India is a country where, by the reckoning of nutritional experts, half the population fails to get even a single square meal a day. Five years ago Jawaharlal Nehru's government discovered with alarm that India's population, increasing at the rate of 5,000,000 a year, was outdistancing food production. Nehru launched a five-year plan to I) increase food, and 2) decrease births by government instruction in birth control.
The birth-control program became the province of Health Minister Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, a spinster, a Christian, and a devoted disciple of Gandhi, who taught that the only...