdie’s later

novels powerfully remind us) the city is also a site for communal rivalries. Appadurai may

write that ‘all modern nation-states have subscribed to and contributed to the idea that

legitimate polities must be the outgrowth of natural affinities of some sort,’11 but in India,

not everybody’s ‘natural affinity’ is with nation over region, as with Aziz. While India’s

external borders remained almost exactly fixed after Independence, the redrawing of

internal borders was an ongoing process. We learn from Saleem that in 1956 ‘India had

been divided anew, into fourteen states and six centrally-administered “territories”. But the

boundaries of these states were not formed by rivers, or mountains, or any natural features

of the terrain; they were, instead, walls of words.’ (MC, p. 261) Nehru’s government

generally accepted majority languages within regions (such as Malayalam in Kerala, or Tamil

in Tamil Nadu) as a basis for the division of India into states, and Benedict Anderson writes

10 Salman Rushdie, ‘India’s Fiftieth Anniversary’, Step Across This Line: Collected Non-Fiction 1992-2002

(London: Vintage, 2003),.................., at p. 179. 11 Appadurai, p. 157.

5

in Imagined Communities that ‘there is a particular kind of contemporaneous community

which language alone suggests’.12 But Bombay’s status at this point is undecided:

The State was to be partitioned; then not to be partitioned; then partition

reared its head again. And as for the city itself – it was to be the capital of

Maharashtra; or of both Maharashtra and Gujarat; or an independent state

of its own...while the government tried to work out what on earth to do, the

city’s inhabitants decided to encourage it to be quick. (MC, pp. 309-10)

Hence, a good portion of Saleem’s childhood is set against a backdrop of ‘language riots’

(MC, p. 265) between Marathi and Gujarati speakers, each demanding a state of their own.

He is even at the centre of one in which ‘fifteen [were] killed, [and] over three hundred

wounded.’ (MC, p. 265) These riots present a challenge to Nehruvian political pluralism. If

even the State of Bombay, at the centre of which stands the nation’s most diverse city,

cannot maintain its spatial political form, then what hope is there for the nation as a whole,

which contains an even greater plethora of racial and religious affinities? Despite an early

sympathy with the idea of ‘keeping Bombay out of the control of a single language group’,13

the riots forced Nehru’s hand, and he saw that compromising on the issue of Bombay State

would benefit its people in the long run. Nehru did not insist upon a dogmatic pluralism in

the face of social unrest, but accepted the partition in order to avert further violence, by

mediating between the demands of both Maharashtrians and Gujaratis. Pluralism, almost

paradoxically, is manifested in this case by an acceptance of the wish for a plural region to

be partitioned into more monocultural entities.

This does not appear acceptable to Saleem, whose conception of India is more of an

abstracted nation than of a nation-state. His belief is in a pluralism and multiplicity that is

able, somehow, to resist the vagaries of compromise politics, and as such, his reaction to

the creation of Maharashtra and Gujarat is an adverse one; ‘we resigned ourselves to the

partition of the state of Bombay.’ (MC, p. 308) He regrets that the vibrant, diverse city of his

childhood could not sustain a multilingual State of Bombay, describing the Marathi-Gujarati

linguistic rivalry as ‘old dead struggles’ (MC, p. 262), and calling one procession ‘a stream of

chanting humanity[...]of which it was said that the statue of Sivaji [the Hindu king revered by

right-wing Maharashtrian Hindu nationalists] had come to life to ride stonily at its head’

(MC, p. 262). Saleem appears to regard the demands for Maharashtra and Gujarat as

undesirable pipedreams. It is true that elsewhere in the novel dreams shared by individuals,

leading to tangible political and spatial formations, can have desirable effects for Rushdie, as

with India, ‘a country which would never exist[...]except in a dream we all agreed to

dream[...]India, the new myth – a collective fiction in which anything was possible’ (MC, p.

150). However, dreams can also have adverse consequences in some cases; Saleem says

12 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London:

Verso, 2006), p. 145. 13 Guha, p. 191.

6

that in 1965 ‘the war happened because I dreamed Kashmir into the fantasies of our rulers’

(MC, p. 471). Neil ten Kortenaar argues that ‘[t]he novel makes a distinction between lies

and fictions[...]it would seem that fictions are what he himself believes, while lies are the

unbelievable things that other people declare they believe’,14 and we can certainly

appreciate this dynamic with regard to the issue of ‘dreams’. Saleem recognizes that these

collective fictions have power within the political world, but decries those that go against his

vision of what India should be. He describes the marchers’ dreams as fevered, almost

primal, and, crucially, insubstantial compared with the more desirable ‘collective fiction’ of

pluralistic India:

the dream of Maharashtra was at the head of some processions, the

mirage of Gujarat led the others forward. Heat, gnawing at the mind’s

divisions between fantasy and reality, made anything seem possible[...]

the air was filled with the stickiness of aroused desires.

What grows best in the heat: fantasy; unreason; lust. (MC, p. 231)

Overall, where Nehru’s government is concerned, historians generally accept that ‘this

legacy of what may be called constructive pluralism was transformed by an iconoclastic

ideological position into a mere division. The new Indian state, constrained by political

exigencies, was forced to acknowledge such divisions’.15 Rushdie, in Imaginary Homelands,

does the same: ‘For a nation of seven hundred millions to make sense, it must base itself

firmly on the concept of multiplicity, of plurality and tolerance, of devolution and

decentralization wherever possible’.16 The more idealistic Saleem, however, accepts these

spatial compromises under sufferance.

The reason can be found – literally – in Saleem’s mind. Rushdie juxtaposes the language

riots with the flowering of Saleem’s telepathy: ‘In 1956, then, languages marched militantly

through the daytime streets; by night, they rioted in my head.[...]The voices babbled in

everything from Malayalam to Naga dialects, from the purity of Lucknow Urdu to the

Southern slurrings of Tamil.’ (MC, p. 231, 232) Eventually, he learns to communicate on a

mental rather than verbal plane: ‘Only later, when I began to probe, did I learn that below

the surface transmissions[...]language faded away, and was replaced by universally

intelligible thought-forms which far transcended words’ (MC, p. 233). Saleem intends for his

MCC to represent the nation rather than the nation-state, and as such to transcend

communal and linguistic considerations such as those which caused the partition of the

State of Bombay. Nehru called Saleem ‘the mirror of the nation’, but his group is not the

mirror of the nation-state. It has nothing to govern, and despite Saleem’s ‘dream[s] of

14 ten Kortenaar, pp. 41-2. 15 Amedeo Maiello, ‘Ethnic Conflict in Post-Colonial India’, The Post-colonial Question: Common Skies, Divided

Horizons, eds. Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 99-114, at p. 101. 16 Salman Rushdie, ‘The Assassination of Indira Gandhi’, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-91

(London: Granta, 1992), pp. 41-6, at p. 44, my italics.

7

purpose’ (MC, p. 608) for the group, attains no formal political power, and therefore is not

forced, as Nehru was, to deal with the harsh realities and compromises of federal politics.

The regional and religious differences within the ‘lok sabha or parliament of [Saleem’s]

brain’ (MC, p. 314) are purely philosophical. However, while Saleem’s head is a parliament

with nothing to run, this abstract microcosm of the Indian nation still falls victim to

disintegration due to Saleem being unable to live up to his promise of creating a ‘loose

federation of equals’ (MC, p. 305). Even such a profoundly pluralistic conception of the

nation – a ‘loose federalism’ (MC, p. 306) unencumbered by spatial considerations of

national and regional boundaries – necessarily falls victim to elements that are hierarchical

and totalizing. Rushdie may celebrate diversity and multiplicity in his novels, but the failure

of the MCC to cohere suggests an acknowledgement that his celebration of a hybrid (rather

than monocultural) conception of the nation is at odds with the reality of what happens

when people of such diverse creeds and backgrounds attempt to exist in harmony.

Firstly, the fact that Saleem becomes the leader of the MCC shows the inevitability of

stratification of power, even within a group which fails to find a political raison d’être.

Saleem, despite professing equality between the diverse members of his collective, finds he

is ‘not immune to the lure of leadership’ (MC, p. 315), on the grounds that his head is their

meeting place; ‘didn’t the one who provided the club-house run the club?’ (MC, p. 315)

Henri Lefebvre writes that ‘abstract space is not homogeneous; it simply has homogeneity

as its goal’,17 but the abstract space of Saleem’s mind only partially attains this goal. The

children may not have to engage with spatial territories like Maharashtra and Gujarat, but

there is still a centre (Saleem’s head) and regions (the consciousnesses of all the others). As

Catherine Cundy puts it, ‘like the Indian storyteller, Saleem is not merely a “transmitter” but

a creative artist who imposes his personality on the form of communication, which

eventually comes to reflect rather than negate the author/creator’s centrality.’18

Furthermore, Saleem’s leadership shows how purportedly inclusive bodies can still operate

under an exclusionary logic. Once a figure rises to the top of a community, they eventually

are forced to take actions to maintain their position. Just as Indira Gandhi (as we shall see)

uses biopolitics to remove a perceived threat to her political dominance, Saleem, in the

name of his own power, bars his rival Shiva from his brain. It may be true that ‘Saleem’s

notion of the nation[...]as a collection of representative minorities appears more democratic

and more respectful of difference than are the subnational groupings that make it up’,19 but

he is not respectful of the differences of Shiva, who is eventually excluded from the

collective because Saleem hates ‘the roughness of his tongue [and] the crudity of his ideas’

(MC, p. 314), and because Saleem fears such a violent, non-pluralistically-minded person

learning of his true birthright, the two babies, one rich, one poor, having been swapped at

17 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), p.

287. 18 Cundy, p. 40. 19 ten Kortenaar, p. 152.

8

birth. This action precipitates the final collapse of the MCC, with the remaining members

accusing Saleem of ‘secrecy, prevarication, high-handedness [and] egotism’ (MC, p. 414).

Once a body built on pluralism picks and chooses which members it wants to retain, it is no

longer truly plural. Nehru may have compromised in order to resolve the Bombay dispute,

but Saleem acts in a much more autocratic manner, and his exclusionary logic cannot be

said to be Nehruvian. If the MCC is a microcosm of the ideal plural nation, then it is surely

an imperfect one, and Rushdie is at pains to point this out.

The MCC is not only imperfect in its leadership, but also because of its divisions. Despite

the collective’s non-corporeal nature meaning that there can be no physical violence akin to

the language riots, there are verbal battles, as ‘children are the vessels into which adults

pour their poison’ (MC, p. 355). Saleem laments, ‘I found children from Maharashtra

loathing Gujaratis, and fair-skinned northerners reviling Dravidian “blackies”; there were

religious rivalries; and class entered our councils.’ (MC, p. 353) What is more disturbing

than ‘the endless duality of masses-and-classes, capital-and-labour, them-and-us’ (MC, p.

354), however, is that while the MCC contains all these differences, rivalries and prejudices,

they are not all that India is. Even this group, numbering 1001, cannot represent the vast

diversity of India. The MCC is not a true ‘mirror of the nation’ but a pocket-mirror (what is

visible is limited), and even 1001 is a number that ‘refuses to be understood.’ (MC, p. 498)

Saleem tells us, ‘my narrative could not cope with five hundred and eighty-one fully-

rounded personalities[...]they were the very essence of multiplicity’ (MC, p. 317), which

challenges the idea that a pluralistic, (mostly) incorporative body like the MCC can recognize

the interests and personalities of every single member. It certainly cannot encapsulate and

individuate every type of person to be found in India, and neither can Saleem’s tale. He may

claim, ‘I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have seen done, of

everything done to me[...]to understand me, you’ll have to swallow a world,’ (MC, p. 535)

but as ten Kortenaar responds, ‘[T]he people he has affected and who have affected him,

though certainly too numerous to count, are unlikely to number six hundred million’.20

Midnight’s Children may celebrate multiplicity on one hand, but without political

manoeuvring such as Nehru’s policy of linguistic states, the novel brings into question how

such a regionally, religiously and culturally diverse nation such as India can cohere, without

central governmental leadership to mediate between groups.

However, the Midnight’s Children remain a source of hope for pluralism within the Indian

nation. While Nehru and Saleem reach a parting of the ways with regard to the State of

Bombay, they both broadly espouse a political inclusivity that (only for the most part in

Saleem’s case) accepts varying viewpoints, and attempts to synthesize them into a plan of

action under the leadership of a paternalistic ‘big brother’ (MC, p. 316). The major

philosophical opposition in the novel is not between Nehru and Saleem, but between Indira

Gandhi and the pluralism of the other two. The abstracted MCC, insufficiently plural to

20 ten Kortenaar, p. 82.

9

symbolize the nation and yet too plural to function, is still represented as infinitely

preferable to the biopolitical government of Nehru’s daughter, which concentrates power in

the hands of the leader to a much greater degree than Saleem does, and which will happily

sacrifice, exclude and disenfranchise its citizens for the good of the nation-state. Saleem’s

running of his collective may not have been perfect, but in the second half of the novel,

Rushdie utilises the diversity and multiplicity of the extraordinary children not to suggest

the difficulty of representative government, but as a powerful symbol of pluralism that

stands against an increasingly autocratic and biopolitical nation-state.

In Midnight’s Children, the nation-state (as opposed to the apolitical, inclusive nation) is

seen to be a potential site for autocracy. Inherent within its structure are mechanisms that

can turn sinisterly biopolitical in the wrong hands, such as ‘the power to declare a national

emergency that, in effect, may convert the country into a unitary state’,21 which was written

into the Constitution under Nehru’s watch. This is not to say that Nehru is condemned in

the novel. Although Saleem criticizes Congress for hiring Shiva’s gang of toughs to

‘encourag[e] the electorate to use its vote with wisdom and care’ (MC, p. 308) in 1957, and

makes a note of the Nehru government’s patchy record of economic production and social

reform, we have seen that Nehru’s political career is marked by a willingness to compromise

and his tenure as Prime Minister is favourably contrasted with that of Indira. Saleem,

speaking of Sanjay Gandhi, says that ‘the sons of the great unmake their parents’ (MC, p.

463), and to this we may add the daughters of the great. Nevertheless, despite Nehru’s

advocating ‘equal opportunities for all and no political, economic, or social barrier in the

way of any individual or group’,22 he saw the state as the vehicle for implementing these

opportunities, writing that ‘[t]he idea of planning and a planned society is accepted now in

varying degrees by almost everyone.’23 His politics were marked by pluralism and

inclusivity, but also by bureaucracy and central planning. The second half of Midnight’s

Children shows what happens when central power over regions and peoples is used for

nefarious biopolitical means, rather than to effect compromises like the partition of the

State of Bombay, thus bearing out Nehru’s prescient warning that ‘planning by itself has

little meaning and need not necessarily lead to good results.’24 In the end, the Midnight’s

Children, by virtue of their victimization and sterilization by Indira’s government, are more

vividly rendered by Rushdie as symbols of a pluralistic nation as opposed to an autocratic

nation-state, than they are as symbols of the difficulties of a community coalescing under

the aegis of Nehruvian pluralism. Rushdie’s lionizing of India’s diversity effaces a more

probing critique of the idea of the nation. Instead, his ire is directed at the nation-state.

The sterilization of the Midnight’s Children provides an exemplary manifestation of the

autocracy and lack of pluralism of the Indira government. An explicitly biopolitical analysis

21 Brass, p. 63. 22 Nehru, p. 521. 23 Ibid., p. 501. 24 Ibid., p. 501.

10

of the State of Emergency will provide a clear view of the distinction Rushdie makes

between the pluralist nation, as symbolized by the children, and the governmental nation-

state that he is so keen to critique. Midnight’s Children is by no means Rushdie’s only

engagement with India’s sterilization campaign, but it is here that his examination of

population control focuses most sharply on its effect on the bios of the public at large. It is

this dynamic which makes the episode of the sterilization of the children ideal for the

exploration of governmental biopolitics, and how it is used in order to crystallize central

state authority over areas that, spatially, lie away from the centre.

In a rare linkage of Rushdie’s work with the idea of biopower, Stephen Morton writes that

‘the biopolitical power of the state during India’s state of emergency is foregrounded in

Sanjay Gandhi’s population control programme, the slum clearances in Delhi and in the

forced sterilization of the midnight’s children’.25 Nevertheless, much of India’s family

planning policy in the 1970s proceeded on the basis of incentivizing its citizens to be

sterilized, rather than coercing them. In The Satanic Verses, a toymaker produces ‘the

Family Planning doll, a socially responsible variant of the old Russian-doll notion. Inside a

suited-and-booted Abba-doll was a demure, sari-clad Amma, and inside her a daughter

containing a son. Two children are plenty: that was the message of the dolls.’ (SV, pp. 224-

5) This toy, with its anatomical incorrectness, functions as a comedic example of the

relatively benign acts of public-spirited Indian citizens dedicated to raising awareness of the

problem of exponential population growth from a non-governmental platform. But

measures to prevent overpopulation become more sinister when the biopolitical state is

involved.

History books are full of examples of the psychologically coercive nature of ‘family

planning’ during the Emergency. Often, ‘getting sterilized or paying someone else to do so

became[...]the only way displaced people could obtain small plots of land in resettlement

colonies’.26 Not only did the state authorities demolish homes (of which more later), they

expected their former residents to sacrifice their fertility for the privilege. There are also

stories of schoolchildren being told that they would be automatically failed in their exams if

their parents were not sterilized.27 We see here the twisting of linguistic meaning during

the Emergency. Many Indians, officially ‘voluntarily’ sterilized, in fact had no choice,

whereas Shiva in Midnight’s Children undergoes an apparently sincere ‘voluntary

vasectomy’ (MC, p. 615) for the good of the nation, but only after siring ‘legions of bastards

swelling in the unectomied bellies of great ladies and whores’ (MC, p. 615). He thus

contributes much more to the population problem than the vast majority of people who

were psychologically coerced into being sterilized. However, to assert that coercion does

not necessarily have to be physical is not to say that there was not physical coercion during

the Emergency’s campaign. Forced sterilizations were fairly common in India’s northern 25 Morton, p. 48. 26 Tarlo, p. 11. 27 Ibid., p. 148.

11

states (the so-called ‘vasectomy belt’) and in the west. According to Ramachandra Guha, in

one district ‘[l]ocal officials prepared lists of “eligible men”, that is, of those who already had

three or more children. Police vans would come and take them off to the nearest health

centre. Some men fled into the hills to escape the marauders.’28 In Midnight’s Children, the

use of force by the state to compel its citizens to undergo sterilization can be seen in the use

of ‘socialist rifles’ (MC, p. 600) against Saleem and the Magicians’ Ghetto. The most vivid act

of Emergency repression depicted by the novel is not, for example, the imprisonment of

high-profile political opponents such as Morarji Desai or J.P. Narayan, but the destruction of

‘the colony or ghetto of the magicians’ (MC, p. 594) with whom Saleem makes his home in

what he calls his ‘true inheritance of poverty and destitution’ (MC, p. 553). Despite the fact

that (if it were a factual event) it would barely merit a footnote in the history of the

‘continuous midnight’ (MC, p. 585) of the Emergency, the move against the ghetto by ‘The

Sanjay Youth’ (MC, p. 588) – the forces of Mrs Gandhi’s son and closest advisor – is an

excellent example of Indira’s (bio)politics. The episode is illuminating with regard to the

assertion of state control over the diverse spaces of Delhi, and ‘state racism’, as

philosophers of biopolitics term biopolitical discrimination against certain groups.

Paul Brass informs us that during the Emergency, ‘government employees with more than

three children were expected to have vasectomies or be denied perquisites such as

government housing. In some states, they were also given quotas to fulfil to have ordinary

members of the public sterilized.’29 Not only is this further evidence of non-physical

government coercion, the reference to quotas points to the biopolitical nature of the

sterilization campaign, considering that a major aspect of biopolitical practice is the

categorization and organization of human beings through statistics. Government control

over the reproductive systems – the very biology – of its people is profoundly biopolitical.

Furthermore, the Indian state’s ‘family planning’ is biopolitical in another way, when we

consider the sterilization of the midnight’s children as a form of state racism.

Nicole Weickgennant Thiara is suspicious of the status of Midnight’s Children as an

indictment of central government’s treatment of people such as the magicians. For her, ‘[i]t

is after all not so much the actual sterilizations which count in Midnight’s Children but the

destruction of an idea of India, which was embodied by the midnight’s children.30 The ‘idea

of India’, as we have seen, is indeed important in the novel, but the actual sterilizations and

the state’s reasoning for them are actually very useful in a discussion of Indian

governmental biopolitics, when we consider the issue of state racism. Hardt and Negri

define state racism as the idea that

[m]ost discussions of demographic explosions and population crises

[...]are not really oriented toward either bettering the lives of the poor

28 Guha, p. 516. 29 Brass, p. 42. 30 Thiara, p. 52.

12

or maintaining a sustainable total global population[...]but are rather

concerned primarily with which social groups reproduce and which do

not.31

This particular technology is closely associated with biopower; ‘When, as the nineteenth

century advanced, bio-politics was deployed throughout the population, state racism was

born. The life of the species became a political issue, giving rise to projects for the eugenic

ordering of society’.32 The existence of ‘a black leather folder labelled TOP SECRET, and

titled PROJECT M.C.C.’ (MC, p. 547) convinces Saleem that ‘the truest, deepest motive

behind the declaration of a State of Emergency was the smashing, the pulverizing, the

irreversible discombobulation of the children of midnight.’ (MC, p. 597) Like the police raids

on the un-vasectomied, the attack on the midnight’s children is a targeted forced

sterilization which fits Hardt and Negri’s definition. As for why Indira Gandhi targets the

children in this way, the answer lies in the fact that ‘the drives toward centralization of

power in Delhi[...]intensified markedly since the death of Nehru’.33 Rushdie contrasts

Nehru’s conception of the pluralist, multiplicitous nation, and his pragmatic ideology of

political compromise, with Indira’s attempt to portray herself as the living avatar of the

nation, as exemplified by the election slogan, ‘India is Indira and Indira is India’ (MC, p. 587),

and her absorption of political power in her own hands and those of the state. Rushdie

defines the Emergency as an attempt by Indira Gandhi to remove any challengers to her

place as ‘not only Prime Minister of India but[...]possessor of the shakti of the gods’ (MC, p.

612).

As we have seen, the children’s debates in ‘the lok sabha or parliament of [Saleem’s] brain’

(MC, p. 314) – Rushdie’s choice of words here is telling – set the children up as a symbol of a

pluralist politics that (largely) welcomes free and frank discussion, and a wide range of

viewpoints. However, as Saleem laments, the MCC fractures without having accomplished

anything tangible. Indira’s sterilization of her perceived rivals, ‘the very essence of

multiplicity’ (MC, p. 317) with their ‘thousand and one possibilities’ (MC, p. 278), operates

more on the biopolitical axis than that of practical party politics. The children have no

realistic hope of usurping her political power. For Foucault, ‘[i]n the biopower

system,[...]killing or the imperative to kill is acceptable only if it results not in a victory over

political adversaries, but in the elimination of the biological threat to and the improvement

of the species or race.’34 If Indira merely perceived in the children the risk of political

dissent, then she would have simply imprisoned them as she did Desai and Narayan.

Sterilization demonstrates that the main aim was their removal from the gene pool. The

idea that this removal would improve the species from an objective, purely biological

standpoint is debatable, as while the supernaturally-gifted MCC contains those who ‘were

31 Hardt and Negri, Multitude, p. 166. 32 Jon Simons, Foucault and the Political (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 34. 33 Brass, p. 33. 34 Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, p. 256.

13

(to be frank) little more than circus freaks’ (MC, p. 275), there are figures like Saleem who

receive ‘the highest talents of which men had ever dreamed’ (MC, p. 276). Nevertheless, it

is clear that the Prime Minister cannot countenance the presence of magical, multiplicitous

powers of any sort within her nation’s populace. The MCC ‘can be seen as the last throw of

everything antiquated and retrogressive in our myth-ridden nation, whose defeat was

entirely desirable in the context of a modernizing, twentieth-century economy; or as the

true hope of freedom’ (MC, p. 278), and neither of these interpretations are amenable to a

woman who wishes to rule from the centre as ‘the Mother-goddess in her most terrible

aspect’ (MC, p. 612).

Furthermore, it seems that Indira wishes to ‘improve the species’ not only by eliminating

the children of midnight, but by replicating her own children, specifically Sanjay. This

replication is, crucially, juxtaposed with the raid on the ghetto and the sterilization of the

midnight’s children. ‘The Sanjay Youth Movement [which] was particularly effective in the

sterilization campaign’ (MC, p, 588) lives up to its name in a literal sense, as it is populated

entirely by clones of Sanjay and his wife Menaka. Jean Baudrillard posits that ‘the relation

between [objects] is no longer that of an original to its counterfeit – neither analogy nor

reflection – but equivalence, indifference. In a series, objects become undefined simulacra

one of the other.’35 Rather than promising pluralism and multiplicity, as the MCC does, the

identical beings carry the authority of the ‘signifier of reference’.36 However, this is not a

Baudrillardian ‘subtle way of murdering the original’,37 but quite the opposite; an

affirmation of the disenfranchising biopolitical power of a dynastic elite. Saleem tells us that

‘all the men had the same curly hair and lips-like-women’s-labia, and the elegant ladies were

all identical, too, their features corresponding precisely to those of Sanjay’s Menaka[...]I was

shown once again that the ruling dynasty of India had learned how to replicate itself.’ (MC,

p. 599) Not only do we see the simulacral nature of those involved in the ‘civic-

beautification and vasectomy programmes’ (MC, p. 603), the presence of Menaka

emphasizes the fertility of Indira’s family as opposed to the sterility of the children.

Madelena Gonzalez states that ‘the authority of the family [is] a frequent metaphor in

Rushdie’s fiction for political oppression’,38 but they are one and the same here, and by

ensuring that ‘the children of midnight [are] denied the possibility of reproducing

themselves’ (MC, p. 613), Indira is making sure that their (potential) political agency can be

superseded by that of manifestations of her dynasty. Saleem is acutely aware that the

counterpart of the state project to ‘improve the species’ by sterilizing the magical and

multiplicitous is the cloning of the family of the ruler in order to effect the same. He states,

35 Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext[e],

1983), p. 97. 36 Ibid., p. 101. 37 Ibid., p. 144. 38 Madelena Gonzalez, ‘The Moor’s Last Sigh: Marginal Alternatives, the Reconstruction of Identity through the

Carnival of Indetermination’, Subverting Masculinity: Hegemonic and Alternative Versions of Masculinity in

Contemporary Culture, eds. Russell West and Frank Lay (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000).............at p. 130.

14

‘certain high-ups in that extraordinary government (and also certain unelected sons of

prime ministers) had acquired the power of replicating themselves[...]No wonder that

incredible dynasty wanted to impose birth control on the rest of us’ (MC, p. 551).

We have seen how Rushdie uses ‘family planning’ as a vivid indictment of Indira’s

biopolitical project, but he also uses the parallel slum clearance campaign as an intensifying

corollary, to strengthen his critique. Not only were Saleem and the magicians sterilized, but

their slum home was destroyed, which leads us to the spatial dimension of biopower. We

have seen how the central government deals with large regions such as Kashmir,

Maharashtra and Gujarat, but Upstone’s conception of ‘the often-undermined smaller-than-

national spatial location’39 extends to much smaller spaces than the Indian states within the

federal system. So does Indira’s conception. It is not enough that she rules India. Every

single space within Delhi must fall under the rubric of her power. Rushdie tells us in The

Enchantress of Florence that ‘[n]o city is all palaces’ (EF, p. 35), but Indira’s government is

intolerant of slums, partially because of their squalor and ugliness, but also because they

resist biopolitical categorization, many being illegally built and ‘off the grid’ as far as

administration is concerned. They can be seen biopolitically as an impediment to the

improvement and effective governance of the city and a symptom of what the geographer

Edward Soja has called the ‘postmetropolis’, in which ‘[t]he boundaries of our city are

becoming more porous, confusing our ability to draw neat lines separating what is inside as

opposed to outside the city’.40 700,000 slum-dwellers, representing 15 per cent of Delhi’s

population, were displaced to ‘marginal spaces beyond the borders of the city’41 between

1975 and 1977. The Emergency government, rather than countenance them being in the

city but not of it, moved them to government-run ‘resettlement camps’. Just as Indira’s

warped logic determines that the midnight’s children must be sterilized for the good of the

species, the slums must be destroyed for the good of the city, even if (in a truly biopolitical

sense) this means the sacrifice of so-called ‘bare life’; ‘life [which] is inimical to life and has

to be exterminated if it cannot be corrected and reformed’.42 ‘The city was being

beautified, and if there were a few deaths,[...]well, what of it, an eyesore was being

removed from the face of the ancient capital’ (MC, p. 602). Additionally, Indira’s

imprisoning of the MCC asserts her power over her nation’s heterogeneous regions, in that

the multiplicity of the children is not just ideological and magical but geographical/spatial.

Shiva and Saleem may be Bombayites, but there is within the group ‘a Goanese girl with the

gift of multiplying fish’ (MC, p. 274), ‘a werewolf from the Nilgiri Hills’ (MC, p. 274), and a

‘Benarsi silversmith’s son’ (MC, p. 276) who can travel through time, to name but a few.

Saleem could never physically bring the MCC together, and even within the non-physical

parliament of his mind the group eventually falls victim to ‘gradual disintegration’ (MC, p.

39 Upstone, p. 23. 40 Edward W. Soja, Postmetropolis, p. 150. 41 Tarlo, p. 4. 42 Dillon, p. 177.

15

352). But Indira, with her state institutions, has the power to convene them in one place;

the disciplinary space of ‘the Widow’s Hostel in Benares’ (MC, p. 603), the old imperial

centre of Delhi. When Saleem finally gets to address his counterparts verbally, the situation

is beyond hope. Not only has Indira asserted her authority over her capital, and her

contempt for the idea of the postmetropolis as shown by her destruction of the spatially

uncategorized slums, but she has shown how the tentacles of her biopower reach

throughout all of India.

On the other hand, despite the fact that central political (bio)power has become more

tangible than in Nehru’s time, it is by no means total. Not everyone targeted by biopower is

necessarily brought under its aegis. In Giorgio Agamben’s formulation,

the realm of bare life – which is originally situated at the margins of

the political order – gradually begins to coincide with the political realm,

and exclusion and inclusion, outside and inside[...]enter into a zone of

irreducible indistinction.[...]When its borders begin to be blurred, the

bare life that dwelt there frees itself in the city and becomes both

subject and object of the conflicts of the political order, the one place

for both the organization of State power and emancipation from it.43

This idea that bare life within the biopolitical urban area is a permanent, immanent, and

potentially assertive presence is, despite the slum clearances, present in Midnight’s

Children. Although the Magicians’ Ghetto is destroyed, ‘not all the magicians were

captured’ (MC, p. 602), and rather than conform to Indira’s concept of a well-ordered Delhi,

they take their provisional and nebulous spatiality even further, as ‘the moving slum of the

escaped illusionists’ (MC, p. 602) continually evades the ‘wreckers[...]vasectomists and

troops’ (MC, p. 603) that are the symbolic triptych of government biopower. In her book on

spatial politics, Upstone argues that ‘to see fluidity functioning only in the service of western

capital and its neo-colonial interests is too simplistic’,44 and that ‘the inventive ways in

which fluidity may be utilized to foster disruptive actions’45 should be recognized, and the

moving slum is an excellent example of such a disruption. The magicians may be

‘Communists, almost to a man’ (MC, p. 554), but what produces their most effective

resistance to state power is not a political ideology, but the simple act of movement.

However, this movement is not a truly powerful example of a revolutionary, reactive

biopolitics. Hardt and Negri may conceive that ‘[t]he struggles of the poor against their

conditions of poverty are not only powerful political protests but also affirmations of

biopolitical power – the revelation of a common “being” that is more powerful than their

miserable “having”’,46 but in this case the conditions of poverty and rootlessness are

43 Agamben, p. 9. 44 Upstone, p. 8. 45 Ibid., p. 9. 46 Hardt and Negri, Multitude, p. 135

16

precisely the tools of resistance that are being used. The moving slum can only ever be a

temporary measure, a spatial water-treading, and when Saleem locates the remaining

magicians, he finds that ‘[s]omewhere in the many moves of the peripatetic slum, they had

mislaid their powers of retention, so now they had become incapable of judgement’ (MC, p.

621). This shows that spatial autonomy without consciousness is a self-defeating form of

resistance to biopower, and as such offers no hope for a pluralist, Nehruvian Indian future.

The hope in the novel comes from other sources.

These sources, naturally, are symbols of pluralism, both political and magical. The political

situation at the end of Midnight’s Children has Indira losing power via the ballot box – the

symbol of democratic procedure treasured by Nehru – to the Janata Morcha, a multifarious

coalition of parties which ‘grew in all kinds of bizarre directions, until it embraced Maoist

Communists[...]and extreme right-wing members of the Ananda Marg; until Left-Socialists

and conservative Swatantra members joined its ranks’ (MC, p. 582). Saleem doesn’t hold

the front ‘to represent a new dawn’ (MC, p. 616), but acknowledges that ‘others[...]felt

otherwise’ (MC, p. 616), and its victory in the 1977 election near the end of the novel does

seem to promise an Indian nation-state governed along more pluralistic lines (even if history

– and Rushdie’s later writing – shows us that the Janata government soon fell apart). In

addition, the symbols of the pluralist apolitical conception of the nation are not completely

defeated. Just as the biopolitical state lacks the power to completely eradicate the ghetto,

it fails also to completely eradicate the Midnight’s Children. Saleem’s cry – ‘Good news,

children! They cannot get us all’ (MC, p. 608) – shows that hope remains. Indira’s

spokeswoman tells Saleem that ‘they would be satisfied with four hundred and twenty, they

had verified one hundred and thirty-nine dead’ (MC, p. 612), which makes 559 captured or

dead out of the 581 that did not die in infancy of ‘[m]alnutrition, disease and the

misfortunes of everyday life’ (MC, p. 271). Twenty-two remain at large, and the power of

‘Soumitra the time-traveller’ (MC, p. 608) presumably makes him impossible to capture. It is

true that this is not a great proportion of the original sample, and Saleem and his cohorts

experience ‘a draining-out of hope’ (MC, p. 611) at their sterilization; as he puts it, ‘the

children of midnight were denied the possibility of reproducing themselves’ (MC, p. 613).

Yet this is not the full story. Shockingly, it is scarcely remarked upon in Rushdie criticism

that the ‘legions of bastards’ (MC, p. 615) fathered by ‘midnight’s darkest child’ (MC, p. 616)

Shiva are not the only offspring of the magical collective. They are sterilized, but at the age

of 28, and it is scarcely believable that there was not significant procreation occurring

before Indira took them to Benares. Considering India’s birth rate (a birth rate that Indira’s

biopolitical sterilization campaign did little to stymie) it is probable that this second

generation is more numerous than the first.

In the end, the inability of Rushdie’s protagonist to ‘bear the burden of history’ (MC, p.

534) and his eventual disintegration does not invalidate the idea that India, whatever its

problems of practical politics, can accommodate diversity and multiplicity. It is enough that

Indira loses power, and that the limits of (bio)power – as shown by the existence of the

17

second generation of children – are made clear, as is its sinister and autocratic nature.

Pranav Jani’s pessimistic reading of the novel – ‘Forced to read Saleem’s beginnings through

his end, the implied audience is trained to read all instances of hope and promise as signs of

future defeat’47 – rings false. India, as an ‘annihilating whirlpool of the multitudes’ (MC, p.

647), remains. Ultimately, it is not that ‘the decline of the nation-state is[...]a structural and

irreversible process’,48 but that its existence cannot quash the natural multiplicity of India,

which the end of the novel suggests will live on ‘until the thousand and first generation’

(MC, p. 647). The MCC are a symbol of hope more than of failure, and the end of Midnight’s

Children suggests that despite Indira’s attempts at centralization and biopolitical autocracy,

a Nehruvian pluralism is forever inherent within the Indian nation, if not the nation-state.

47 Jani, p. 152. 48 Hardt and Negri, Empire, p. 336.