A legend that sprang up after the Turkman Gate killing is that when the shrine is disturbed, the government will fall, as it happened with the Indira Gandhi government.
Personnel from the Rapid Action Force have been deployed in and around Turkman Gate in Delhi to support the Municipal Corporation of Delhi's demolition drive that began on the night of Tuesday, January 6, 2026.
Five policemen were injured after protestors pelted stones on the police, in a furious reaction to the demolition dive.
The demolition and the reaction bring to mind one of the Emergency era's most infamous incidents, when a massive demolition drive and forced sterilisation at the very same Turkman Gate and the protests that followed resulted in the deaths of an unknown number of people.
As is usually the case, it was the government against the people. But the government was different: It was the Congress party that initiated and carried out the demolition drive in April 1976, under the orders of the Congress' unofficial heir apparent, Sanjay Gandhi.
Sanjay Gandhi was Indira Gandhi's younger son and was not even 30 years old when the Turkman Gate demolition drive took place (he would turn 30 on December 14 the same year).
His elder brother Rajiv was then a pilot with the now defunct Indian Airlines, seemingly uninterested in politics.
When the Emergency was declared on June 25, 1976, Sanjay had no experience in government or in politics and was considered a brash and callous young man.
But as the prime minister's son, he held tremendous power, which he did not hesitate to exercise.
He virtually ran parts of the government during the Emergency and was most active in the Delhi area.
Sanjay Gandhi was keen to beautify Delhi (in the 1970s, Delhi still looked like an oversized mofussil city), and apparently remarked that he wanted to see the Jama Masjid from Turkman Gate, but could not due to the presence of the massive slum colony.
An ambitious bureaucrat Jagmohan (who would later be appointed as governor of Jammu and Kashmir) took it upon himself to clear the slum colony.
He called in bulldozers, leading to furious protests by the slum colony residents, who feared for the fate of their homes.
Not surprisingly, the Turkman Gate locals refused to comply with such a whimsical order, pointing out that they had been living in that area since the days of the Mughal empire.
There was another aspect that fuelled tempers: Forced sterilisations.
The first bulldozer arrived on April 13, 1976, but there was little resistance.
Two days later, Sanjay Gandhi inaugurated Dujana House near Turkman Gate, and, according to reports, almost immediately thereafter, random people were picked up and sterilised.
Authorities were given daily targets to meet, who then deployed the police to help them achieve their targets.
The daily targets saw people from the Turkman Gate and further afield being picked up and forced to undergo the sterilisation procedure. Tempers were high.
The local people around Turkman Gate called for a general strike and mobilised hundreds of people to protesters.
On April 19, 1976, bulldozers were pressed into action to clear the slum colony and the protestors came out in huge numbers.
According to economist and author Ashok Chakravarthi, who has described in detail the Turkman Gate incidence in his book A Memoir of the Emergency, there was a crowd of about 5,000-6,000 protestors and the bulldozers were ordered to move forward.
This led to massive stone-pelting, which led to the police retaliating by firing upon the protestors.
The firing continued through the night. The next day, many more bulldozers were called and they just steamrolled over the slums and the bodies. It was clearly a low point in India's history.
It is still not known how many of the protestors were killed on that fateful day when they chose to opposed the destruction of their homes.
The figures range from the official six to over 20.
Because the nation was under the Emergency, the Turkman Gate killings were not known to the rest of the country till it was first reported in the foreign media and later picked up by the Indian media.
After Indira Gandhi's government was ousted in 1977, the Shah Commission, set up to probe the excesses of the Emergency, named several people as responsible for the Turkman Gate killings.
But no action was taken against them and anyway, the Congress swept back to power three years later.
This time, Sanjay Gandhi held an official position: He was elected to the Lok Sabha from Amethi, Uttar Pradesh.
Turkman Gate is so named because it was built near the shrine of Hazrat Shah Turkman Bayabani, a 13th century Sufi saint.
A legend that sprang up after the Turkman Gate killing is that when the shrine is disturbed, the government will fall, as it happened with the Indira Gandhi government.
One can only wonder whether the latest police action has disturbed the shrine once more!
Feature Presentation: Aslam Hunani/Rediff
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