On Population Paranoia Among Hindutva Fundamentalists | Subhash Gatade

Time for a Group Marriage of Sangh Pracharaks ?
On Population Paranoia Among Hindutva Fundamentalists

by subhash gatade

This communalisation of demography has a fairly long history. As early as 1909, U N Mukherji, who would go on to co-found the Punjab Hindu Maha Sabha, wrote a book entitled 'Hindus: A Dying Race,' which influenced many subsequent publications by the Sabha, the parent organisation of the RSS. This work met with widespread demand, being reprinted many times, and helping to create and reinforce Hindu communalism. It had a special appeal to upper-caste Hindu communalists, who were anxious to create a monolithic Hindu community in the face of calls for separate representation emanating from both Muslims and the Dalits. Whipping up anxiety about Muslims would certainly be one way to weld together hugely diverse, and often antagonistic, castes into one community, erasing the structural divisions in caste society.
(Mohan Rao, 'Murderous Identities and Population Paranoia' , Himal, September 2008, http://communalism.blogspot.in/search?q=population+hindu)

I

Datta Hosbale, RSS Joint Secretary, found himself in complete agreement with what his organisations 'bete noire' the Church is doing in Kerala- which has launched programmes to encourage its followers to adopt big family norms.

Talking to the media on the sidelines of their National Executive Committee meeting held in Kerala, the senior leader was sharing his 'anxieties about demographic shift towards the minorities' and asking the Hindus to do 'a serious re-think about "blindly accepting" family planning methods and go in for big families' and 'produce more children'. Making a strong case for producing more children he also shared similar advice rendered by the former RSS Supremo late K S Sudarshan. Sudarshan is reported to have said "We don't have adequate number of youths to join our armed forces.The one-child family prefers their children to join sectors like IT."

While everything went well and none of the journalists present there raised any inconvenient questions about the senior leaders "pearls of wisdom" which seemed at complete odds with growing popularity of family planning methods among large cross-sections of people - cutting across religion, caste as well as ethnicities -, or bigger families becoming a thing of the past, the manner in which his remarks were met with barrage of criticism from a broad spectrum of scholars, activists and population experts, the RSS was forced to issue a 'clarification'. And as usually happens it took a U turn on the topic denying that Hosbale had made any such suggestion.

II.

The National Family Health Survey-2 (NFHS-2) shows that only 2 per cent of women oppose the use of family planning on the ground of religion [International Institute for Population Sciences and Macro 2000:159]. The report further brought out the fact that there is a high unmet need of family planning among Muslims (22 per cent) compared to Hindus (15 per cent). The unmet need for both spacing methods (like condom, IUD and pill) and terminal methods (sterilisation) is higher among Muslims than Hindus. It is therefore evident that the demand for family planning among Muslims is less satisfied [International Institute for Population Sciences and Macro 2000:171] and it is wrong to believe that Muslims are not willing to accept family planning on account of their religion.
(Fact and Fiction on Hindutva claims re 'a dying race' (R B Bhagat), Economic and Political Weekly ;.September 25, 2004 )

According to a report which appeared in DNA (http://www.dnaindia.com/mumbai/report-rashtriya-swayamsevak-sangh-exaggerated-fear-of-demographic-imbalance-experts-1910512) population experts trashed the RSS suggestion and said that '..[a]lthough the growth rate of Muslims has been higher as compared with other communities, it has actually been declining for the past few years. RSS has exaggerated the fear of demographic imbalance, they said.'

P Arokiasamy, professor at International Institute of Population Sciences, made few important points. Talking to the reporter he said that
- the higher fertility rate in Muslims can’t be attributed solely to their religious beliefs.

- Poor socio-economic conditions also play a major role. A majority of Muslim women don’t have access to contraceptives, just like underprivileged women from other communities

- growth rate of Muslims in Kerala and J&K is lower than the average Hindu community growth which can be attributed to their better education and socio-economic status in these states and for similar reasons, the fertility rate among Hindus in the less developed states of UP and Bihar, among others, is higher.

Abdul Shaban, Professor at Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) made another point. According to him the 2001 census affirms that decline in the growth rate of Muslims is faster than the majority community’s.

"Researches and statistics have proved demography is religion-neutral, but RSS wants to create fear among the majority by hyping up the issue. Instead, it should ensure that the fruits of development reach the Muslims and other backward communities if it’s really concerned about the imbalance.”

Junking the RSS idea a senior official from the United Nations Population Fund underlined :
“Population growth rate has been higher in rural, tribal and poor families irrespective of their religion. Besides, rich from all communities have lesser children,”

Comments of a housewife Manasi Shinde rather put the RSS men on further defensive. She said :

'There is an international consensus on the fertility issue, which says it should be a woman’s choice if she wants to have a child. The decision on the number of children and the gap between two children is also the woman’s.No one else can decide on such personal matters,”
Perhaps passing shot was reserved for a Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) politician.Reacting to the RSS leader's suggestion to produce more children Nawab Mallick, NCP spokesperson said that if RSS is so concerned about the 'declining population of Hindus' then it is high time that unmarried BJP/RSS leaders, including Narendra Modi, should first get married to increase the Hindu population. He said,
“The unmarried leaders of RSS should start this movement. The Sangh should have arranged for a mass marriage ceremony and got Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi married there.”

The NCP spokesperson was candid enough to admit that the Hindu population had declined by three per cent, whereas the Muslim population went up by 1.5 per cent between 1960 and 2001, which he attributed it to the illiteracy among Muslims.

Question arises whether leaders of the Hindutva formations are really so ill informed that they are oblivious to the changes occurring around them and would love to return to the bygone era of more children and big families or their ignorance is deliberate/ self imposed which is meant to further their sectarian political agenda?

III.

Anyone keeping a close watch on the going ons in the country would vouch that neither Hosbale, nor Sudarshan can claim originality in this claim. We can find similar references to the issue elsewhere in RSS's not so glorious history. A random sampling of news cuttings makes it clear.

Around ten years back VHP president Ashok Singhal had similarly exhorted Hindus to give up family planning
"..[s]o that their population does not go down … The population of minorities, especially Muslims, had been rising at such a fast pace that it would be 25 to 30 percent of the total population in 50 years. It would be suicidal for Hindus if they did not raise their population.
Or here is Ram Madhav, then spokesperson of RSS "The Hindus will be reduced to less than of the subcontinent’s population by 2050". (2004)
Perhaps in recent times Narendra Modi, a Sangh Pracharak himself, can be 'credited' with bringing out this population paranoia in more vicious ways and benefitting electorally from it. On the one hand while castigating the victim Muslim community, which was forced to live in relief camps, for transforming these camps into 'child producing factories' he had raised another slogan to whip up frenzy against the minorities. He said "Hum do hamare do; woh paanch, unke pachees, which crudely translates as ‘We [Hindus] are two and have two children; they [Muslims] are five and have 25 children’.

Explaining these controversial statements here is Mohan Rao once again : (-do-)

"The suggestion is simple and beguilingly appealing, but also deeply flawed. The reference is, of course, to the fact that Hindus are not allowed by civil law to have more than one wife, while Muslims in India can have four. What this does not reveal is that data clearly shows that unlawful bigamous or polygamous marriages are more prevalent among Hindus than among Muslims. For example, as per the available data, the percentage incidence of what are called polygynous marriages (in which a man has more than one wife) is 5.8 among Hindus, while it is 5.73 among Muslims. What this also overlooks is that, assuming a situation of relatively equal males and females, a Muslim man with four wives would actually contribute less to population growth than if each of the wives were to be married to different men. Another oversight is that Muslims, like Hindus, are not a monolithic, homogenous community. Muslims in Kerala or Tamil Nadu, indeed in South India in general, typically have smaller families than Hindus in states such as Uttar Pradesh and Bihar in North India. Clearly, then, religion is not the main issue at play. "

We can notice that the Parivar scare campaign against Muslims "swamping" of the country has three components. Firstly, the Muslims, are accused of breeding faster than Hindus by avoiding birth control and secondly, Muslim youth are accused of engaging in 'love jihad' to win over Hindu girls/women and thus promoting conversion and thirdly, "demographic invasion" which 'takes place from across the borders.Thus a Bangladeshi, who arrives in India without any Papers, becomes a "infiltrator" rather than "illegal immigrant."
It is a different matter that facts belie their claims.

"...[O]f the total Indian population of 1.028 billion at the time of the census, (2001) the Hindus totaled 827 million and 80.5 of the population. The Muslims numbered 138 million, comprising 13.4 per cent of the population. The next in size were the Christians (24 million or 2.3 per cent). Census data since 1951, the year of the first Indian head-count, suggest that the Muslim population increases by about one per cent every decade.Experts have pointed out that, at the same rate, it will take three centuries for India to become a Muslim-majority country! "( Of Figures and Indian Fascists, Raman, www.truthdig.com)

A look at the population trends over a period of time tells us that over the 1990s the rate of decline in the population growth rate among Muslims was sharper than among Hindus. For example, the National Family Health Survey tells us that the total fertility rate (TFR) for Hindus declined from 3.2 to 2.78 between 1993-94 and 1998-99, a difference of 0.52. Among Muslims, it declined from 4.41 to 3.59, a decline of 0.82. As far as Muslims with a high standard of living is concerned, the percentage decline in the TFR was much sharper than among Hindus over the same period.

IV

As an aside it would be worthwhile to mention some interesting figures about Muslim majority countries.

At the popular level, it is difficult for people to take cognisance of the fact that fertility in Indonesia with majority Muslims population is lower (total fertility rate3 2.6) than India with majority Hindu population (total fertility rate 3.2) [UN 2002]. The decline in fertility in Indonesia has been possible through vigorous family planning, well-integrated with the healthcare provisions in the country. Recently, fertility decline in Bangladesh has been much faster following an increased level of family planning
(Fact and Fiction on Hindutva claims re 'a dying race' (R B Bhagat), Economic and Political Weekly ;.September 25, 2004 )

To conclude, if this is the real picture, then what is the basis for paranoia around population ?

It is simple. It serves a larger political purpose of mobilisation of 'us' versus 'them'. By constructing fear and anxiety about the future, saffron demography accomplishes something insidious: it evokes complicity in morally offensive policies. Fundamentalist demographies of other hues – Jewish, Christian, Islamic or Sinhala - can also be characterised by same features and follow similar trajectory.

Much on the lines of Datta Hosbales and Ashok Singhals, Islamist fundamentalists are also opposed to family planning, which considers it as a Judeo-Christian plot to emasculate the Muslim world, e.g. Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt, is opposed to contraception as it would, its members claim, lead to ‘unrestrained female sexuality’, weakening the moral fabric of Islamic society.

Datta Hosbales of the world are really in good company. Perhaps it is high time that they build international linkages and advice each other over the issue of 'producing more children' and 'having bigger families' and in the intervening period get ready to implement Nawab Malik's sincere advice to them.