India Census 2011: Where are the Atheists?
-subhash gatade
“A good world needs knowledge, kindness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men’
- Bertrand Russell
The consternation witnessed around release of religious figures in Census 2011 has rather overshadowed an interesting fact which has emerged through this mammoth exercise. It tells us that India has 2.87 million people who have no faith in any religion, which is around 0.24 per cent of our population. Definitely it includes not only atheists, rationalists but all those people who do not believe in any faith but some ‘unknown’ force.
Definitely it is a welcome development that the state has finally acknowledged their existence and what Dravid Kazhagam leader K Veeramani said ‘recorded their voice for the first time in the census’. but a cursory glance at earlier surveys and studies makes it amply clear that the figures are on the lower end.
Take the case of a survey done by the Times of India people with TNS, a leading market research agency to know ‘how Indians view God and their faith’.(10 city TOI-TNS poll ( TOI, 26 th Nov 2006) ) It was done across ten cities – Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Patna, Lucknow and Nagpur- with 1,007 respondents, and which was restricted to people falling in socio-economic categories A,B and C.
According to the survey three fourths of Indians were strong believers; 72 per cent of those in their twenties strongly believe in god ; mere 11 per cent of respondents saw god as explicitly male ; number of people who said they are more religious today than they used to be was considerably larger than those who felt they had become less religious. The survey also brought to the fore the unwritten divide existing between the south and the north. While according to the survey 92 % of the respondents in the north had expressed their belief in God, the figure slipped to 86% in South. The scepticism of the south was also evident in things like belief in spiritual gurus or on questions less directly connected to religiosity.
Or, refer to the ‘Global Index of Religiosity and Atheism’ (More Indians have stopped believing in God: Survey, Kounteya Sinha,TNN | May 27, 2013, 05.09 AM IST) which found that ‘the number of non-religious people in India has risen.’ While in the same survey in 2005, 87% participants declared themselves to be religious, the percentage fell to 81 % in 2013, a drop by 6 % in seven years. Interestingly the survey found 1% dip in the number of people calling themselves as an atheist. If 4% people declared themselves to be atheist in 2005, in 2012, it had dipped to 3%.
They also found that the trend is similar globally, while religiosity has dropped by 9 %, atheism has risen by 3 % and they witnessed a ‘notable decline across the globe in self-description of being religious.’ If one goes into the details one discovers that they talked to 51,297 persons from 57 countries in five continents. And in each country they interviewed around 1,000 men and women.
Interestingly a writeup in a leading newspaper ( In God We Don’t Believe, The Telegraph, January 11, 2015) talked about emergence of a ‘silently unfolding counter-movement’ and ‘Atheism gathering followers among Indian youth’. It also said
‘A random dipstick survey of the metros shows that nearly 30 per cent of the people do not believe in God. Of them, 17 per cent are avowed atheists. Among those who do believe in the existence of God, nearly half approach God as an indefinable superpower rather than a religious concept.
Acknowledging the fact that the above mentioned surveys have used a small sample, and have been randomly picked to convey a point it is difficult to comprehend that India which has a long history of atheism and agnosticism and Indian religions like Buddhism, Jainism and some schools of Hinduism consider atheism to be acceptable and India having produced many atheist politicians and social reformers, the no of people under ‘nonfaith category’ is so less. Another important factor which we should bear in mind relates to the trajectory of modern secular democracies where one discovers that people are turning away from religion. E.g. In Netherlands the figure is 40 per cent whereas in Check republic more than 60 per cent people have expressed no commitment towards any religion etc.
The only possible reason behind the meagre number of people under ‘non faith category’ seems to be absence of clarity in the census form itself which had resulted in the lumping together of minor or tribal religions as well as atheists and agnostics in an unclassifiable category of ‘Others’. One can recall how many atheists and agnostics had expressed their dissent then over the fact that question 7 in the 2011 census form had asked respondents to disclose their religion and if it fell in the list of six major religions, a corresponding code was given. They had found it to be ‘closed question which compelled a religious response.’ Although the concerned ministry had instructed enumerators to record ‘no religion’ for such respondents, yet ‘technically, only the coded answers in the Indian census form were tabulated as classifiable data.’ (http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/science/Indian-atheists-seek-recognition-in-the-land-of-a-million-gods/articleshow/14527853.cms?referral=PM)
The small number of people under ‘non faith’ category because of the ambiguity maintained by the state here reminds one of a campaign undertaken by secular groups in Britain in the year 2011 to urge members of the public who are not religious to say so explicitly in the national census. They had felt that the question on the 2001 census form ‘What is your religion?’ was a closed question (which was repeated in the 2011 census as well) which compelled people to give a religious response which had resulted in 72% of people being classed as Christians – a figure which was much higher than other surveys. The British Humanist Association (BHA) had then even unveiled a series of posters on buses and billboards across the country which had used the slogan “Not religious? In this year’s census, say so”.
Perhaps as we contemplate on the issue there is an urgent need to look at similar experiences elsewhere and strategise accordingly so that in the forthcoming census in 2021 at least atheists can be easily marked out and we get the actual figures and are not condemned to the ‘others’ category.
subhash.gatade@gmail.com
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Showing posts with label Census. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Census. Show all posts
September 01, 2015
February 01, 2015
India: My religion isn’t state business (Renuka Bisht)
The Times of India - 22 January 2015 - Edit Page
My religion isn’t state business
Renuka Bisht
Our secular state has no religion, meaning that while people are free to be devout followers of diverse faiths state policy must be based on religiously neutral considerations. Therefore our census also should have no religion.
It enumerates the entire country every decade so the state can do a better job of planning to improve citizens’ quality of life. But whether it’s education or healthcare or roads or electricity or irrigation or banking or any other in a long list of services the state has a role in supplying, religion ought not to be a factor for a secular state. Enumerating religion in the census impairs the idea of modern secular India. Let’s stop doing this as it only strengthens the social barriers and bigotry that the state must work to dilute.
With the caste census unfortunately India is moving in reverse. Ostensibly this is to improve reservations – but these should have been ended decades ago, as was expected by those that gave them birth. Nehru himself had strong feelings about how they led to ‘inefficiency and second rate standards’. The point here is not to deny historical or continuing injustices but to say that the modern secular state should tackle them by universalising basic provisions, improving institutions and service delivery for all – rather than perpetuating the tyranny of group identities. The growing core of modern identity is flexibility and personal choice. Census should catch up.
My religion isn’t state business
Renuka Bisht
Our secular state has no religion, meaning that while people are free to be devout followers of diverse faiths state policy must be based on religiously neutral considerations. Therefore our census also should have no religion.
It enumerates the entire country every decade so the state can do a better job of planning to improve citizens’ quality of life. But whether it’s education or healthcare or roads or electricity or irrigation or banking or any other in a long list of services the state has a role in supplying, religion ought not to be a factor for a secular state. Enumerating religion in the census impairs the idea of modern secular India. Let’s stop doing this as it only strengthens the social barriers and bigotry that the state must work to dilute.
With the caste census unfortunately India is moving in reverse. Ostensibly this is to improve reservations – but these should have been ended decades ago, as was expected by those that gave them birth. Nehru himself had strong feelings about how they led to ‘inefficiency and second rate standards’. The point here is not to deny historical or continuing injustices but to say that the modern secular state should tackle them by universalising basic provisions, improving institutions and service delivery for all – rather than perpetuating the tyranny of group identities. The growing core of modern identity is flexibility and personal choice. Census should catch up.
February 13, 2014
India: PIL seeks change from 'Muslim' to 'Islam' in Census data
PIL seeks change from 'Muslim' to 'Islam' in Census data
Monday, February 10, 2014 - 06:00 IST | Place: Mumbai | Agency: DNA
DNA Correspondent
The Bombay high court on Friday directed the Union Government to file an affidavit in reply to a public interest litigation (PIL) seeking correction on survey data forms of 2011-2012, which wrongly mentions 'Muslim' in the religion column instead of 'Islam'.
A division bench comprising Justices S J Vazifdar and B P Colabawala gave the order after hearing the PIL submitted by Aziz Pathan.
Pathan wanted the HC to direct the Union Ministry of Human Resource Development and Census to withdraw the data forms and circulate corrected forms and only then declare the survey report.
According to the petition, the data forms issued for the socio, economic and caste/religious survey for the year 2011-12 contained the word 'Muslim' in the religion column instead of Islam. And though the petitioner made representations to the government in this regard, it did not respond. He then approached the HC.
The HC has directed the Union Government to file its reply within two weeks.
source url: http://www.dnaindia.com/mumbai/report-pil-seeks-change-from-muslim-to-islam-in-census-data-1960599
November 09, 2012
Publication announcment: Religion, Science, and Empire: Classifying Hinduism and Islam in British India
H-ASIA
November 8, 2012
Member publication: Religion, Science, and Empire: Classifying Hinduism
and Islam in British India
******************************************************************
From: Peter Gottschalk
pgottschalk@wesleyan.edu
Dear colleagues,
For those who might be interested, I'm pleased to announce the publication
of my book, Religion, Science, and Empire: Classifying Hinduism and Islam
in British India (Oxford University Press, 2012).
The volume offers a study of how, through the British implementation of
scientific taxonomy in the subcontinent, Britons and Indians identified an
inherent divide between mutually antagonistic religious communities.
England's ascent to power coincided with the rise of empirical science as
an authoritative way of knowing not only the natural world, but the human
one as well. The British scientific passion for classification, combined
with the Christian impulse to differentiate people according to religion,
led to a designation of Indians as either Hindu or Muslim according to
rigidly defined criteria that paralleled classification in botanical and
zoological taxonomies.
Through an historical and ethnographic study of the north Indian village
of Chainpur, the volume shows that the Britons' presumed categories did
not necessarily reflect Indian concepts of their own identities, though
many Indians came to embrace this scientism and gradually accepted the
categories the British instituted through projects like the Census of
India, the Archaeological Survey of India, and the India Museum. Today's
propogators of Hindu-Muslim violence often cite scientistic formulations
of difference that descend directly from the categories introduced by
imperial Britain.
Introduction
1. Religion, Science, and Scientism
2. Cartography, the Ideal of Science, and the Place of Religion
First Theoretical Interlude: Th e Dynamics of Comparison and Classification
3. Christocentric Travel Writing: Dynamics of Comparison and Classification
Second Theoretical Interlude: Five Modes of Comparison
4. Humanist Travel Writing: Ascent of Empiricism and the On the Spot
Third Theoretical Interlude: Classification in the Natural Sciences
5. Categories to Count On: Religion and Caste in the Census
6. A Raja, a Ghost, and a Tribe: Studies in Folklore, Ethnology, and Religion
7. Popularizing Chainpur’s Past: Archaeology in Place and in Museums
8. Chainpur Today
Conclusion
Link to publisher:
http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/ReligionTheology/Hinduism/?view=usa&ci=9780195393019
Peter Gottschalk
Professor
Department of Religion
171 Church Street
Wesleyan University
Middletown, CT 06459
(860) 685-2293
pgottschalk@wesleyan.edu
November 8, 2012
Member publication: Religion, Science, and Empire: Classifying Hinduism
and Islam in British India
******************************************************************
From: Peter Gottschalk
pgottschalk@wesleyan.edu
Dear colleagues,
For those who might be interested, I'm pleased to announce the publication
of my book, Religion, Science, and Empire: Classifying Hinduism and Islam
in British India (Oxford University Press, 2012).
The volume offers a study of how, through the British implementation of
scientific taxonomy in the subcontinent, Britons and Indians identified an
inherent divide between mutually antagonistic religious communities.
England's ascent to power coincided with the rise of empirical science as
an authoritative way of knowing not only the natural world, but the human
one as well. The British scientific passion for classification, combined
with the Christian impulse to differentiate people according to religion,
led to a designation of Indians as either Hindu or Muslim according to
rigidly defined criteria that paralleled classification in botanical and
zoological taxonomies.
Through an historical and ethnographic study of the north Indian village
of Chainpur, the volume shows that the Britons' presumed categories did
not necessarily reflect Indian concepts of their own identities, though
many Indians came to embrace this scientism and gradually accepted the
categories the British instituted through projects like the Census of
India, the Archaeological Survey of India, and the India Museum. Today's
propogators of Hindu-Muslim violence often cite scientistic formulations
of difference that descend directly from the categories introduced by
imperial Britain.
Introduction
1. Religion, Science, and Scientism
2. Cartography, the Ideal of Science, and the Place of Religion
First Theoretical Interlude: Th e Dynamics of Comparison and Classification
3. Christocentric Travel Writing: Dynamics of Comparison and Classification
Second Theoretical Interlude: Five Modes of Comparison
4. Humanist Travel Writing: Ascent of Empiricism and the On the Spot
Third Theoretical Interlude: Classification in the Natural Sciences
5. Categories to Count On: Religion and Caste in the Census
6. A Raja, a Ghost, and a Tribe: Studies in Folklore, Ethnology, and Religion
7. Popularizing Chainpur’s Past: Archaeology in Place and in Museums
8. Chainpur Today
Conclusion
Link to publisher:
http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/ReligionTheology/Hinduism/?view=usa&ci=9780195393019
Peter Gottschalk
Professor
Department of Religion
171 Church Street
Wesleyan University
Middletown, CT 06459
(860) 685-2293
pgottschalk@wesleyan.edu
September 01, 2012
Bangla Deshi's in India: Myth and Reality
Ram Puniyani
The Assam violence between Bodos and Muslims, alleged by many to be Bangldeshi infiltrators, has a long chain of repercussions. The number of dead is nearly eighty. Killings are continuing and the people who have been displaced have been over 4 lakhs. There is no exact statistics to tell us how many of the displaced are Muslims and how many are Bodos, still roughly some investigators have put the figure of Muslims 80% and Bodos 20%. The few reports which have come out tell us that the condition of the all refugee camps is abysmal, much worse of those where Muslims are living. Meanwhile many a voices have come up to express their own opinions. The BJP leaders have strongly asserted that the whole violence is due to the Bangla Deshi infiltrators, whose number is estimated as per the flight of one’s imagination ranging from 10 million to 20 million or even more. It is alleged that they have encroached, taken over the land of the local natives, which is causing the dissatisfaction and so the hate for them. This hate in turn is at the root of violence. This is one case where displacement overshadows the violence.
The Election Commissioner H.S. Brahma, a Bodo himself, went to the extent of saying that these infiltrators have gone up in number and so have become aggressive and attacked the local Bodos. The other point of view is that despite the formation of Bodo Territorial Council, the Bodos did not surrender their arms, which was one of the conditions for accepting the demand of this regional council. There are voices from BJP stable that this is an issue of Nationalism, the one of Indians and the other of Bangladeshis. Some of them have voiced that these Bangla Deshis should be disenfranchised and not be permitted to vote. As such already many of them are not allowed to vote by putting them in the category of ‘D’ voters, i.e. doubtful voters. As per BJP and company it is Congress, which has been encouraging the Bangladeshis to infiltrate so that they can be used as the vote bank by the Congress. Not to ignore that since major number of those in relief camps is that of Muslims, some Bodo groups have warned that the Muslims should not be permitted to return to their original places.
National Minorities Commission in its report has pointed out that there is no infiltration of Bangla Deshis as such and the issue is that between the Bodo ethnic groups, on one side and the Muslims, who have settled here from a long time, on the other. Before we come to the issue whether these are Bangla Deshi infiltrators, Bangldeshi migrants or the Muslims settlers from Bengal over a period of time, lets register that the Assam episode had a very painful after events. There were Hate emails, Hate web sites which warned the North Eastern people that revenge of Assam will be taken against them and this caused a mammoth exodus of North eastern people from all over, more particularly from Bangalore. The Web sites which did this dirty job, many of them have been blocked, it is said are from Pakistan, some 20% of the blocked sites are the one’s run by Hindutva groups also. Through leaflets and other mechanisms VHP and other groups are propagating that Hindus are being attacked by Muslims, the Bangla Deshi infiltrators.
Not to be left behind some orthodox, fanatic Muslim groups organized a protest rally in Azad Maidan of Mumbai, in which a preplanned act by a section of Muslims attacked the OB vans of media and the police officials. The restrained and effective leadership of Arup Patnaik was not to the liking of the communal elements and those politicking on the issue within the ruling party and so Mr. Patnaik has been punished by being kicked up, As such secular activists and large section of Muslims are in deep appreciation of Mr. Patnaik’s handling of the episode.
Coming back to the propaganda of Bangla Deshi infiltrators, many a researchers have proved on the basis of demographic data of last century in particular that the Muslims in the region are settlers from pre partition Bengal to begin with, later at the time of partition in 1947 and lastly at the time of Bangla Desh war in 1971. Assam accord of 1985 recognizes all those living in this area as the legal setters, most of the Muslim fall in that category. Not to deny that that some small number of illegal immigrants, the one’s forced to migrate for economic reasons is also there.
The change in demographic profile of Assam has taken place over a period of more than a century. It was mainly the British policy to release the pressure from the then Bengal province that they encouraged the Bengalis to settle in Assam. The last major migration has taken place around 1971, the Bangla war. After that the trickle has been there but the alleged infiltration is not there. Assam accord does recognize that all those who have settled before 1971 are legal Indian citizens, which most of the Muslims in Assam are. This is shown by the pattern of decadal growth in the region more particularly from 1950 onwards. The census figures clearly point out that after 1971; there is no major increase in the population of the area. The decadal growth in India, Assam, Dhubri, Dhemaji, and Karbi Anglong from 1971 to 1991 had been 54.51, 54.26, 45.65, 107.50, and 74.72 respectively. While the same in the decade of 1991-01 became 21.54, 18.92, 22.97, 19.45, 22.72 and in the decade of 01-11 it became 17.64, 16.93, 24.40, 20.30 and 18.69 respectively. Shivam Viz in Myth of Bangla Deshi and Violence in Assam (http://kafila.org/2012/08/16/
If we just look at the decadal growth rates of population in two other districts of Assam, Dhemaji and Karbi Anglong, we will see that their growth rates in comparison have been more than twice that of Assam and substantially higher than even the ‘Muslim’ majority ‘border’ district of Dhubri. Yet, the Muslim population in Dhemaji and Karbi Anglong is minuscule. The Hindu population in these two districts is 95.94% and 82.39% Hindu respectively. Muslims constitute merely 1.84% and 2.22% respectively of their total populations, in spite of having consistent high decadal growth rates – Dhemaji touching 103.42% between 1961-71 and Karbi Anglong having a similar high of 79.21% between 1951-61. This should be testimony enough to show that there could be reasons apart from illegal immigration of Muslims behind a high decadal growth rate of population. In Assam there is a decline in the population in Kokrajhar, which is the seat of Bodo Territorial Council. It hasthe lowest population growth of 5.19%, from the earlier 14.49 per cent in 2001.
Understanding the truth and deeper analysis of the demographic pattern of Assam is very essential to understand the nature of present carnage, which is more of a sectarian nature, a group trying to assert ethnic domination in the region. The underlying causes, lack of development of the region, absence of jobs, is creating more pressure on the land, and the ‘sons of the soil’ politics is being brought up in a very painful manner. Not only do we need to assuage the present violence, there is a need to bring in amity between different communities with proper development of infrastructure, which gives the opportunities to all the citizens of the area.
August 23, 2012
Banajit Hussain on 2012 Assam Riots & the bogey of Bangladeshis
Many Muslims from erstwhile East Bengal settled in Assam in early 20th century. But vested interests are out to prove that their descendants today are illegal migrants
http://www.sacw.net/article2777.html
http://www.sacw.net/article2777.html
August 22, 2012
Assam: Census Figures Nix Illegal Migration Theory
Outlook Magazine | Aug 27, 2012
politics: communal violence
Census Figures Nix Illegal Migration Theory
Population growth patterns over the last decade show no Muslim influx
Uttam Sengupta
Wildly fluctuating and suspiciously rounded figures (10 million in 1997 by CPI’s Indrajit Gupta, 20 million by BJP’s L.K. Advani in 2003, 12 million by Congress’s Sriprakash Jaiswal in 2004) of alleged illegal Bangladeshi migrants, based on nothing in particular or attributed vaguely to ‘intelligence reports’, have dominated the discourse on the ethnic strife in Assam. Yet, official census figures tell a completely different story.
* In the last three Censuses (1991, 2001 and 2011), decadal growth rates of population have been lower than the national figure.
* Also, it’s incorrect that abnormal population growth automatically suggests illegal migration.
Population in Dhemaji district grew dramatically by 74.72 per cent between 1971 and 1991. But 95 per cent of the population happen to be Hindus.
* Tripura has a 900-km border with Bangladesh (as compared to 270 kms for Assam) and yet illegal migrants do not seem to be an issue there.
The BJP Member of Parliament, Bijoya Chakrabarty, declared in the Lok Sabha this month that ‘Bangladeshis’ were in a majority in 13 of the 27 districts of Assam. Even the otherwise sober Arun Jaitley, leader of the opposition in the Rajya Sabha, said in the Rajya Sabha that in both Dhubri and Goalpara districts, ‘foreigners’ constituted 60-80 per cent of the population.
In an affidavit filed before the Supreme Court of India this month, the ministry of home affairs however claimed that electoral rolls in Assam went through several revisions between 1997 and 2005 and there was little possibility of ‘foreigners’ being included in the list. The latest census appears to support the claim.
Population growth in Assam: In absolute terms, the number of people in the state went up by 4.51 million in a decade (45,13,744 to be precise) in the 2011 census (provisional).
Children below the age of 6: The population of children below the age of 6, born after the last census in 2001, is also 4.51 million (45,11,307). The fear of run-away illegal migration, therefore, may well be misplaced.
Decline of population in Kokrajhar: The lowest population growth (5.19 per cent) in Assam has been recorded in Kokrajhar district, the seat of the Bodo Territorial Council, where it has come down from 14.49 per cent in 2001.
Muslim population in Kokrajhar: While figures for population by religion in the 2011 census are yet to be declared, in 1971, Muslims constituted 17 per cent of the population, 19.3 per cent in 1991 and 20.4 per cent in 2001. This clearly does not indicate an alarming growth. Muslims as a whole, constituted 30.9 per cent of Assam’s population (comparative figures are 25.2 per cent for Bengal and 24.7 per cent for Kerala.) Most of the ‘migrant’ Muslims—Indian citizens if they came before April 1971—are forced to live on the shifting sandbars of the Brahmaputra and frequently uprooted by floods. Many migrate to urban centres to work as rickshaw pullers, vegetable vendors and construction workers. Politicians feeding on their fear seem to have pushed them again to the brink.
politics: communal violence
Census Figures Nix Illegal Migration Theory
Population growth patterns over the last decade show no Muslim influx
Uttam Sengupta
Wildly fluctuating and suspiciously rounded figures (10 million in 1997 by CPI’s Indrajit Gupta, 20 million by BJP’s L.K. Advani in 2003, 12 million by Congress’s Sriprakash Jaiswal in 2004) of alleged illegal Bangladeshi migrants, based on nothing in particular or attributed vaguely to ‘intelligence reports’, have dominated the discourse on the ethnic strife in Assam. Yet, official census figures tell a completely different story.
* In the last three Censuses (1991, 2001 and 2011), decadal growth rates of population have been lower than the national figure.
* Also, it’s incorrect that abnormal population growth automatically suggests illegal migration.
Population in Dhemaji district grew dramatically by 74.72 per cent between 1971 and 1991. But 95 per cent of the population happen to be Hindus.
* Tripura has a 900-km border with Bangladesh (as compared to 270 kms for Assam) and yet illegal migrants do not seem to be an issue there.
The BJP Member of Parliament, Bijoya Chakrabarty, declared in the Lok Sabha this month that ‘Bangladeshis’ were in a majority in 13 of the 27 districts of Assam. Even the otherwise sober Arun Jaitley, leader of the opposition in the Rajya Sabha, said in the Rajya Sabha that in both Dhubri and Goalpara districts, ‘foreigners’ constituted 60-80 per cent of the population.
In an affidavit filed before the Supreme Court of India this month, the ministry of home affairs however claimed that electoral rolls in Assam went through several revisions between 1997 and 2005 and there was little possibility of ‘foreigners’ being included in the list. The latest census appears to support the claim.
Population growth in Assam: In absolute terms, the number of people in the state went up by 4.51 million in a decade (45,13,744 to be precise) in the 2011 census (provisional).
Children below the age of 6: The population of children below the age of 6, born after the last census in 2001, is also 4.51 million (45,11,307). The fear of run-away illegal migration, therefore, may well be misplaced.
Decline of population in Kokrajhar: The lowest population growth (5.19 per cent) in Assam has been recorded in Kokrajhar district, the seat of the Bodo Territorial Council, where it has come down from 14.49 per cent in 2001.
Muslim population in Kokrajhar: While figures for population by religion in the 2011 census are yet to be declared, in 1971, Muslims constituted 17 per cent of the population, 19.3 per cent in 1991 and 20.4 per cent in 2001. This clearly does not indicate an alarming growth. Muslims as a whole, constituted 30.9 per cent of Assam’s population (comparative figures are 25.2 per cent for Bengal and 24.7 per cent for Kerala.) Most of the ‘migrant’ Muslims—Indian citizens if they came before April 1971—are forced to live on the shifting sandbars of the Brahmaputra and frequently uprooted by floods. Many migrate to urban centres to work as rickshaw pullers, vegetable vendors and construction workers. Politicians feeding on their fear seem to have pushed them again to the brink.
January 19, 2009
The decadal growth of the Sangh Parivar in Orissa
LEST WE FORGET
The decadal growth of the Sangh Parivar in Orissa from the martyrdom of Graham Stuart Staines and his sons on January 22, 1999, and of Father Bernard digal in the violence of August 2008
RSS the mother organization now has 6,000 shakhas with a 1,50,000 plus cadre.
The VHP has 1,25,000 primary workers in Orissa.
The Bajrang Dal has 50,000 activists working in 200 shakhas.
The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party has above 4,50,000 workers.
The Durga Vahini, the women’s group has 7,000 outfits in 117 sites.
The Rashtriya Sevika Samiti, another gender group, has 80 centres
Bharatiya Majdoor [labour] Sangh manages 171 trade unions with a cadre of 1,82,000 members.
The strong Bharatiya Kisan [farmers] Sangh has 30,000 in 100 blocks.
Other Sangh front organisations include Friends of Tribal Society, Samarpan Charitable Trust, Sookruti, Yasodha Sadan, Eklavya Vidyalayas [schools], Vanvasi Kalyan Ashrams and Parishads , Vivekananda Kendras, Shikha Vikas Samitis and Sewa Bharatis.
Kandhamal district, one of Orissa’s thirty, has 2,415 villages, the two towns of Phulbani and Balliguda.
Orissa’s 36.8 million population has a mere 2.4 per cent Christians, 2.1 per cent Muslims.
[Data courtesy Census of India, Survey of India, Prof Angana Chatterji
[US] and others]
John Dayal, 19th January 2009
The decadal growth of the Sangh Parivar in Orissa from the martyrdom of Graham Stuart Staines and his sons on January 22, 1999, and of Father Bernard digal in the violence of August 2008
RSS the mother organization now has 6,000 shakhas with a 1,50,000 plus cadre.
The VHP has 1,25,000 primary workers in Orissa.
The Bajrang Dal has 50,000 activists working in 200 shakhas.
The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party has above 4,50,000 workers.
The Durga Vahini, the women’s group has 7,000 outfits in 117 sites.
The Rashtriya Sevika Samiti, another gender group, has 80 centres
Bharatiya Majdoor [labour] Sangh manages 171 trade unions with a cadre of 1,82,000 members.
The strong Bharatiya Kisan [farmers] Sangh has 30,000 in 100 blocks.
Other Sangh front organisations include Friends of Tribal Society, Samarpan Charitable Trust, Sookruti, Yasodha Sadan, Eklavya Vidyalayas [schools], Vanvasi Kalyan Ashrams and Parishads , Vivekananda Kendras, Shikha Vikas Samitis and Sewa Bharatis.
Kandhamal district, one of Orissa’s thirty, has 2,415 villages, the two towns of Phulbani and Balliguda.
Orissa’s 36.8 million population has a mere 2.4 per cent Christians, 2.1 per cent Muslims.
[Data courtesy Census of India, Survey of India, Prof Angana Chatterji
[US] and others]
John Dayal, 19th January 2009
November 04, 2004
Census and Nonsense: The Sangh's Communal Demography (Manisha Sethi)
(ML International Newsletter November-December 2004)
Census and Nonsense: The Sangh's Communal Demography
by Manisha Sethi
A comedy of errors was played out when the Census
Commission first raised the cry of spiralling Muslim
growth rate and falling Hindu growth rate, only to
rectify their schoolchild-like error by admitting that
the growth rate was not adjusted against the 1991
census figures, when the solitary Muslim majority
state was not included. So in fact now, with the
adjusted figures, Muslim population was not rising at
the rate of 36 per cent as declared earlier but at the
rate of 29.3 per centódown from 32.9 per cent in 1991.
Indeed the Muslim growth rate registered a decline
greater than that of Hindus, which stood at 3.6 and
2.8 per cent respectively. Further, the decline in
Hindu growth rate could have been possibly triggered
not by falling birth rates but because several large
communities who had previously been recorded as Hindus
- the Jains, Veershaive/Lingayats in Karnataka and the
Sarna in Jharkhand - insisted on a separate
identification this time.
But the Hindutva brigade would not be pacified.
Praveen Togadia was particularly miffed at the
'adjusted figures' and threatened to move court over
the change whereby the Hindu population 'jumped from
80.5 per cent to 81.4 per cent'. He saw it as a
conspiracy to 'hoodwink' the Hindus about the actual
growth in Muslim population, which was poised,
according to him, to become a majority by 2111, unless
checked. Venkaiah Naidu announced that high Muslim
growth coupled with 'demographic invasion' by
Bangladeshi infiltrators should be a 'cause of grave
concern for all those who think of India's unity and
integrity in the long run', namely the Rashtriya
Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) and its affiliates. For Ram
Madhav, the RSS spokesperson, even the earlier
unadjusted figures do not measure up adequately.
According to him, 'our own study has shown much higher
growth [for the Muslims]'.
'Our own study'? True, the Organiser routinely lists
horror stories about the rising Muslim population, but
none of these lay claims to being a 'study'. The
study under question, one can hazard a guess, is
Religious Demography of India by A.P Joshi, M.D.
Srinivas and J.K. Bajaj (Centre for Policy Research,
Chennai, 2003). With its plethora of tables and
statistics on census between 1881 and 1991, it is a
supreme example of how figures divorced from all
socio-economic contexts may be harnessed in the
service of a dangerous ideology. The basic thesis of
the 'study' is thus: The population of 'Indian
religionists' is steadily declining while that of
other religionists, namely Muslims and Christians, is
steadily rising, resulting in a fall of about 11 per
cent points for the former. The downward graph of the
Indian religionists and the upward, resurgent curve of
the non-Indian religionists 'will intersect at 50 per
cent mark just before 2061', following which the
Indian religionists will be rendered a minority (There
is obviously no consensus in the Hindutva camp about
the precise date of the Doomsday: Togadia predicted
2111).
How do Messrs. Joshi, Srinivas and Bajaj arrive at
this calculation? Simple. They take liberties with
conceptual as well as geographical boundaries!
According to them, 'Indian religionists' include not
only Sikhs, Jains and Buddhistsówhich were in any case
defined by Article 25 of the Indian Constitution as
Hindus - but much more remarkably, also, Jews, Parsees
and Bahais. It is therefore only a residual category,
including under its denomination all those who are not
Muslims and Christians.
India, for them, is not the Indian Union but in true
Akhand Bharat style, subsumes India, Pakistan and
Bangladesh! By their own calculations for the Indian
Union, the fall in the population of Indian
religionists is only about 2 percent nowhere as
dramatic as 11 per cent. Though by itself 2 per cent
is not significant, what worries them is that while
Indian religionists have been able to rebuff the
advance of Islam and Christianity and continue to form
an overwhelming majority in large swathes of areas,
there are certain regions where the Indian
religionists are under great pressure (Uttar Pradesh,
Bihar, West Bengal and Assam) or turning into a
minority (Kerala, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, the
Northeast). The existence of pockets of Muslim and
Christian influence, say the authors, 'formed the
demographic basis of Partition of the country in
1947', thus hinting that a rising Muslim and Christian
population signals another impending partition. L.K.
Advani who has written the Foreword to the book, in
his own words, was a 'victim' of religious demography
and thus urges all to take serious note of the
findings of the book.
The spectre of 'Muslims overtaking Hindus in India' is
not of recent origin. It is as old as the census
itself and the communalist mythmakers drew sustenance
from it. For instance, O Donnel, the Census
Commissioner for 1891 calculated on the basis of the
sluggish growth rates of the Hindus in comparison with
that of Muslims the ëexactí numbers of years it would
take for the Hindus to disappear altogether. H.H.
Risley, Home Secretary, Govt. of India, wondered if
the figures of the last Census were a 'forerunner of
an Islamic and Christian revival which will threaten
the citadel of Hinduism' (cited in P.K. Datta's
"'Dying Hindus': Production of Communal Commonsense in
Early 20th Century Bengal" in EPW, June 19, 1993).
Over the years, it has become a vital component of the
communal commonsense. Best encapsulated in Modi's
infamous, 'Hum paanch, hamaare pachchis' (We five, Our
Twenty Five) insinuation. (Does he even recognise the
kind of sex ratios that would be required in the
Muslim community for realising his fantastical 'hum
paanch'?). These canards though are easily disproved
through reference to actual facts: Pune's Gokhale
Institute in the 1990s had calculated that the Muslim
population will remain fixed at 14.2 per cent of the
total even if the same trends persist for the next 100
years. The myth of Muslim polygamy was punctured by
the Survey conducted by Registrar General of India in
1961, which established the incidence of polygamy as
lowest among the Muslims.
What is completely lost in population data based on
religious distinctions is that communities are not
homogenous monoliths but are riddled with internal
socio-economic divisions, factors that actually
determine population rates. It has been well
established that development is the best contraceptive
and population rates directly reflect a peopleís
access to a host of factors such as education,
employment, nutrition, health etc. High population
rates are only an indictment of the Indian State's
inability, nay unwillingness to ensure a just and
equitable distribution of the country's resources.
Therefore, when a Venkiah Naidu or an Arun Jaitley
preaches to the Muslims to adopt family planning
measures, they are not only bolstering the commonsense
about Muslims as a community that traditionally shuns
family planning but are also cleverly shifting the
burden of its backwardness on to the community. Notice
how Maulana Sayed Kalbe Sadiq was hailed as a model
reformist when he called for a discussion on the issue
of family planning in a forthcoming meeting of the All
India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB). Precisely
because it trained the spotlight on the community and
its alleged need to 'reform' rather than on the
State's failure to deliver the goods. The Congress of
course, having burnt its hands once over the forced
sterilization drive under Sanjay Gandhi's directions
sang the song of 'voluntary' family planning.
What is as disturbing as the cry of the Islamic
population bomb is the silence over the real bombshell
of the census the abnormally skewed sex ratios across
communities, reflecting a marked preference for sons.
Again, if one were to go beyond the religion-wise
data, we find that in Haryana, for instance, the sex
ratio in lower income families is an astonishingly
high 1000, while in high income families, it is a mere
600! Clearly, the model 'hum do hamare do' (We Two,
Our Two) high-income (mostly Hindu) families follow
their own population control by killing girl foetuses.
The RSS, naturally, is silent on this murderous trend
in patriarchal Indian society.
Between 1991 and 2001, Hindus added to their
population numbers equivalent to the total Muslim
population. Why then this paranoia? It is more than a
simple matter of creating and sustaining stereotypes
or keeping the fires of communal antagonisms
simmering: at its heart lies the project of fashioning
society and State in the mould of a fascist vision.
The model of 'One People, One Culture' conceives of a
seamless Hindu civilization based on Sanatan Dharma,
which countenanced ëdifferenceí or heterogeneity for
the first time with the arrival of Islam and
Christianity. It is only the followers of the
Indic/Indianist/Vedic/Sanatani religion into which
melt the heterodox faiths of Buddhism, Jainism,
animist religions of the Adivasis and powerful
anti-Brahmanical movements who are the true
inhabitants of the nation. In We or Our Nationhood
Defined, Golwalkar had declared that "the Hindus alone
are the nation and the Moslems and others, if not
actually anti-national are at least outside the body
of the nation." Thus, if the nation is to be
preserved, the contaminating presence of the
non-nationals and anti-nationals has to be mitigated.
In his Foreword to Religious Demography in India,
Advani says, " The growth and decline of population
play a crucial role in the rise and fall of nations "
That is why active and alert societies "keep an eye
on the changing demographic trends within themselves".
However, as the sham demographers of the RSS, Joshi,
Srinivas and Bajaj tell us, defending the demographic
balance also requires a vigilante State. Gujarat
perhaps provided the best example of how 'active' and
ëalertí societies and an interventionist State may
keep an eye on the demographic trends. Genocide, after
all, is the preferred mode of ëpopulation controlí for
the fascists - recall how the saffron mobs of Gujarat
specially targeted the wombs and unborn foetuses of
Muslim women.
Census and Nonsense: The Sangh's Communal Demography
by Manisha Sethi
A comedy of errors was played out when the Census
Commission first raised the cry of spiralling Muslim
growth rate and falling Hindu growth rate, only to
rectify their schoolchild-like error by admitting that
the growth rate was not adjusted against the 1991
census figures, when the solitary Muslim majority
state was not included. So in fact now, with the
adjusted figures, Muslim population was not rising at
the rate of 36 per cent as declared earlier but at the
rate of 29.3 per centódown from 32.9 per cent in 1991.
Indeed the Muslim growth rate registered a decline
greater than that of Hindus, which stood at 3.6 and
2.8 per cent respectively. Further, the decline in
Hindu growth rate could have been possibly triggered
not by falling birth rates but because several large
communities who had previously been recorded as Hindus
- the Jains, Veershaive/Lingayats in Karnataka and the
Sarna in Jharkhand - insisted on a separate
identification this time.
But the Hindutva brigade would not be pacified.
Praveen Togadia was particularly miffed at the
'adjusted figures' and threatened to move court over
the change whereby the Hindu population 'jumped from
80.5 per cent to 81.4 per cent'. He saw it as a
conspiracy to 'hoodwink' the Hindus about the actual
growth in Muslim population, which was poised,
according to him, to become a majority by 2111, unless
checked. Venkaiah Naidu announced that high Muslim
growth coupled with 'demographic invasion' by
Bangladeshi infiltrators should be a 'cause of grave
concern for all those who think of India's unity and
integrity in the long run', namely the Rashtriya
Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) and its affiliates. For Ram
Madhav, the RSS spokesperson, even the earlier
unadjusted figures do not measure up adequately.
According to him, 'our own study has shown much higher
growth [for the Muslims]'.
'Our own study'? True, the Organiser routinely lists
horror stories about the rising Muslim population, but
none of these lay claims to being a 'study'. The
study under question, one can hazard a guess, is
Religious Demography of India by A.P Joshi, M.D.
Srinivas and J.K. Bajaj (Centre for Policy Research,
Chennai, 2003). With its plethora of tables and
statistics on census between 1881 and 1991, it is a
supreme example of how figures divorced from all
socio-economic contexts may be harnessed in the
service of a dangerous ideology. The basic thesis of
the 'study' is thus: The population of 'Indian
religionists' is steadily declining while that of
other religionists, namely Muslims and Christians, is
steadily rising, resulting in a fall of about 11 per
cent points for the former. The downward graph of the
Indian religionists and the upward, resurgent curve of
the non-Indian religionists 'will intersect at 50 per
cent mark just before 2061', following which the
Indian religionists will be rendered a minority (There
is obviously no consensus in the Hindutva camp about
the precise date of the Doomsday: Togadia predicted
2111).
How do Messrs. Joshi, Srinivas and Bajaj arrive at
this calculation? Simple. They take liberties with
conceptual as well as geographical boundaries!
According to them, 'Indian religionists' include not
only Sikhs, Jains and Buddhistsówhich were in any case
defined by Article 25 of the Indian Constitution as
Hindus - but much more remarkably, also, Jews, Parsees
and Bahais. It is therefore only a residual category,
including under its denomination all those who are not
Muslims and Christians.
India, for them, is not the Indian Union but in true
Akhand Bharat style, subsumes India, Pakistan and
Bangladesh! By their own calculations for the Indian
Union, the fall in the population of Indian
religionists is only about 2 percent nowhere as
dramatic as 11 per cent. Though by itself 2 per cent
is not significant, what worries them is that while
Indian religionists have been able to rebuff the
advance of Islam and Christianity and continue to form
an overwhelming majority in large swathes of areas,
there are certain regions where the Indian
religionists are under great pressure (Uttar Pradesh,
Bihar, West Bengal and Assam) or turning into a
minority (Kerala, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, the
Northeast). The existence of pockets of Muslim and
Christian influence, say the authors, 'formed the
demographic basis of Partition of the country in
1947', thus hinting that a rising Muslim and Christian
population signals another impending partition. L.K.
Advani who has written the Foreword to the book, in
his own words, was a 'victim' of religious demography
and thus urges all to take serious note of the
findings of the book.
The spectre of 'Muslims overtaking Hindus in India' is
not of recent origin. It is as old as the census
itself and the communalist mythmakers drew sustenance
from it. For instance, O Donnel, the Census
Commissioner for 1891 calculated on the basis of the
sluggish growth rates of the Hindus in comparison with
that of Muslims the ëexactí numbers of years it would
take for the Hindus to disappear altogether. H.H.
Risley, Home Secretary, Govt. of India, wondered if
the figures of the last Census were a 'forerunner of
an Islamic and Christian revival which will threaten
the citadel of Hinduism' (cited in P.K. Datta's
"'Dying Hindus': Production of Communal Commonsense in
Early 20th Century Bengal" in EPW, June 19, 1993).
Over the years, it has become a vital component of the
communal commonsense. Best encapsulated in Modi's
infamous, 'Hum paanch, hamaare pachchis' (We five, Our
Twenty Five) insinuation. (Does he even recognise the
kind of sex ratios that would be required in the
Muslim community for realising his fantastical 'hum
paanch'?). These canards though are easily disproved
through reference to actual facts: Pune's Gokhale
Institute in the 1990s had calculated that the Muslim
population will remain fixed at 14.2 per cent of the
total even if the same trends persist for the next 100
years. The myth of Muslim polygamy was punctured by
the Survey conducted by Registrar General of India in
1961, which established the incidence of polygamy as
lowest among the Muslims.
What is completely lost in population data based on
religious distinctions is that communities are not
homogenous monoliths but are riddled with internal
socio-economic divisions, factors that actually
determine population rates. It has been well
established that development is the best contraceptive
and population rates directly reflect a peopleís
access to a host of factors such as education,
employment, nutrition, health etc. High population
rates are only an indictment of the Indian State's
inability, nay unwillingness to ensure a just and
equitable distribution of the country's resources.
Therefore, when a Venkiah Naidu or an Arun Jaitley
preaches to the Muslims to adopt family planning
measures, they are not only bolstering the commonsense
about Muslims as a community that traditionally shuns
family planning but are also cleverly shifting the
burden of its backwardness on to the community. Notice
how Maulana Sayed Kalbe Sadiq was hailed as a model
reformist when he called for a discussion on the issue
of family planning in a forthcoming meeting of the All
India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB). Precisely
because it trained the spotlight on the community and
its alleged need to 'reform' rather than on the
State's failure to deliver the goods. The Congress of
course, having burnt its hands once over the forced
sterilization drive under Sanjay Gandhi's directions
sang the song of 'voluntary' family planning.
What is as disturbing as the cry of the Islamic
population bomb is the silence over the real bombshell
of the census the abnormally skewed sex ratios across
communities, reflecting a marked preference for sons.
Again, if one were to go beyond the religion-wise
data, we find that in Haryana, for instance, the sex
ratio in lower income families is an astonishingly
high 1000, while in high income families, it is a mere
600! Clearly, the model 'hum do hamare do' (We Two,
Our Two) high-income (mostly Hindu) families follow
their own population control by killing girl foetuses.
The RSS, naturally, is silent on this murderous trend
in patriarchal Indian society.
Between 1991 and 2001, Hindus added to their
population numbers equivalent to the total Muslim
population. Why then this paranoia? It is more than a
simple matter of creating and sustaining stereotypes
or keeping the fires of communal antagonisms
simmering: at its heart lies the project of fashioning
society and State in the mould of a fascist vision.
The model of 'One People, One Culture' conceives of a
seamless Hindu civilization based on Sanatan Dharma,
which countenanced ëdifferenceí or heterogeneity for
the first time with the arrival of Islam and
Christianity. It is only the followers of the
Indic/Indianist/Vedic/Sanatani religion into which
melt the heterodox faiths of Buddhism, Jainism,
animist religions of the Adivasis and powerful
anti-Brahmanical movements who are the true
inhabitants of the nation. In We or Our Nationhood
Defined, Golwalkar had declared that "the Hindus alone
are the nation and the Moslems and others, if not
actually anti-national are at least outside the body
of the nation." Thus, if the nation is to be
preserved, the contaminating presence of the
non-nationals and anti-nationals has to be mitigated.
In his Foreword to Religious Demography in India,
Advani says, " The growth and decline of population
play a crucial role in the rise and fall of nations "
That is why active and alert societies "keep an eye
on the changing demographic trends within themselves".
However, as the sham demographers of the RSS, Joshi,
Srinivas and Bajaj tell us, defending the demographic
balance also requires a vigilante State. Gujarat
perhaps provided the best example of how 'active' and
ëalertí societies and an interventionist State may
keep an eye on the demographic trends. Genocide, after
all, is the preferred mode of ëpopulation controlí for
the fascists - recall how the saffron mobs of Gujarat
specially targeted the wombs and unborn foetuses of
Muslim women.
October 03, 2004
Fact and Fiction on Hindutva claims re 'a dying race' (R B Bhagat)
Economic and Political Weekly
September 25, 2004 (Census 2001 and religion data)
Fact and Fiction
Since 1901, passions have been inflamed after every census that the Hindus are becoming 'a dying race' in India. History is repeating itself in 2004. Those who abuse demography for communal ends do not recognise the facts: in recent years the rate of acceptance of family planning practices has been rising faster among Muslims than among the Hindus and fertility has been falling more rapidly among the Muslims. The articles in this special section examine various aspects of the ongoing controversy
by R B Bhagat
The beginning of the 21st century marked a significant change in the sphere of census enumeration in India and abroad. The British census incorporated a question on religion in 2001 Census after a strong pressure to include religion in 1991 Census [Peach 1999, 2000; Bhagat 2003].
On the other hand, from India’s first census in 18721 to 1931, the question on religion was asked and data published on the size, growth, literacy and occupational status of the population cross-classified by religion. After independence, the question on religion was continued to be asked as it was necessary to identify the scheduled castes [Mahatme 1985] who could only belong to Hindus and Sikhs initially, and Buddhists since 1990.2 However, the publication of data on education and occupation by religion was discontinued after independence and reintroduced only in 2001.
Over the past few years there has been a strong demand to publish the socio-economic data on education and occupation according to religion. The 2001 Census must be commended for publishing literacy and work participation data by religion for the first time in independent India. It has been argued elsewhere that the lack of appropriate data sustains myths and prejudices [Bhagat 2001].
It has been a feature in census history that after each census, communal passions have flared up. A similar situation arose at the beginning of the 20th century when the 1901 Census revealed a decline in the growth rate of Hindu population. This led to the articulation of a demographic theory of Hindus as a dying race [Mukherji 1909]. The fear of Hindus being outnumbered has since then erupted after almost every census. Concerns have been raised that a higher fertility among Muslims is essentially rooted in Islam and that Muslim men can have four wives. It has been clarified that Islam is not against family planning [Khan 1978; Tantawai 1988] and that polygamy is not necessarily related to high fertility. On the contrary, it is found that women in polygamous marriages have lower fertility [Bongaarts, Frank and Lesthaeghe 1984]. Furthermore, it is also not true that the prevalence of polygamous marriages is higher among Muslims compared to Hindus [Census of India 1971]. E A Gait, the census commissioner of 1911 Census had observed almost a century ago, “a Muhammadan may have four wives, but he also in practice is generally monogamous. As a rule, it is only the comparatively rich who indulge in the luxury, if such it should prove, of a second wife” [Gait 1913:246].
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 [Das Gupta and Narayana 1997]. In the Indian situation, the role of factors like literacy and education, type of occupations, access to jobs in the organised sector and access to quality family planning services in explaining fertility differences between religious groups have not been properly emphasised. This is partly due to the lack of adequate data and partly because of the persistence of the stereotypes about the Muslim community which have been sustained by communal polarisation.
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. Further, more Muslims than Hindus get family planning services from private sources [Mishra 2004]. This raises an important question about the responsibility of the state in making the family planning services accessible to the larger Muslim population. The 2001 Census shows that Muslims are much behind the Hindus in both levels of literacy and work participation rates. The level of literacy was 65 per cent among Hindus compared to 59 per cent among Muslims. The gap in work participation between Hindus (40.4 per cent) and Muslims (31.3 per cent) was even wider. Thus, it is no doubt that the socio-economic conditions of the Muslims are worse than average. On the other hand, the lower socio-economic status of the Muslim community is also coupled with the failure of the state to provide family planning services to them. In this situation, it is likely that Muslim fertility will be little higher than among the Hindus. However, the differential between Hindus and Muslim fertility is not very large. The two rounds of NFHS surveys show that on the average Muslim women reproduce one child more than Hindu women. Further, it is very important to note that between the two surveys (NFHS-1 and NFHS-2), the fertility decline among Muslims (18 per cent) was faster than among the Hindus (16 per cent). The total fertility rate among Hindus declined from 3.3 to 2.78 between two surveys during 1992-93 to 1998-99, compared to the decline of 4.41 to 3.59 among Muslims during the same period. Also, the increase in the use of modern family planning methods among Muslims was very high (37 per cent) compared to the increase among Hindus (17 per cent) during the period 1992-93 to 1998-99. Among the Hindus 37.7 per cent reported a current use of modern family planning methods in 1992-93, which increased to 44.3 per cent in 1998-99 – compared to 30.2 per cent among Muslims in 1998-99, up from 22 per cent in 1992-93. These figures of a higher increase in the acceptance of family planning and also a faster fertility decline among Muslims are generally glossed over outside the academia. On the other hand, efforts are made now and then to inject demographic issues into the communal discourse.
Given that the population growth rate by religion is a sensitive issue and easily exploited for fomenting passions based on prejudices, it is not known why the census released the unadjusted growth rates showing that the growth rate of Muslims increased between 1981-91 and 1991-2001, while the Hindu growth rate has declined (The Times of India, September 7, 2004:1). It is a matter of common sense that as the census was not held in Assam in 1981 and in Jammu and Kashmir in 1991, the inclusion of these two states in the calculation of growth rates was bound to distort the picture. However, the census has a long history of providing credible data and taking into cognisance even small deviations such as that census enumeration was not held in several villages in Gujarat due to earthquake or where there were changes in the administrative boundaries.
The census has usually provided adjusted figures and growth rates. While releasing the provisional figures of 2001 Census nearly three years ago, the growth rate of India’s population during 1991-2001 was not presented in terms of unadjusted or adjusted rates, but the document gave only one figure of India’s population growth rate (21.34 per cent) after taking cognisance of the population of Jammu and Kashmir where the census could not be held in 1991 [Census of India 2001]. The publication of unadjusted growth rates is unusual in census history, which has painted a wrong picture about Muslim population growth rates during 1991-2001. Anyway, the enormous damage has already been done as this has been reported in national and regional dailies across the country. While some national dailies have immediately clarified – reporting that the Muslim population growth rate in fact declined by 3.5 percentage points compared to a 2.94 percentage point decline in Hindu growth rate between the decades 1981-91 to 1991-2001 and made it clear that the Muslim growth rate had declined faster than the Hindu growth rate (The Times of India, September 8, 2004:1), it is doubtful whether the vernacular press has done so with equal alacrity and accurateness. It is now time to rectify this damage as far as possible over the regional TV channels across the country.
In the wake of the result of the Census of 1991 and 2001, an issue of cross-border migration of Muslims has also surfaced. While we know little about the cross-border migration of Muslims, in terms of numbers, we can be sure that Muslim fertility during the last decade has declined faster and the level of family planning has increased substantially during this time.
Notwithstanding the reported error in the growth rates by religion, the credibility and quality of census data remain unquestioned. The data are open to scrutiny and analysis and also available and accessible on the census web site (www.censusindia.net). Further, the 2001 Census is not only novel in terms of providing data on literacy and work participation by religion for the first time after independence, but also provides an opportunity to analyse and understand nearly 1,700 religious groups which were recorded in earlier censuses and codified in the 2001 Census. This provides an enormous opportunity to understand India’s religious and cultural diversity, if unpublished data are also made available to the concerned users.
Notes
1 It was decided by the British government as early as in 1856 to hold a census in 1861 in India. But the census could not be held due to the uprising of 1857. In 1865, the government of India and the home government again agreed that a general population census would be taken in 1871. But, the years 1867-72 were actually spent in census taking. This series of censuses was in fact known as census of 1872, which was neither a synchronous census nor covered the entire territory controlled by the British [Srivastava 1972:9].
2 Besides Hindus and Sikhs, Buddhists were also brought under the realm of scheduled castes by Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order (Amendment) Act 1990 (see Census of India 1991).
3 The total fertility rate is the average number of children that would be born alive to a hypothetical cohort of women if, throughout their reproductive years, the age specific fertility rates for the specified year remained unchanged. In short, it means the number of live births a woman is expected to bear during her entire reproductive life.
4 The exact decline in Muslim growth rate was 3.6 percentage points compared to 2.8 percentage points decline in Hindu growth rate between the decades 1981-91 to 1991-2001 (www.censusindia.net).
References
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– (2003): ‘Role of Census in Ethnic and Racial Construction: US, British and Indian Censuses’, Economic and Political Weekly, February 22, pp 686-91.
Bongaarts, J, O Frank and R Lesthaeghe (1984): ‘The Proximate Determinants of Fertility in subSaharan Africa’, Population and Development Review, 10(3): 511-37.
Census of India (1971): ‘Polygynous Marriages in India – A Survey’, Miscellaneous Studies, Monograph no 4, Registrar General and Census Commissioner, New Delhi.
– (1991): Series 1, Part II-B(ii), Primary Census Abstracts: Scheduled Castes, Registrar General and Census Commissioner, New Delhi.
– (2001): Provisional Population Totals, Series 1, Paper 1 of 2001, Registrar General and Census Commissioner, New Delhi.
Das Gupta, M and D Narayana (1997): ‘Bangladesh’s Fertility Decline from a Regional Perspective’, Genus, Vol 53, No 3-4, pp 101-28.
Gait, E A (1913): India, Volume 1, Part I – Report, Census of India 1911, Superintendent, Government Printing, Calcutta, India.
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International Institute for Population Sciences (1995): India – National Family Health Survey, 1992-93, Mumbai.
Khan, M E (1978): Birth Control amongst Muslims in India, Manohar Publications, New Delhi.
Mahatme, A (1985): Concepts and Procedures in Indian Census: A Reappraisal, Criteria Publication, New Delhi.
Mishra, V (2004): ‘Muslim/Non-Muslim Differentials in Fertility and Family Planning in India’, Working Paper, East-West Centre, Honolulu.
Mukherji, U N (1909): Hindus – A Dying Race, M Bannerjee, Calcutta.
Peach, C (1999): ‘Social Geography’, Progress in Human Geography, Vol 32, No 2, p 284.
– (2000): ‘Discovering White Ethnicity and Parachuted Plurality’, Progress in Human Geography, Vol 24, No 4, p 623.
Srivastava, S C (1972): Indian Census in Perspective, Census Centenary Monograph No 1, Office of the Registrar General, New Delhi, India.
Tantawai, M S (1988): ‘Birth Planning and Religious Point of View’, Population Science, 8, 1-14.
UN (2002): Demographic Yearbook, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, New York.
September 25, 2004 (Census 2001 and religion data)
Fact and Fiction
Since 1901, passions have been inflamed after every census that the Hindus are becoming 'a dying race' in India. History is repeating itself in 2004. Those who abuse demography for communal ends do not recognise the facts: in recent years the rate of acceptance of family planning practices has been rising faster among Muslims than among the Hindus and fertility has been falling more rapidly among the Muslims. The articles in this special section examine various aspects of the ongoing controversy
by R B Bhagat
The beginning of the 21st century marked a significant change in the sphere of census enumeration in India and abroad. The British census incorporated a question on religion in 2001 Census after a strong pressure to include religion in 1991 Census [Peach 1999, 2000; Bhagat 2003].
On the other hand, from India’s first census in 18721 to 1931, the question on religion was asked and data published on the size, growth, literacy and occupational status of the population cross-classified by religion. After independence, the question on religion was continued to be asked as it was necessary to identify the scheduled castes [Mahatme 1985] who could only belong to Hindus and Sikhs initially, and Buddhists since 1990.2 However, the publication of data on education and occupation by religion was discontinued after independence and reintroduced only in 2001.
Over the past few years there has been a strong demand to publish the socio-economic data on education and occupation according to religion. The 2001 Census must be commended for publishing literacy and work participation data by religion for the first time in independent India. It has been argued elsewhere that the lack of appropriate data sustains myths and prejudices [Bhagat 2001].
It has been a feature in census history that after each census, communal passions have flared up. A similar situation arose at the beginning of the 20th century when the 1901 Census revealed a decline in the growth rate of Hindu population. This led to the articulation of a demographic theory of Hindus as a dying race [Mukherji 1909]. The fear of Hindus being outnumbered has since then erupted after almost every census. Concerns have been raised that a higher fertility among Muslims is essentially rooted in Islam and that Muslim men can have four wives. It has been clarified that Islam is not against family planning [Khan 1978; Tantawai 1988] and that polygamy is not necessarily related to high fertility. On the contrary, it is found that women in polygamous marriages have lower fertility [Bongaarts, Frank and Lesthaeghe 1984]. Furthermore, it is also not true that the prevalence of polygamous marriages is higher among Muslims compared to Hindus [Census of India 1971]. E A Gait, the census commissioner of 1911 Census had observed almost a century ago, “a Muhammadan may have four wives, but he also in practice is generally monogamous. As a rule, it is only the comparatively rich who indulge in the luxury, if such it should prove, of a second wife” [Gait 1913:246].
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 [Das Gupta and Narayana 1997]. In the Indian situation, the role of factors like literacy and education, type of occupations, access to jobs in the organised sector and access to quality family planning services in explaining fertility differences between religious groups have not been properly emphasised. This is partly due to the lack of adequate data and partly because of the persistence of the stereotypes about the Muslim community which have been sustained by communal polarisation.
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. Further, more Muslims than Hindus get family planning services from private sources [Mishra 2004]. This raises an important question about the responsibility of the state in making the family planning services accessible to the larger Muslim population. The 2001 Census shows that Muslims are much behind the Hindus in both levels of literacy and work participation rates. The level of literacy was 65 per cent among Hindus compared to 59 per cent among Muslims. The gap in work participation between Hindus (40.4 per cent) and Muslims (31.3 per cent) was even wider. Thus, it is no doubt that the socio-economic conditions of the Muslims are worse than average. On the other hand, the lower socio-economic status of the Muslim community is also coupled with the failure of the state to provide family planning services to them. In this situation, it is likely that Muslim fertility will be little higher than among the Hindus. However, the differential between Hindus and Muslim fertility is not very large. The two rounds of NFHS surveys show that on the average Muslim women reproduce one child more than Hindu women. Further, it is very important to note that between the two surveys (NFHS-1 and NFHS-2), the fertility decline among Muslims (18 per cent) was faster than among the Hindus (16 per cent). The total fertility rate among Hindus declined from 3.3 to 2.78 between two surveys during 1992-93 to 1998-99, compared to the decline of 4.41 to 3.59 among Muslims during the same period. Also, the increase in the use of modern family planning methods among Muslims was very high (37 per cent) compared to the increase among Hindus (17 per cent) during the period 1992-93 to 1998-99. Among the Hindus 37.7 per cent reported a current use of modern family planning methods in 1992-93, which increased to 44.3 per cent in 1998-99 – compared to 30.2 per cent among Muslims in 1998-99, up from 22 per cent in 1992-93. These figures of a higher increase in the acceptance of family planning and also a faster fertility decline among Muslims are generally glossed over outside the academia. On the other hand, efforts are made now and then to inject demographic issues into the communal discourse.
Given that the population growth rate by religion is a sensitive issue and easily exploited for fomenting passions based on prejudices, it is not known why the census released the unadjusted growth rates showing that the growth rate of Muslims increased between 1981-91 and 1991-2001, while the Hindu growth rate has declined (The Times of India, September 7, 2004:1). It is a matter of common sense that as the census was not held in Assam in 1981 and in Jammu and Kashmir in 1991, the inclusion of these two states in the calculation of growth rates was bound to distort the picture. However, the census has a long history of providing credible data and taking into cognisance even small deviations such as that census enumeration was not held in several villages in Gujarat due to earthquake or where there were changes in the administrative boundaries.
The census has usually provided adjusted figures and growth rates. While releasing the provisional figures of 2001 Census nearly three years ago, the growth rate of India’s population during 1991-2001 was not presented in terms of unadjusted or adjusted rates, but the document gave only one figure of India’s population growth rate (21.34 per cent) after taking cognisance of the population of Jammu and Kashmir where the census could not be held in 1991 [Census of India 2001]. The publication of unadjusted growth rates is unusual in census history, which has painted a wrong picture about Muslim population growth rates during 1991-2001. Anyway, the enormous damage has already been done as this has been reported in national and regional dailies across the country. While some national dailies have immediately clarified – reporting that the Muslim population growth rate in fact declined by 3.5 percentage points compared to a 2.94 percentage point decline in Hindu growth rate between the decades 1981-91 to 1991-2001 and made it clear that the Muslim growth rate had declined faster than the Hindu growth rate (The Times of India, September 8, 2004:1), it is doubtful whether the vernacular press has done so with equal alacrity and accurateness. It is now time to rectify this damage as far as possible over the regional TV channels across the country.
In the wake of the result of the Census of 1991 and 2001, an issue of cross-border migration of Muslims has also surfaced. While we know little about the cross-border migration of Muslims, in terms of numbers, we can be sure that Muslim fertility during the last decade has declined faster and the level of family planning has increased substantially during this time.
Notwithstanding the reported error in the growth rates by religion, the credibility and quality of census data remain unquestioned. The data are open to scrutiny and analysis and also available and accessible on the census web site (www.censusindia.net). Further, the 2001 Census is not only novel in terms of providing data on literacy and work participation by religion for the first time after independence, but also provides an opportunity to analyse and understand nearly 1,700 religious groups which were recorded in earlier censuses and codified in the 2001 Census. This provides an enormous opportunity to understand India’s religious and cultural diversity, if unpublished data are also made available to the concerned users.
Notes
1 It was decided by the British government as early as in 1856 to hold a census in 1861 in India. But the census could not be held due to the uprising of 1857. In 1865, the government of India and the home government again agreed that a general population census would be taken in 1871. But, the years 1867-72 were actually spent in census taking. This series of censuses was in fact known as census of 1872, which was neither a synchronous census nor covered the entire territory controlled by the British [Srivastava 1972:9].
2 Besides Hindus and Sikhs, Buddhists were also brought under the realm of scheduled castes by Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order (Amendment) Act 1990 (see Census of India 1991).
3 The total fertility rate is the average number of children that would be born alive to a hypothetical cohort of women if, throughout their reproductive years, the age specific fertility rates for the specified year remained unchanged. In short, it means the number of live births a woman is expected to bear during her entire reproductive life.
4 The exact decline in Muslim growth rate was 3.6 percentage points compared to 2.8 percentage points decline in Hindu growth rate between the decades 1981-91 to 1991-2001 (www.censusindia.net).
References
Bhagat, R B (2001): ‘Census and the Construction of Communalism in India’, Economic and Political Weekly, November 24, pp 4352-56.
– (2003): ‘Role of Census in Ethnic and Racial Construction: US, British and Indian Censuses’, Economic and Political Weekly, February 22, pp 686-91.
Bongaarts, J, O Frank and R Lesthaeghe (1984): ‘The Proximate Determinants of Fertility in subSaharan Africa’, Population and Development Review, 10(3): 511-37.
Census of India (1971): ‘Polygynous Marriages in India – A Survey’, Miscellaneous Studies, Monograph no 4, Registrar General and Census Commissioner, New Delhi.
– (1991): Series 1, Part II-B(ii), Primary Census Abstracts: Scheduled Castes, Registrar General and Census Commissioner, New Delhi.
– (2001): Provisional Population Totals, Series 1, Paper 1 of 2001, Registrar General and Census Commissioner, New Delhi.
Das Gupta, M and D Narayana (1997): ‘Bangladesh’s Fertility Decline from a Regional Perspective’, Genus, Vol 53, No 3-4, pp 101-28.
Gait, E A (1913): India, Volume 1, Part I – Report, Census of India 1911, Superintendent, Government Printing, Calcutta, India.
International Institute for Population Sciences and Macro (2000): India – National Family Health Survey (NFHS-2), 1998-99, Mumbai.
International Institute for Population Sciences (1995): India – National Family Health Survey, 1992-93, Mumbai.
Khan, M E (1978): Birth Control amongst Muslims in India, Manohar Publications, New Delhi.
Mahatme, A (1985): Concepts and Procedures in Indian Census: A Reappraisal, Criteria Publication, New Delhi.
Mishra, V (2004): ‘Muslim/Non-Muslim Differentials in Fertility and Family Planning in India’, Working Paper, East-West Centre, Honolulu.
Mukherji, U N (1909): Hindus – A Dying Race, M Bannerjee, Calcutta.
Peach, C (1999): ‘Social Geography’, Progress in Human Geography, Vol 32, No 2, p 284.
– (2000): ‘Discovering White Ethnicity and Parachuted Plurality’, Progress in Human Geography, Vol 24, No 4, p 623.
Srivastava, S C (1972): Indian Census in Perspective, Census Centenary Monograph No 1, Office of the Registrar General, New Delhi, India.
Tantawai, M S (1988): ‘Birth Planning and Religious Point of View’, Population Science, 8, 1-14.
UN (2002): Demographic Yearbook, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, New York.
Censuses, Communalism, Gender and Identity (Charu Gupta)
The Economic and Political Weekly
September 25, 2004 (Census 2001 and religion data)
Censuses, Communalism, Gender and Identity: A Historical Perspective
The census has always been used by communal forces to map Hindu communities, to count them, and above all to compare them with other religious communities, particularly the Muslim. Census data has been an instrument not just for enumeration, but also for comparison.
by Charu Gupta
It has been pointed out by many scholars like Arjun Appadurai, Bernard Cohn and Kenneth Jones that since the time the first census appeared in India during colonial rule, it has become an absolutely critical tool for Hindu communal forces. It is used as an instrument which uses the façade of statistical data to produce yet another story of mangled bodies and torn minds. The census has been used by the Hindu communal forces to map Hindu communities, to count them, and above all to compare them with other religious communities. The Hindu religion here becomes the Hindu comunity counted and compared in hard numbers with other communities, particularly Muslims. Thus, census data historically has been used not just for enumeration but also for comparison.
The discursive power of Hindu communalism actually does not spring exclusively from single texts or even a chain of them. It creates a popular network of tropes and themes, to provide a single mobile trope, which has immense potency and amazing flexibility. In 1979, the Hindu Mahasabha brought out a publication called They Count Their Gains, We Calculate Our Losses, which raised the scare of a growing Muslim population and again used census data in a distorted manner. Earlier in 1925, Swami Shraddhanand had declared that he had been seized by the problem of the 'dying out' of 'the Hindu race'. And as early as 1912 there was a pamphlet published in Calcutta by U N Mukherjee, entitled Hindus – A Dying Race, which was actually to become a part of the Hindu communal 'common sense'. Population fears have thus been especially 'used' by communal discourses to construct myths of 'dying Hindus' and perceptions of declining Hindu numbers. In fact, the British colonialists used such constructed fears effectively for their policy of divide and rule. O'Donnell, the census commissioner for 1891, on the basis of slower population growth rates of Hindus relative to the Muslims, leapfrogged across simple statistical logic to deduce the number of years it would take for the Hindus to disappear altogether! Jagatguru Shankaracharya in a Mahasabha meeting at Nasik in 1925 claimed that with such rates it would just take one century for Hindus to disappear completely!
Such statistical formulations aided the Hindu fear of numerical decline, which became much more intense in the specific context of the 1920s, in the context of 'sangathan'/'shuddhi' and increasing communal riots. The 1921 Census stated:
Both relatively and absolutely Hindus have lost…Hindus have decreased during the last decade by 347 per 10,000, or just under 3.5 per cent.
Using this, a tract written in 1922, titled Hinduon ka Sangrakshan aur Atmarakshan stated:
Some Hindus argue that what do we have to do with increasing our numbers. We should be more concerned with preserving the seed of our true Aryan identity. Dear, what do you mean by the protection of the seed? In every census, the number of Hindus is decreasing while that of Muslims and Christians is increasing. And you are just concerned with the protection of the seed! Our aim should be to increase the numbers first and foremost.
The changes in the Hindu population were lamented for example in a tract called Hinduon ke Sath Vishwasghat, saying that from 33 crore, the numbers had now been reduced to a mere 20 crore. Using the statistics from 1911 and 1921 Censuses, it was said that over the 10 years, Hindus had been reduced in number by 8 lakhs while Muslims had increased by 21 lakhs. If this continued, after some years, no Arya would be found in India. Newspapers, magazines and even caste journals propounded similar myths, with catchy titles like 'Hinduon ka Bhayankar Haas'. The numerically defined strength of the community has thus historically been a significant component of communal consciousness, helping in stabilising Hindu communal identities around new orientations. Bhai Parmanand, a leading light of the Hindu Mahasabha stated that the main reason for the Hindu-Muslim conflict was the question of numbers, where Muslims were constantly increasing and Hindus declining. In such a situation, the main aim of shuddhi and sangathan was to stop the decline of Hindu numbers. And this, of course, ties in with the current conversion debates too.
There are serious implications for questions of gender and sexuality, and here again I am going to specifically refer to Hindu communalism by offering a fragment from historical data. The example can provide, I think, some linkages to the current conversion debates as well. I will highlight here very briefly the shifting nature of the debate on widow remarriage, when linked to the censuses. The Census Report of 1911 for UP, for example, not only acknowledged that Muslims were more prolific in comparison to Hindus, but also linked this fertility to the status of widows:
It has long been known that Musalmans are more fertile than Hindus and that their chances of life are better: and the figures of the last decade merely strengthen this view…The prohibition of the remarriage of widows does not affect the Muhammadan. The figures bear this out…The Muhammadan widows are only 14 per cent of the female population as against 17 per cent among Hindus…At the child-bearing ages (15-40), when this factor will chiefly effect the rate of increase, under 3 per cent of Muhammadan women are widows whilst the Hindu rate is over 4 per cent.
Hindu propagandists, while highlighting the alleged decline of Hindus and the simultaneous proliferation of Muslims, said that one of the most important reason for this was the increasing frequency of alliances between Muslim men and Hindu widows. A tract said that large numbers of widows were at present entering the homes of 'yavanas' and 'mlecchas', producing children for them and increasing their numbers. A poem, widely quoted at the time, had these lines:
Gode mein isaiyat islam ki
betiyan bahuein lita kar hum late!
Ah ghate par humen ghata hua
man bewaon ka ghata kar hum ghate!!
It was plainly stated that a loss of a Hindu widow was not just the loss of one person, but also of many more. Moreover, these numbers were subtracted from the Hindu population, but added to the Muslims, doubling the loss to Hindus. One tract, Humara Bhishan Haas, a collection of articles reprinted from newspapers, dwelt on the catastrophic decline of Hindus due to growing conversion. A picture of terrible calamity was built up, quoting extensively from census reports. At one place it was stated:
Our sexually unsatisfied widows especially are prone to Muslim hands and by producing Muslim children they increase their numbers and spell disaster for the Hindus...Muslim goondas are especially seen outside the houses that have Hindu widows...You yourselves say, would you like our Aryan widows to read nikah with a Muslim?
Here we see a combination of the 'negative' portrayals of Muslims, stereotypes about the sexual desires of widows, as well as fears of agency of the widow. There is a similarity between the way widows and Muslims are treated here: both are seen as figures of potential sexual excess and hence of fear. Such essentialisms are as crucial to the definition of the 'problem' as of the community.
A tract of the time stated that two and a half crore Hindu widows had been enticed by the Muslims through various methods. In the shape of a poem, a warning was issued to Hindu males by using the voice of the widow:
Jis din than jayegi man mein, kahin nikal main jaoongi.
Kisi yavan ka hath pakarkar, usko main apnaoongi.
Paida karke bacche usse, uski shakti bharaongi....
Gauon ko katwaungi nit, mandir main turvaungi.
Devsthanon ko mitvakar, masid main banvaungi....
Dharma-granth jalva dungi main, chutiyon ko katwaungi.
To overcome this disaster and crisis, the solution proposed was that widow remarriage must be advocated, and Hindu males, as part of their religious duty, should marry Hindu widows to increase the number of Hindu males, and control the widow's reproductivity within the bounds of Hinduism. The liberal promise of widow-remarriage was overturned by a community need for a better economy of potential childbearing wombs, and to reverse the alleged decline in Hindu numbers. We come full circle here. In the militant Hindu psychology, conversions have to be prevented at all cost, especially of women, as it ties up with constructed fears of Hindu decline. The converted widow here is perceived as dangerous to the vaunted Hindu nation. She puts at risk the grand strategy of Hindu identity formation itself, a denial of both difference and the right to a difference.
Many of these debates can be linked to the present situation. With such arguments, even a demographic religious majority can still mentally project itself as an endangered minority. The conversion of the census into a fully grown and popular communal knowledge, increases its flexibility even more drastically (without losing the authority of statistics), allowing for much bigger effects to dramatise anxiety. The whole discourse of the Hindu Right around the censuses is aimed at obliterating pluralism of identities, by provoking a fear of the other and propagating a constant myth of a catastrophic decline in the Hindu population.
September 25, 2004 (Census 2001 and religion data)
Censuses, Communalism, Gender and Identity: A Historical Perspective
The census has always been used by communal forces to map Hindu communities, to count them, and above all to compare them with other religious communities, particularly the Muslim. Census data has been an instrument not just for enumeration, but also for comparison.
by Charu Gupta
It has been pointed out by many scholars like Arjun Appadurai, Bernard Cohn and Kenneth Jones that since the time the first census appeared in India during colonial rule, it has become an absolutely critical tool for Hindu communal forces. It is used as an instrument which uses the façade of statistical data to produce yet another story of mangled bodies and torn minds. The census has been used by the Hindu communal forces to map Hindu communities, to count them, and above all to compare them with other religious communities. The Hindu religion here becomes the Hindu comunity counted and compared in hard numbers with other communities, particularly Muslims. Thus, census data historically has been used not just for enumeration but also for comparison.
The discursive power of Hindu communalism actually does not spring exclusively from single texts or even a chain of them. It creates a popular network of tropes and themes, to provide a single mobile trope, which has immense potency and amazing flexibility. In 1979, the Hindu Mahasabha brought out a publication called They Count Their Gains, We Calculate Our Losses, which raised the scare of a growing Muslim population and again used census data in a distorted manner. Earlier in 1925, Swami Shraddhanand had declared that he had been seized by the problem of the 'dying out' of 'the Hindu race'. And as early as 1912 there was a pamphlet published in Calcutta by U N Mukherjee, entitled Hindus – A Dying Race, which was actually to become a part of the Hindu communal 'common sense'. Population fears have thus been especially 'used' by communal discourses to construct myths of 'dying Hindus' and perceptions of declining Hindu numbers. In fact, the British colonialists used such constructed fears effectively for their policy of divide and rule. O'Donnell, the census commissioner for 1891, on the basis of slower population growth rates of Hindus relative to the Muslims, leapfrogged across simple statistical logic to deduce the number of years it would take for the Hindus to disappear altogether! Jagatguru Shankaracharya in a Mahasabha meeting at Nasik in 1925 claimed that with such rates it would just take one century for Hindus to disappear completely!
Such statistical formulations aided the Hindu fear of numerical decline, which became much more intense in the specific context of the 1920s, in the context of 'sangathan'/'shuddhi' and increasing communal riots. The 1921 Census stated:
Both relatively and absolutely Hindus have lost…Hindus have decreased during the last decade by 347 per 10,000, or just under 3.5 per cent.
Using this, a tract written in 1922, titled Hinduon ka Sangrakshan aur Atmarakshan stated:
Some Hindus argue that what do we have to do with increasing our numbers. We should be more concerned with preserving the seed of our true Aryan identity. Dear, what do you mean by the protection of the seed? In every census, the number of Hindus is decreasing while that of Muslims and Christians is increasing. And you are just concerned with the protection of the seed! Our aim should be to increase the numbers first and foremost.
The changes in the Hindu population were lamented for example in a tract called Hinduon ke Sath Vishwasghat, saying that from 33 crore, the numbers had now been reduced to a mere 20 crore. Using the statistics from 1911 and 1921 Censuses, it was said that over the 10 years, Hindus had been reduced in number by 8 lakhs while Muslims had increased by 21 lakhs. If this continued, after some years, no Arya would be found in India. Newspapers, magazines and even caste journals propounded similar myths, with catchy titles like 'Hinduon ka Bhayankar Haas'. The numerically defined strength of the community has thus historically been a significant component of communal consciousness, helping in stabilising Hindu communal identities around new orientations. Bhai Parmanand, a leading light of the Hindu Mahasabha stated that the main reason for the Hindu-Muslim conflict was the question of numbers, where Muslims were constantly increasing and Hindus declining. In such a situation, the main aim of shuddhi and sangathan was to stop the decline of Hindu numbers. And this, of course, ties in with the current conversion debates too.
There are serious implications for questions of gender and sexuality, and here again I am going to specifically refer to Hindu communalism by offering a fragment from historical data. The example can provide, I think, some linkages to the current conversion debates as well. I will highlight here very briefly the shifting nature of the debate on widow remarriage, when linked to the censuses. The Census Report of 1911 for UP, for example, not only acknowledged that Muslims were more prolific in comparison to Hindus, but also linked this fertility to the status of widows:
It has long been known that Musalmans are more fertile than Hindus and that their chances of life are better: and the figures of the last decade merely strengthen this view…The prohibition of the remarriage of widows does not affect the Muhammadan. The figures bear this out…The Muhammadan widows are only 14 per cent of the female population as against 17 per cent among Hindus…At the child-bearing ages (15-40), when this factor will chiefly effect the rate of increase, under 3 per cent of Muhammadan women are widows whilst the Hindu rate is over 4 per cent.
Hindu propagandists, while highlighting the alleged decline of Hindus and the simultaneous proliferation of Muslims, said that one of the most important reason for this was the increasing frequency of alliances between Muslim men and Hindu widows. A tract said that large numbers of widows were at present entering the homes of 'yavanas' and 'mlecchas', producing children for them and increasing their numbers. A poem, widely quoted at the time, had these lines:
Gode mein isaiyat islam ki
betiyan bahuein lita kar hum late!
Ah ghate par humen ghata hua
man bewaon ka ghata kar hum ghate!!
It was plainly stated that a loss of a Hindu widow was not just the loss of one person, but also of many more. Moreover, these numbers were subtracted from the Hindu population, but added to the Muslims, doubling the loss to Hindus. One tract, Humara Bhishan Haas, a collection of articles reprinted from newspapers, dwelt on the catastrophic decline of Hindus due to growing conversion. A picture of terrible calamity was built up, quoting extensively from census reports. At one place it was stated:
Our sexually unsatisfied widows especially are prone to Muslim hands and by producing Muslim children they increase their numbers and spell disaster for the Hindus...Muslim goondas are especially seen outside the houses that have Hindu widows...You yourselves say, would you like our Aryan widows to read nikah with a Muslim?
Here we see a combination of the 'negative' portrayals of Muslims, stereotypes about the sexual desires of widows, as well as fears of agency of the widow. There is a similarity between the way widows and Muslims are treated here: both are seen as figures of potential sexual excess and hence of fear. Such essentialisms are as crucial to the definition of the 'problem' as of the community.
A tract of the time stated that two and a half crore Hindu widows had been enticed by the Muslims through various methods. In the shape of a poem, a warning was issued to Hindu males by using the voice of the widow:
Jis din than jayegi man mein, kahin nikal main jaoongi.
Kisi yavan ka hath pakarkar, usko main apnaoongi.
Paida karke bacche usse, uski shakti bharaongi....
Gauon ko katwaungi nit, mandir main turvaungi.
Devsthanon ko mitvakar, masid main banvaungi....
Dharma-granth jalva dungi main, chutiyon ko katwaungi.
To overcome this disaster and crisis, the solution proposed was that widow remarriage must be advocated, and Hindu males, as part of their religious duty, should marry Hindu widows to increase the number of Hindu males, and control the widow's reproductivity within the bounds of Hinduism. The liberal promise of widow-remarriage was overturned by a community need for a better economy of potential childbearing wombs, and to reverse the alleged decline in Hindu numbers. We come full circle here. In the militant Hindu psychology, conversions have to be prevented at all cost, especially of women, as it ties up with constructed fears of Hindu decline. The converted widow here is perceived as dangerous to the vaunted Hindu nation. She puts at risk the grand strategy of Hindu identity formation itself, a denial of both difference and the right to a difference.
Many of these debates can be linked to the present situation. With such arguments, even a demographic religious majority can still mentally project itself as an endangered minority. The conversion of the census into a fully grown and popular communal knowledge, increases its flexibility even more drastically (without losing the authority of statistics), allowing for much bigger effects to dramatise anxiety. The whole discourse of the Hindu Right around the censuses is aimed at obliterating pluralism of identities, by provoking a fear of the other and propagating a constant myth of a catastrophic decline in the Hindu population.
September 26, 2004
India: The census bungling was bad enough, what lies behind it is worse (Sunanda K. Datta-Ray)
The Telegraph
September 25, 2004
UNNUMBERED HEADS
- The census bungling was bad enough, what lies behind it is worse
Sunanda K. Datta-Ray
Not counted
The furore over the census figures for Indian Muslims recalls Ying Ma, a Chinese American campaigner against black militancy, describing racism as “the hate that dare not speak its name”. Hate begets hate. It also often masks fear which explains the far more crude posturing of Britain’s shadowy White Nationalist Party. Indian Muslims owe it to themselves and to national harmony not to give the WNP’s Hindu equivalent any excuse for mischief.
Statistically, fears of being overwhelmed are not without substance. Two east London townships already have more Afro-Asians than native whites. The demographic composition of Assam, Nagaland, Manipur and West Bengal’s border districts has changed. Substantial groups of people in both countries are disinclined to treat such change as normal evolution, unlike the United States of America which faces a mixed future with equanimity. Bill Clinton’s acknowledgment in 1998 that “a half century from now…there will be no majority race in America” means that whites, blacks, Chicanos and Asians will balance each other in the world’s greatest melting pot.
WNP literature preys on the fear that Britain’s coloured population (Bangladeshis, Pakistanis, Africans, Indians, West Indians in the order of family size), which increased from 6 per cent in 1991 to 9 per cent in 2001, will be the majority 64 years from now. “We’re being bred out of existence,” it laments. No wonder the British Office for National Statistics did not disclose ethnic figures until 1991. In India, Jayanti Kumar Banthia’s report for 2001 was the first ever based on religion. Political sensitivity explains official reticence on the subject of minorities, racial or religious. While enlightened white Britons are now prepared to co-exist amicably with the Asians and Africans in their midst, the 1991 finding that whites accounted for 94.5 per cent of the population also assures them that WNP propaganda notwithstanding, they have little reason to be afraid of being swamped.
British liberals and Indian secularists both pay lip service to the concept of a society based on the universal brotherhood of man but ideals often vanish the moment tribal loyalties are seriously challenged. There is, however, an internal reason for the difference between the US on the one hand and Britain and India on the other. Regardless of origin, all minority groups in the US subscribe to the American dream and aspire to the same totems of success. Harmony is based on the uniformity of taste in food, dress, housing, education and leisure activities. In contrast, most immigrants in Britain still live in cultural isolation, while Indian Muslims seem more and more determined to keep the mainstream at bay.
How great the gulf is was unwittingly exposed when the respected population expert, Ashish Bose, was at pains to announce that despite Banthia’s controversial figures, “the Muslim community has actually declined at a greater rate than the Hindus.” What he should have declared bluntly was that religious composition makes no difference to the national label in a state that sees all its citizens as equal, and that Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh anxieties reflect disgracefully on India’s casteless, creedless ideal. But such a claim would be too far removed from reality to be taken seriously. Hence, a well-meaning statement that actually concedes, albeit implicitly, the legitimacy of the fears expressed by M. Venkaiah Naidu and other RSS worthies who warn darkly that at this rate the subcontinent will have more Muslims than Hindus by 2050.
Bose advised them not to worry on this score because the statistical evidence does not support their misgivings: the RSS can note with relief that there is no danger of Muslims ever equalling or outnumbering Hindus. Of course, it was not Bose’s intention to support the RSS thesis that it would be calamitous for “India’s unity” if they did but that is the effect conveyed. It is all the more revealing of general Hindu thinking for being unintentional and instinctive.
Repeated in a British or Indian context, Clinton’s revolutionary view of the future would overthrow all accepted notions of what either country stands for. Understandably, therefore, the Bharatiya Janata Party government shied away from allowing Banthia’s figures to be published. The BJP might arguably have been able to make political capital out of the suggestion of high Muslim growth but the claim would also have been social dynamite. The BJP may have felt that the risk of a violent fall-out outweighed the possibility of electoral gain.
It is curious, however, that it did not tumble to the astonishingly simple explanation offered by the present government. We are now told that the Muslim growth rate appeared to have gone up by 1.5 per cent to 36 per cent in 1991-2001 only because Jammu and Kashmir’s 6.7 million Muslims were not included in the 1991 census and that this was no more than a “clerical” error. The plea is that when the figures are “adjusted” in light of the Jammu and Kashmir population, they prove comfortingly that there is no need to worry: the Muslim growth rate actually plummeted from 34.5 per cent to 29.3 per cent during this period. Hindu ascendancy faces no danger.
If this were all, why did the BJP not spot the omission? Why, for that matter, did Banthia himself not make the correction before being forced to do so by the public reaction? There may well be innocent explanations for both lapses but the lay public is always sceptical about official figures and does not take kindly to chopping and changing. Mark Twain’s comment about lies, damned lies and statistics comes to mind.
Returning to the underlying cause of the census controversy, the parallel between India and Britain is valid only up to a point. The crucial difference lies in the minority’s identity. While Britain (like France, Germany and the Netherlands) faces the challenge of settlers from abroad (though 50 per cent of coloured British were born in the country), India’s minority is indigenous and, therefore, immune even to the theoretical threat of deportation. Our 138 million Muslims are as Indian as our 19 million Sikhs, 24 million Christians, or Hindus who comprise 80.5 per cent of the population. The problem of adjustment and accommodation is thus a national problem, as much a problem of Muslims as of Hindus.
Whether Muslims are conscious of their responsibility in this respect is another matter. The worldwide spirit of assertiveness is most evident in countries where Muslims are in a minority. Bangladeshis have absorbed rituals like gaye holud into their marriage ceremonies as part of the Bengali heritage but that would be unthinkable in India. Mention has been made in these columns before of a Calcutta seminar where a maulvi ruled out ordinary schools or even part-time religious instruction because a Muslim child has to read the Quran first and last. From early childhood, therefore, he is taught to see himself as different. Similarly, Muslim housewives told a family planning worker I know in Andhra Pradesh to preach birth control to Hindus until numbers were equal. Syed Shahabuddin’s objection to smashing a coconut at a ship launch or the insistence on a personal law that violates many canons of natural justice are other instances of the exclusiveness that plays into the hands of Hindu bigots. They are ready to accuse Muslims of deliberately making a bid to achieve numerical parity (or superiority) and of seeking to dilute what are generally regarded as the cultural characteristics of the Indian nation. Politicians pander to this separateness instead of enforcing Amartya Sen’s prescription of women’s education as one way of countering Muslim inversion.
The census bungling was bad enough. What lies behind it is infinitely worse. A community in a mental ghetto does honour neither to god nor to Caesar. By blurring the distinction between the two, it perpetuates its own backwardness and weakens the overall social fabric.
September 25, 2004
UNNUMBERED HEADS
- The census bungling was bad enough, what lies behind it is worse
Sunanda K. Datta-Ray
Not counted
The furore over the census figures for Indian Muslims recalls Ying Ma, a Chinese American campaigner against black militancy, describing racism as “the hate that dare not speak its name”. Hate begets hate. It also often masks fear which explains the far more crude posturing of Britain’s shadowy White Nationalist Party. Indian Muslims owe it to themselves and to national harmony not to give the WNP’s Hindu equivalent any excuse for mischief.
Statistically, fears of being overwhelmed are not without substance. Two east London townships already have more Afro-Asians than native whites. The demographic composition of Assam, Nagaland, Manipur and West Bengal’s border districts has changed. Substantial groups of people in both countries are disinclined to treat such change as normal evolution, unlike the United States of America which faces a mixed future with equanimity. Bill Clinton’s acknowledgment in 1998 that “a half century from now…there will be no majority race in America” means that whites, blacks, Chicanos and Asians will balance each other in the world’s greatest melting pot.
WNP literature preys on the fear that Britain’s coloured population (Bangladeshis, Pakistanis, Africans, Indians, West Indians in the order of family size), which increased from 6 per cent in 1991 to 9 per cent in 2001, will be the majority 64 years from now. “We’re being bred out of existence,” it laments. No wonder the British Office for National Statistics did not disclose ethnic figures until 1991. In India, Jayanti Kumar Banthia’s report for 2001 was the first ever based on religion. Political sensitivity explains official reticence on the subject of minorities, racial or religious. While enlightened white Britons are now prepared to co-exist amicably with the Asians and Africans in their midst, the 1991 finding that whites accounted for 94.5 per cent of the population also assures them that WNP propaganda notwithstanding, they have little reason to be afraid of being swamped.
British liberals and Indian secularists both pay lip service to the concept of a society based on the universal brotherhood of man but ideals often vanish the moment tribal loyalties are seriously challenged. There is, however, an internal reason for the difference between the US on the one hand and Britain and India on the other. Regardless of origin, all minority groups in the US subscribe to the American dream and aspire to the same totems of success. Harmony is based on the uniformity of taste in food, dress, housing, education and leisure activities. In contrast, most immigrants in Britain still live in cultural isolation, while Indian Muslims seem more and more determined to keep the mainstream at bay.
How great the gulf is was unwittingly exposed when the respected population expert, Ashish Bose, was at pains to announce that despite Banthia’s controversial figures, “the Muslim community has actually declined at a greater rate than the Hindus.” What he should have declared bluntly was that religious composition makes no difference to the national label in a state that sees all its citizens as equal, and that Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh anxieties reflect disgracefully on India’s casteless, creedless ideal. But such a claim would be too far removed from reality to be taken seriously. Hence, a well-meaning statement that actually concedes, albeit implicitly, the legitimacy of the fears expressed by M. Venkaiah Naidu and other RSS worthies who warn darkly that at this rate the subcontinent will have more Muslims than Hindus by 2050.
Bose advised them not to worry on this score because the statistical evidence does not support their misgivings: the RSS can note with relief that there is no danger of Muslims ever equalling or outnumbering Hindus. Of course, it was not Bose’s intention to support the RSS thesis that it would be calamitous for “India’s unity” if they did but that is the effect conveyed. It is all the more revealing of general Hindu thinking for being unintentional and instinctive.
Repeated in a British or Indian context, Clinton’s revolutionary view of the future would overthrow all accepted notions of what either country stands for. Understandably, therefore, the Bharatiya Janata Party government shied away from allowing Banthia’s figures to be published. The BJP might arguably have been able to make political capital out of the suggestion of high Muslim growth but the claim would also have been social dynamite. The BJP may have felt that the risk of a violent fall-out outweighed the possibility of electoral gain.
It is curious, however, that it did not tumble to the astonishingly simple explanation offered by the present government. We are now told that the Muslim growth rate appeared to have gone up by 1.5 per cent to 36 per cent in 1991-2001 only because Jammu and Kashmir’s 6.7 million Muslims were not included in the 1991 census and that this was no more than a “clerical” error. The plea is that when the figures are “adjusted” in light of the Jammu and Kashmir population, they prove comfortingly that there is no need to worry: the Muslim growth rate actually plummeted from 34.5 per cent to 29.3 per cent during this period. Hindu ascendancy faces no danger.
If this were all, why did the BJP not spot the omission? Why, for that matter, did Banthia himself not make the correction before being forced to do so by the public reaction? There may well be innocent explanations for both lapses but the lay public is always sceptical about official figures and does not take kindly to chopping and changing. Mark Twain’s comment about lies, damned lies and statistics comes to mind.
Returning to the underlying cause of the census controversy, the parallel between India and Britain is valid only up to a point. The crucial difference lies in the minority’s identity. While Britain (like France, Germany and the Netherlands) faces the challenge of settlers from abroad (though 50 per cent of coloured British were born in the country), India’s minority is indigenous and, therefore, immune even to the theoretical threat of deportation. Our 138 million Muslims are as Indian as our 19 million Sikhs, 24 million Christians, or Hindus who comprise 80.5 per cent of the population. The problem of adjustment and accommodation is thus a national problem, as much a problem of Muslims as of Hindus.
Whether Muslims are conscious of their responsibility in this respect is another matter. The worldwide spirit of assertiveness is most evident in countries where Muslims are in a minority. Bangladeshis have absorbed rituals like gaye holud into their marriage ceremonies as part of the Bengali heritage but that would be unthinkable in India. Mention has been made in these columns before of a Calcutta seminar where a maulvi ruled out ordinary schools or even part-time religious instruction because a Muslim child has to read the Quran first and last. From early childhood, therefore, he is taught to see himself as different. Similarly, Muslim housewives told a family planning worker I know in Andhra Pradesh to preach birth control to Hindus until numbers were equal. Syed Shahabuddin’s objection to smashing a coconut at a ship launch or the insistence on a personal law that violates many canons of natural justice are other instances of the exclusiveness that plays into the hands of Hindu bigots. They are ready to accuse Muslims of deliberately making a bid to achieve numerical parity (or superiority) and of seeking to dilute what are generally regarded as the cultural characteristics of the Indian nation. Politicians pander to this separateness instead of enforcing Amartya Sen’s prescription of women’s education as one way of countering Muslim inversion.
The census bungling was bad enough. What lies behind it is infinitely worse. A community in a mental ghetto does honour neither to god nor to Caesar. By blurring the distinction between the two, it perpetuates its own backwardness and weakens the overall social fabric.
September 25, 2004
Sangh Parivar's Population Bogey (T.K. Rajalakshmi)
[ Frontline, Volume 21 - Issue 20, Sept. 25 - Oct. 08, 2004
http://www.flonnet.com/fl2120/stories/20041008006101600.htm ]
The population bogey
T.K. RAJALAKSHMI
in New Delhi
Disregarding the well-established principles of demography, the Sangh Parivar continues to thrive on myths about the growth rate of the Muslim population.
PRAKASH SINGH/AFP
At a mosque in New Delhi. The Hindu Right's skewed interpretation of the Census data is aimed at obliterating the pluralism of identities, by provoking a fear of the "Other" and perpetrating myths about catastrophic decline of Hindus.
IN the first week of September, the Census Office released the First Report on Religion Data emerging from the Census of India, 2001. The comparisons made in it of "unadjusted" and "adjusted" growth rates of the population of various religious communities created confusion and a political controversy. The Bharatiya Janata Party was quick to pounce on it, raising an alarm at the growing number of Indians, particularly the minority communities. With the Maharashtra elections round the corner, the Census figures became fodder for its campaign.
In Bangalore, on September 7, after a meeting of the party's national office-bearers, BJP president M. Venkaiah Naidu called for the uniform adoption of population control measures by people belonging to various communities. The findings of the Census, he said, should be a cause of concern for all those who think of India's unity and integrity in the long term. He was concerned that while the rate of growth of Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists had come down, the population of Muslims and Christians was growing at a higher rate. Any imbalance, he cautioned, was not a healthy trend. It was time for a national debate on introducing incentives and disincentives to encourage the two-child norm, irrespective of religious considerations. The party expressed its commitment to the national target of population stabilisation by 2026. It also expressed concern over the "demographic invasion" of over 1.2 crore Bangladeshi "infiltrators", especially in the northeastern region.
A day later, Census Commissioner and Registrar-General of India J.K. Banthia clarified that he had, while releasing the report, explained to the media the facts relating to "unadjusted" and "adjusted" data. The "unadjusted" growth rates of population were based on a comparison of the all-India totals of populations emerging from the periodic Censuses, without taking into consideration the fact that no enumeration was done in Assam in 1981, and in Jammu and Kashmir in 1991. In other words, they were based on comparing incomparable data. The "adjusted" figures, on the other hand, involved comparisons of population totals excluding the figures for Assam and Jammu and Kashmir. Banthia said that these revised or adjusted figures showed that the growth rate of the Muslim population had been steadily declining over the years since 1971 and that motives were being attributed to what was at best a clerical error.
While the initial reactions of the BJP are understandable given its ideological orientation, it was surprising to see the issue being resurrected on September 11-12 in a different form despite the Census Commissioner's clarification. During the two-day BJP Chief Ministers' conclave held in New Delhi, it was proposed that the Chief Ministers should push a population policy, favouring incentives and disincentives and based on a two-child norm, for all sections of the population. On September 16, the BJP president announced the setting up of a committee on "demographic invasion" to be chaired by former Union Human Resource Development Minister Murli Manohar Joshi. The committee was to focus on the "infiltration" from Bangladesh.
Despite clarifications, the BJP and its ideological affiliates continued to make population growth an issue. On September 19, the Web site of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) carried an article suggesting that Muslims constituted one-third of Assam's population. The report is likely to create an uproar in the State which has seen agitations on the `infiltration' issue. The facts, however, as borne out by the Census report, are that in Assam and in Tripura, the growth rate of the Muslim population is the same and not higher than the national average for the community. And in West Bengal, it is below the national average. Hence the infiltration theory is simply not corroborated by the figures.
INDRANEEL BANERJEE/AFP
BJP president M. Venkaiah Naidu.
An article by Sangh Parivar ideologue and columnist S. Gurumurthy in the same Web site says that the Census Commissioner should be congratulated on bringing out the truth. The article, titled "Congratulate him for bringing out the truth, bluntly", Gurumurthy writes: "The Census figures for 2001 have come out for the first time with statistics on religious demography in India. That the Muslim population in India is moving ahead of the rest is undeniable. Not denied in fact. Whether it is rising by 36 per cent in a decade or 29 per cent is the dispute. That all others Hindus, Sikhs, Jains and Buddhists put together rise only two-thirds as fast too is undeniable." The Census-based fact that more Hindus than Muslims were added to the Indian population between 1991 and 2001 (4.8 Hindus for every one Muslim) was conveniently ignored while making such an assertion.
The September 19 issue of the RSS organ, Organiser, also carried several articles on the issue, including one titled "Census politics with Muslim numbers". The article suggests that in just two days, the Census Commissioner, under pressure from the ruling Congress, altered the figures of the rate of growth of the Muslim population by juggling statistics. The editorial titled "The Population Bomb" says: "The Census 2001 has given India a wake-up call. A Hindu majority in every region of the country is an implicit guarantee of its integrity, civilisational vitality and economic prosperity. It is a tragedy; India has no uniform civil code. In the absence of which some minority groups are given the privileges of democratic, modern, permissiveness, even as they enjoy the protections of outdated religious diktats. In such a situation all efforts of the state to have an enlightened population policy are defeated. The changing religious profile of Indian population has a strong impact on the future of India. And it continues to be amongst the major determinants of strife."
APPARENTLY, the BJP and its ideological allies have a short memory. The BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government was in power when the National Population Policy (NPP) was approved by Parliament in 2000. The NPP embodied the spirit of the International Conference on Population and Development held in Cairo, 1994, which laid stress on the slogan "development is the best pill". India became a signatory to the Cairo declaration and it was assumed that any population policy would be in consonance with the basic principles enshrined therein - the pursuance of population policies that are non-coercive and not based on any disincentives and incentives. The NPP, among other things, pledged to improve social indicators of women's development such as literacy, access to health and medical services and address unmet contraceptive needs. A National Population Commission was set up under the chairmanship of the Prime Minister with a corpus of Rs.100 crores to suggest ways to implement the policy. The NPP cautioned correctly that while a two-child norm was desirable, it should not be achieved by resorting to either coercion or by using incentives and disincentives.
So what explains the BJP's about-turn and the sudden emphasis on population control and the two-child norm? The only plausible reason is that the use of terms such as "demographic invasion" and the call for a national debate on population control stem from political expediency and not from a genuine concern for the health of the people. In a statement criticising the BJP's propaganda, the All India Democratic Women's Association (AIDWA), the Delhi Science Forum and the Sama (a group dealing with women's health issues) pointed out that in States that had higher indicators of social development the population growth rate for all communities had come down. "It was access to basic rights that determined the family size and not religion," it said.
Another fall-out of the controversy over the figures has been a debate within the All India Muslim Personal Law Board. While its vice-president Maulana Kalbe Sadiq declared that the Board would promote family planning, its president Maulana Rabeh Husni Nadwi rejected the idea and stated in Lucknow that family planning was "un-Islamic". It is intriguing that the socio-economic backwardness of Muslims, which has emerged as a result of the cross-tabulated data, has not been the focus of interest of any of these groups. Interestingly, the BJP welcomed the views of Maulana Sadiq on family planning.
Sughra Mehdi, vice-president of the All India Muslim Women's Forum, has a different take on the issue. She told Frontline that while there was nothing "un-Islamic" about family planning, the population problem was not that of a particular community as such. It concerned the entire country and nobody should be forced to adopt the small-family norm.
But there are other concerns as well. Sahba Farooqi, general secretary of the National Federation of Indian Women (NFIW), expressed apprehensions about the misuse of the Census data. She said: "Despite the clarification by the Census office, the BJP and others continue to focus on some selective aspects of population growth. While some of us can see the politics behind the growth rate hysteria, it is very difficult to reverse the damage done by the Census office and the manner in which sections of the media covered the issue." A little cynical about the release of such data on the eve of the Maharashtra Assembly elections, Farooqi said that it eventually reinforced stereotypes and gave an opportunity to conservative parties to attack the minorities.
Moreover, history has shown how Census figures have been manipulated. Charu Gupta, feminist historian and Reader in History in the University of Delhi, has documented several instances where the Hindu Right used such data to its advantage. In a paper titled "Censuses, Hindu Communalism, Gender and Identity: A Historical Perspective", she cites examples from Census Reports of pre-Independence India to show that historically Census data has been used not just for enumeration but also for comparison. According to her, in 1979, the Hindu Mahasabha brought out a publication, "They Count Their Gains, We Calculate Our Losses", which tried to raise a scare about rising Muslim population by using Census data in a distorted manner. Many of these debates, she says, can be linked to the present situation. With such arguments, even a religious majority can project itself as an endangered minority. The whole discourse of the Hindu Right around Census is aimed at obliterating the pluralism of identities, by provoking a fear of the "Other" and perpetrating myths about catastrophic decline of the Hindu population.
The BJP and its ideological partners are not going to stop harping on inflated growth rates or raising the bogey of minority population explosion. The Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government, on the other hand, while not going into the merits of Census 2001, has declared its intention to conduct an inquiry into the confusion over the Muslim growth rate. This is despite the Minister of State for Home admitting that the confusion was the result of a "technical aberration".
It is surprising that neither the Congress nor the BJP has found it prudent to stress on the strengths of the data on religions - especially those relating to work participation, sex ratio and literacy - and dismiss the technical aberration.
http://www.flonnet.com/fl2120/stories/20041008006101600.htm ]
The population bogey
T.K. RAJALAKSHMI
in New Delhi
Disregarding the well-established principles of demography, the Sangh Parivar continues to thrive on myths about the growth rate of the Muslim population.
PRAKASH SINGH/AFP
At a mosque in New Delhi. The Hindu Right's skewed interpretation of the Census data is aimed at obliterating the pluralism of identities, by provoking a fear of the "Other" and perpetrating myths about catastrophic decline of Hindus.
IN the first week of September, the Census Office released the First Report on Religion Data emerging from the Census of India, 2001. The comparisons made in it of "unadjusted" and "adjusted" growth rates of the population of various religious communities created confusion and a political controversy. The Bharatiya Janata Party was quick to pounce on it, raising an alarm at the growing number of Indians, particularly the minority communities. With the Maharashtra elections round the corner, the Census figures became fodder for its campaign.
In Bangalore, on September 7, after a meeting of the party's national office-bearers, BJP president M. Venkaiah Naidu called for the uniform adoption of population control measures by people belonging to various communities. The findings of the Census, he said, should be a cause of concern for all those who think of India's unity and integrity in the long term. He was concerned that while the rate of growth of Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists had come down, the population of Muslims and Christians was growing at a higher rate. Any imbalance, he cautioned, was not a healthy trend. It was time for a national debate on introducing incentives and disincentives to encourage the two-child norm, irrespective of religious considerations. The party expressed its commitment to the national target of population stabilisation by 2026. It also expressed concern over the "demographic invasion" of over 1.2 crore Bangladeshi "infiltrators", especially in the northeastern region.
A day later, Census Commissioner and Registrar-General of India J.K. Banthia clarified that he had, while releasing the report, explained to the media the facts relating to "unadjusted" and "adjusted" data. The "unadjusted" growth rates of population were based on a comparison of the all-India totals of populations emerging from the periodic Censuses, without taking into consideration the fact that no enumeration was done in Assam in 1981, and in Jammu and Kashmir in 1991. In other words, they were based on comparing incomparable data. The "adjusted" figures, on the other hand, involved comparisons of population totals excluding the figures for Assam and Jammu and Kashmir. Banthia said that these revised or adjusted figures showed that the growth rate of the Muslim population had been steadily declining over the years since 1971 and that motives were being attributed to what was at best a clerical error.
While the initial reactions of the BJP are understandable given its ideological orientation, it was surprising to see the issue being resurrected on September 11-12 in a different form despite the Census Commissioner's clarification. During the two-day BJP Chief Ministers' conclave held in New Delhi, it was proposed that the Chief Ministers should push a population policy, favouring incentives and disincentives and based on a two-child norm, for all sections of the population. On September 16, the BJP president announced the setting up of a committee on "demographic invasion" to be chaired by former Union Human Resource Development Minister Murli Manohar Joshi. The committee was to focus on the "infiltration" from Bangladesh.
Despite clarifications, the BJP and its ideological affiliates continued to make population growth an issue. On September 19, the Web site of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) carried an article suggesting that Muslims constituted one-third of Assam's population. The report is likely to create an uproar in the State which has seen agitations on the `infiltration' issue. The facts, however, as borne out by the Census report, are that in Assam and in Tripura, the growth rate of the Muslim population is the same and not higher than the national average for the community. And in West Bengal, it is below the national average. Hence the infiltration theory is simply not corroborated by the figures.
INDRANEEL BANERJEE/AFP
BJP president M. Venkaiah Naidu.
An article by Sangh Parivar ideologue and columnist S. Gurumurthy in the same Web site says that the Census Commissioner should be congratulated on bringing out the truth. The article, titled "Congratulate him for bringing out the truth, bluntly", Gurumurthy writes: "The Census figures for 2001 have come out for the first time with statistics on religious demography in India. That the Muslim population in India is moving ahead of the rest is undeniable. Not denied in fact. Whether it is rising by 36 per cent in a decade or 29 per cent is the dispute. That all others Hindus, Sikhs, Jains and Buddhists put together rise only two-thirds as fast too is undeniable." The Census-based fact that more Hindus than Muslims were added to the Indian population between 1991 and 2001 (4.8 Hindus for every one Muslim) was conveniently ignored while making such an assertion.
The September 19 issue of the RSS organ, Organiser, also carried several articles on the issue, including one titled "Census politics with Muslim numbers". The article suggests that in just two days, the Census Commissioner, under pressure from the ruling Congress, altered the figures of the rate of growth of the Muslim population by juggling statistics. The editorial titled "The Population Bomb" says: "The Census 2001 has given India a wake-up call. A Hindu majority in every region of the country is an implicit guarantee of its integrity, civilisational vitality and economic prosperity. It is a tragedy; India has no uniform civil code. In the absence of which some minority groups are given the privileges of democratic, modern, permissiveness, even as they enjoy the protections of outdated religious diktats. In such a situation all efforts of the state to have an enlightened population policy are defeated. The changing religious profile of Indian population has a strong impact on the future of India. And it continues to be amongst the major determinants of strife."
APPARENTLY, the BJP and its ideological allies have a short memory. The BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government was in power when the National Population Policy (NPP) was approved by Parliament in 2000. The NPP embodied the spirit of the International Conference on Population and Development held in Cairo, 1994, which laid stress on the slogan "development is the best pill". India became a signatory to the Cairo declaration and it was assumed that any population policy would be in consonance with the basic principles enshrined therein - the pursuance of population policies that are non-coercive and not based on any disincentives and incentives. The NPP, among other things, pledged to improve social indicators of women's development such as literacy, access to health and medical services and address unmet contraceptive needs. A National Population Commission was set up under the chairmanship of the Prime Minister with a corpus of Rs.100 crores to suggest ways to implement the policy. The NPP cautioned correctly that while a two-child norm was desirable, it should not be achieved by resorting to either coercion or by using incentives and disincentives.
So what explains the BJP's about-turn and the sudden emphasis on population control and the two-child norm? The only plausible reason is that the use of terms such as "demographic invasion" and the call for a national debate on population control stem from political expediency and not from a genuine concern for the health of the people. In a statement criticising the BJP's propaganda, the All India Democratic Women's Association (AIDWA), the Delhi Science Forum and the Sama (a group dealing with women's health issues) pointed out that in States that had higher indicators of social development the population growth rate for all communities had come down. "It was access to basic rights that determined the family size and not religion," it said.
Another fall-out of the controversy over the figures has been a debate within the All India Muslim Personal Law Board. While its vice-president Maulana Kalbe Sadiq declared that the Board would promote family planning, its president Maulana Rabeh Husni Nadwi rejected the idea and stated in Lucknow that family planning was "un-Islamic". It is intriguing that the socio-economic backwardness of Muslims, which has emerged as a result of the cross-tabulated data, has not been the focus of interest of any of these groups. Interestingly, the BJP welcomed the views of Maulana Sadiq on family planning.
Sughra Mehdi, vice-president of the All India Muslim Women's Forum, has a different take on the issue. She told Frontline that while there was nothing "un-Islamic" about family planning, the population problem was not that of a particular community as such. It concerned the entire country and nobody should be forced to adopt the small-family norm.
But there are other concerns as well. Sahba Farooqi, general secretary of the National Federation of Indian Women (NFIW), expressed apprehensions about the misuse of the Census data. She said: "Despite the clarification by the Census office, the BJP and others continue to focus on some selective aspects of population growth. While some of us can see the politics behind the growth rate hysteria, it is very difficult to reverse the damage done by the Census office and the manner in which sections of the media covered the issue." A little cynical about the release of such data on the eve of the Maharashtra Assembly elections, Farooqi said that it eventually reinforced stereotypes and gave an opportunity to conservative parties to attack the minorities.
Moreover, history has shown how Census figures have been manipulated. Charu Gupta, feminist historian and Reader in History in the University of Delhi, has documented several instances where the Hindu Right used such data to its advantage. In a paper titled "Censuses, Hindu Communalism, Gender and Identity: A Historical Perspective", she cites examples from Census Reports of pre-Independence India to show that historically Census data has been used not just for enumeration but also for comparison. According to her, in 1979, the Hindu Mahasabha brought out a publication, "They Count Their Gains, We Calculate Our Losses", which tried to raise a scare about rising Muslim population by using Census data in a distorted manner. Many of these debates, she says, can be linked to the present situation. With such arguments, even a religious majority can project itself as an endangered minority. The whole discourse of the Hindu Right around Census is aimed at obliterating the pluralism of identities, by provoking a fear of the "Other" and perpetrating myths about catastrophic decline of the Hindu population.
The BJP and its ideological partners are not going to stop harping on inflated growth rates or raising the bogey of minority population explosion. The Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government, on the other hand, while not going into the merits of Census 2001, has declared its intention to conduct an inquiry into the confusion over the Muslim growth rate. This is despite the Minister of State for Home admitting that the confusion was the result of a "technical aberration".
It is surprising that neither the Congress nor the BJP has found it prudent to stress on the strengths of the data on religions - especially those relating to work participation, sex ratio and literacy - and dismiss the technical aberration.
India Census: An irrelevant enumeration (Shardul Chaturvedi)
URL: http://www.indianexpress.com/full_story.php?content_id=55153
(Indian Express - September 16, 2004)
CENSUS SENSATION, PART- II
the way we indians are
An irrelevant enumeration
The concept of the Census itself is a colonial and retrograde one designed to benefit an imperialist master.
SHARDUL CHATURVEDI
The debate in the media about the ‘implications’ of Muslim growth is nauseating. The Parivar is jumping with a sense of triumph. Their age-old allegation about Muslims multiplying faster than Hindus have been proved, by a secular agency, under a secular government. Secular gharanas are silent, understandably so, they have routinely dismissed this knowledge as communal propaganda. Now they have nowhere to look.
About thirty years after they silenced the last rebel gun in the great revolt, the British decided to make sense of the country they had come to acquire. And from this curiosity, arose the most novel and extraordinary endeavour of human mapping: the Census. Quite understandably, the British did not know where or how to begin, for Indians needed to be defined, classified, measured, numbered and put in categories. What were these categories? Who were to devise them? These were the daunting questions our benevolent masters faced, and not for the first time in their rule and certainly not for the last, they settled for the easiest and the most damaging answer.
They summoned a bunch of Maulvis and Brahmins to Calcutta, sat them down, and settled once and for all, the fundamental definitions of a Hindu and a Muslim. Maulvisque and Brahmanical perspectives — parochial, textual, and most certainly very communal — gave the British their basic understanding of Islam and Hinduism. We were defined hence by our most fundamentalist representatives; men who often knew little beyond their Arabic and Sanskrit texts and had very little connections with the actual anthropological realities of India. And with such categories in hand, British officers jumped into the Indian leviathan, numbering and categorising people, deciding their races, observing their noses, measuring their jaw structures, categorising them as Moslems, Hindoos, Parsees, Sikhs, martial, effeminate, brave, treacherous, criminal, thugs, genteel.
More often than not, Indian realities did not fit into the categories given to the British by Indian ‘representatives’. It was tough to decide whether Punjabi Rajput Muslims in what is now Pakistan, were culturally Muslims, Rajputs or Punjabi. But the thumb rule was: when people did not fall into categories, categories were clamped on to them. This was the great Census of 1881, which rather than generating identities from Indians, imposed them on the people, often herding them into categories they themselves did not comprehend. But soon, informed of who they were, and how much in numbers, of what race, how brave, how respectable, and the rest, Indians quickly internalised the knowledge, and started believing, behaving, demanding, combining and aspiring according to their newly found categories.
Rajputs ‘realised’ that they were warriors, Sikhs — martial, Brahmins — intellectuals, Mewatis — Muslims, Tamils — Dravidians, Punjabis — Aryans and Muslims — a new category — minority. From that day we can safely date Muslim distrust in number politics and in democracy, and the Hindu confidence in it.
The Census of 1881 is widely seen as an event of huge consequence in Indian self-image and identity. Unsurprisingly, it marks the beginning of the politics of identity — of communalism, casteism, and racism of the Aryan-Dravidian type. Besides, most Indians, when they learnt that they were not ‘adequately’ something, became more desperate to mimic the prototype. Categories were hardened, genealogies purified, languages codified and accents chastened. And the Census, a complete colonial artefact in methodology and intent, continues to replicate itself in our times, provoking similar responses, fears and demands.
Indians who follow Islam continue to be seen as ‘‘Muslims’’ — an almost homogenous monolithic block, and when we are informed that there is something called the Muslim growth rate, we believe in it, though it would be fairly obvious to an even casual observer that Muslims and Hindus of the same class grow at the same rate. Muslims grow faster because more Indian Muslims belong to the lower classes than Indian Hindus and if Muslims were compared to the Hindus of the corresponding classes, the similarity would be striking. But then our Census sees people in terms of their religion, not class, which could be another, perhaps fairer method of understanding people, because members of the same class show social and cultural similarities, which very often members of the same community do not. Most upper classes, for instance, show a decline in the rate of reproduction, irrespective of religion.
Except the Jains, who have startled all by their alarming rate of growth, and given that most Jains in India are not particularly poor, there needs to be serious examination of their growth rate. And I am alarmed, not because they constitute any threat to India, but over the simple issue of population explosion. In the similar way I am disappointed that lower and lower middle-class Muslims have not taken to family planning. Addressing such an issue requires complex and sensitive responses, certainly more sensitive than seeing Muslim growth as a threat to the country.
The threat logic is confusing. Venkaiah Naidu wants us to believe that if Muslims continue to grow at the current rate, they would soon imbalance the demographic equilibrium and threaten national security. How? By simply overtaking Hindus in numbers? That might, hypothetically, change the cultural idiom of the nation state, but why and how would that threaten national security?
The writer is a history scholar who completed his research from Oxford University.
(Indian Express - September 16, 2004)
CENSUS SENSATION, PART- II
the way we indians are
An irrelevant enumeration
The concept of the Census itself is a colonial and retrograde one designed to benefit an imperialist master.
SHARDUL CHATURVEDI
The debate in the media about the ‘implications’ of Muslim growth is nauseating. The Parivar is jumping with a sense of triumph. Their age-old allegation about Muslims multiplying faster than Hindus have been proved, by a secular agency, under a secular government. Secular gharanas are silent, understandably so, they have routinely dismissed this knowledge as communal propaganda. Now they have nowhere to look.
About thirty years after they silenced the last rebel gun in the great revolt, the British decided to make sense of the country they had come to acquire. And from this curiosity, arose the most novel and extraordinary endeavour of human mapping: the Census. Quite understandably, the British did not know where or how to begin, for Indians needed to be defined, classified, measured, numbered and put in categories. What were these categories? Who were to devise them? These were the daunting questions our benevolent masters faced, and not for the first time in their rule and certainly not for the last, they settled for the easiest and the most damaging answer.
They summoned a bunch of Maulvis and Brahmins to Calcutta, sat them down, and settled once and for all, the fundamental definitions of a Hindu and a Muslim. Maulvisque and Brahmanical perspectives — parochial, textual, and most certainly very communal — gave the British their basic understanding of Islam and Hinduism. We were defined hence by our most fundamentalist representatives; men who often knew little beyond their Arabic and Sanskrit texts and had very little connections with the actual anthropological realities of India. And with such categories in hand, British officers jumped into the Indian leviathan, numbering and categorising people, deciding their races, observing their noses, measuring their jaw structures, categorising them as Moslems, Hindoos, Parsees, Sikhs, martial, effeminate, brave, treacherous, criminal, thugs, genteel.
More often than not, Indian realities did not fit into the categories given to the British by Indian ‘representatives’. It was tough to decide whether Punjabi Rajput Muslims in what is now Pakistan, were culturally Muslims, Rajputs or Punjabi. But the thumb rule was: when people did not fall into categories, categories were clamped on to them. This was the great Census of 1881, which rather than generating identities from Indians, imposed them on the people, often herding them into categories they themselves did not comprehend. But soon, informed of who they were, and how much in numbers, of what race, how brave, how respectable, and the rest, Indians quickly internalised the knowledge, and started believing, behaving, demanding, combining and aspiring according to their newly found categories.
Rajputs ‘realised’ that they were warriors, Sikhs — martial, Brahmins — intellectuals, Mewatis — Muslims, Tamils — Dravidians, Punjabis — Aryans and Muslims — a new category — minority. From that day we can safely date Muslim distrust in number politics and in democracy, and the Hindu confidence in it.
The Census of 1881 is widely seen as an event of huge consequence in Indian self-image and identity. Unsurprisingly, it marks the beginning of the politics of identity — of communalism, casteism, and racism of the Aryan-Dravidian type. Besides, most Indians, when they learnt that they were not ‘adequately’ something, became more desperate to mimic the prototype. Categories were hardened, genealogies purified, languages codified and accents chastened. And the Census, a complete colonial artefact in methodology and intent, continues to replicate itself in our times, provoking similar responses, fears and demands.
Indians who follow Islam continue to be seen as ‘‘Muslims’’ — an almost homogenous monolithic block, and when we are informed that there is something called the Muslim growth rate, we believe in it, though it would be fairly obvious to an even casual observer that Muslims and Hindus of the same class grow at the same rate. Muslims grow faster because more Indian Muslims belong to the lower classes than Indian Hindus and if Muslims were compared to the Hindus of the corresponding classes, the similarity would be striking. But then our Census sees people in terms of their religion, not class, which could be another, perhaps fairer method of understanding people, because members of the same class show social and cultural similarities, which very often members of the same community do not. Most upper classes, for instance, show a decline in the rate of reproduction, irrespective of religion.
Except the Jains, who have startled all by their alarming rate of growth, and given that most Jains in India are not particularly poor, there needs to be serious examination of their growth rate. And I am alarmed, not because they constitute any threat to India, but over the simple issue of population explosion. In the similar way I am disappointed that lower and lower middle-class Muslims have not taken to family planning. Addressing such an issue requires complex and sensitive responses, certainly more sensitive than seeing Muslim growth as a threat to the country.
The threat logic is confusing. Venkaiah Naidu wants us to believe that if Muslims continue to grow at the current rate, they would soon imbalance the demographic equilibrium and threaten national security. How? By simply overtaking Hindus in numbers? That might, hypothetically, change the cultural idiom of the nation state, but why and how would that threaten national security?
The writer is a history scholar who completed his research from Oxford University.
September 18, 2004
CENSUS FIGURES AND BJP'S ANTI-MINORITYISM (Asghar Ali Engineer)
(Secular Perspective September 16-30, 2004)
CENSUS FIGURES AND BJP'S ANTI-MINORITYISM
by Asghar Ali Engineer
The Government of India has at last made public the population figures of 2001 census after delay of several years. Now we know that this was delayed by the BJP-led government on account of Loksabha elections. Whatever the reason the population figures and particularly the growth of Muslim population has caused great deal of controversy as expected.
The census commissioner Mr. Banthya either deliberately or otherwise caused sensation by not disclosing that the Muslim population figures do not take into account the fact that there was no census in Assam in 1981 and in Kashmir in 1991 due to ethnic turmoil. Had this been disclosed the Sangh Parivar would not have had another chance at Muslim bashing. Since the BJP does not want to miss any chance to bash Indian Muslims and moreover there are elections in Maharashtra, it jumped at this 'opportunity' to create anti-Muslim feelings. The BJP has yet to overcome the shock of its defeat in Loksabha elections.
Mr. Venkaiah Naidu, the BJP president immediately issued a statement condemning an usual growth of Muslim population. He said that differential growth rates for Hindu and Muslim populations in India are a matter of grave concern for those bothered about India's unity and integrity. The "imbalance", he suggested, raises „serious questions of a long term nature‰ when seen in connection with the phenomenon of Bangladeshi infiltrators.
BJP‚s anti-Muslim feelings are so strong that they had no patience even to wait for a day to find out the truth of population figures and the goof up by the census commissioner. Also without any verification whatsoever, he invoked their another pet issue of Bangladeshi infiltrators. The fact was that both the growth of Hindu and Muslim population has slowed down which is a welcome sign. Apart from other reasons the reason for differential rate of growth is that several of the communities like Kabirpanthis, Prannathis, Ramkrishna Mission followers etc. who refuse to enlist themselves as Hindus in the census report but otherwise perceived as Hindus. This can make quite a difference as far as differential growth of population is concerned.
It is also not generally known that in some states, according to 1988 data the family planning rate among Muslims is higher than that of Hindus as the literacy rate among Muslim women and their economic status is better than their Hindu counterpart. Thus in 15 states the family planning among Muslims is higher than that of Hindus in U.P. In U.P. the family planning figures among Hindus was, according to statistics compiled in 1988, lesser than those of Muslims in 15 states.
In U.P. the acceptors of family planning among Hindus in Bihar and Rajasthan are 29.4, 32.6 and 30.9 percent respectively. Among Muslims, on the other hand, acceptors of family planning were Kerala (64.4%), Andhra Pradesh (51.1%), Chandigarh (35.8%), Delhi(53.8%), Goa (46.1%), Gujarat (49%), Jammu and Kashmir (35%), Karnataka ( 34.4%), Madhya Pradesh (39.6%), Maharashtra (45.8%), N. E. States (33%), Orissa (44%), Pondichery (77%), Tamil Nadu (56.6%) and West Bengal 42.2%). Of course in U.P. and Bihar the family planning acceptance among Muslims is as low as 18.1 and 14. percent respectively.
Thus it can be seen that religion is not the only criterion as the Sangh Parivar thinks. There are several other factors which impinge on acceptance or otherwise of family planning. Had religion been the only factor than Muslims in the 15 states as mentioned above, would not have accepted family planning in larger proportion than that of Hindus.
Also Bangladesh and Iran which are Muslim countries would not have taken lead in making family planning much greater success than that of India. In Bangla Desh the rate of growth of population has come down from 6.1 in 1980 to 2.9 percent. India‚s fertility rate declines in the same period from 5.0 to 2.9 percent. Thus Bangladesh Muslims have reduced fertility much faster than that of Hindus in India. In Iran the fertility rate is just two per woman amounting to zero population growth.
It is not correct to say that Islam comes in the way of family planning. There is no clear injunction in the Qur‚an against family planning. The Holy Prophet himself permitted what is called 'azl' i.e. coitus interruptus which was the only method then known for prevention of conception. Imam Ghazzali, a great Islamic thinker of 12th century has even permitted abortion up to third month (before life begins in the foetus according to the Qur‚an) in case if mother‚s health or life is in danger.
Similarly Maulana Abdulaziz, an Islamic scholar of 18th century India and son of celebrated Islamic thinker Shah Waliyullah also permitted Œazl and abortion on similar grounds. The grand Mufti of al-Azhar in Egypt Shaltut bin Shaltut also approved of family planning. Imam Shafi'i while commenting on the verse 4:3 of the Qur‚an recommends small family as large family is likely to become burden on man. And now even Muslim Personal Law Board has declared its intention to promote family planning among Muslims on the pattern of Iran which has reached the goal of zero growth in population.
In view of all this evidence it is difficult to maintain that Islam categorically opposes family planning. It is true that there are different opinions and some Œulama oppose family planning, particularly those rooted in old tradition and closer to poorer and illiterate Muslims. This should also be noted that religious teaching, even if opposed to family planning, is not the only consideration in human behaviour. Human behaviour is too complex to be reduced only to religious teachings.
In fact religious teaching may be only one among many other considerations, particularly of socio-economic nature. Economic and educational factors play an important role in fertility behaviour, among others. That is why in states like Pondichery and Kerala where female literacy rate among Muslims is higher and women are more independent, family planning acceptance is much higher compared to other states where female literacy rate is comparatively low among Muslims.
There are other factors as well like widow re-marriage. This has been acknowledged by demographers. Also, male-female ratio among Muslims is comparatively higher i.e. there are 936 female per thousand compared to 931 female per thousand male among Hindus. And among children up to 6 this ratio is 950 girls per thousand boys among Muslims and only 925 for Hindus. Mr. Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar explains it thus: "Female infanticide and foeticide reduces population indirectly as well as directly. Even after contraception lowers the total fertility rate (lifetime births per woman), population growth can be rapid for two decades because of what demographers call population momentum: future mothers have already been born. But female infanticide and foeticide ensure that future mothers are not born, and so reduce population momentum." (See TOI of 12/9/04). According to Mr. Aiyar this is part of the reason for falling Hindu population growth, but not something the Hindus should boast about.
Thus there are several factors to be taken into account for understanding the dynamics of population growth in any community and for devising remedial measures. Communalists, more often than not, always bring religion into focus ignoring very vital factors as their primary obsession is with denunciation of a religious community. The BJP better take these factors into account if they really care for the country rather than the narrow interests of a section of the majority community.
The literacy rate among the Muslims according to the census figures is lowest on all India level i.e. around 59.1 per cent whereas among Hindus it is 65.1 percent for those above 7 years of age. The gap of course is only of 6 per cent, not too wide. In fact matter is more complex than it appears. As in case of family planning the rate of literacy among Muslims in 15 states and Union Territories is more than 70 per cent. It is also to be noted that in Jharkhand, Orissa, Chandigarh, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Daman and Diu, Dadra and Nagar Haveli, Tamil Nadu, Pondichery and Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Muslims are doing better than Hindus. In Chattisgarh, the Muslims are ahead by 17 percentage points.
All these fact have to be taken into account. Like that of family planning this myth also needs to be shattered that Muslims do not take to modern secular education per se. There is increasing trend among Muslims both for family planning and for modern secular education. One should not take static view of situation as many scholars do and particularly those who are inclined to the Sangh Parivar. In secular India Muslims, despite many difficulties, also have greater opportunities as there are lesser constraints and more freedom from orthodox point of view.
Post-Babri demolition riots Muslim outlook has changed greatly and they have realised that emotional issues and confrontationist politics will take them nowhere and it is only modern education and economic progress which will ensure better future for them. Whatever figures are available point to the fact that trend for modern education is progressively increasing. What lacks are economic means rather than any traditional obstacle for modern education. One has to work hard to provide such opportunities to poor Muslims. Partly it is for the government and partly for Muslim leadership to create opportunities for education and economic uplift of Muslims.
And the RSS propaganda that Muslims will overtake Hindus by 2050 should be dismissed with the contempt it deserves. No serious demographer will buy it.
__________________________
Centre for Study of Society and Secularism
Mumbai:- 400 055
Website:- www.csss-isla.com
CENSUS FIGURES AND BJP'S ANTI-MINORITYISM
by Asghar Ali Engineer
The Government of India has at last made public the population figures of 2001 census after delay of several years. Now we know that this was delayed by the BJP-led government on account of Loksabha elections. Whatever the reason the population figures and particularly the growth of Muslim population has caused great deal of controversy as expected.
The census commissioner Mr. Banthya either deliberately or otherwise caused sensation by not disclosing that the Muslim population figures do not take into account the fact that there was no census in Assam in 1981 and in Kashmir in 1991 due to ethnic turmoil. Had this been disclosed the Sangh Parivar would not have had another chance at Muslim bashing. Since the BJP does not want to miss any chance to bash Indian Muslims and moreover there are elections in Maharashtra, it jumped at this 'opportunity' to create anti-Muslim feelings. The BJP has yet to overcome the shock of its defeat in Loksabha elections.
Mr. Venkaiah Naidu, the BJP president immediately issued a statement condemning an usual growth of Muslim population. He said that differential growth rates for Hindu and Muslim populations in India are a matter of grave concern for those bothered about India's unity and integrity. The "imbalance", he suggested, raises „serious questions of a long term nature‰ when seen in connection with the phenomenon of Bangladeshi infiltrators.
BJP‚s anti-Muslim feelings are so strong that they had no patience even to wait for a day to find out the truth of population figures and the goof up by the census commissioner. Also without any verification whatsoever, he invoked their another pet issue of Bangladeshi infiltrators. The fact was that both the growth of Hindu and Muslim population has slowed down which is a welcome sign. Apart from other reasons the reason for differential rate of growth is that several of the communities like Kabirpanthis, Prannathis, Ramkrishna Mission followers etc. who refuse to enlist themselves as Hindus in the census report but otherwise perceived as Hindus. This can make quite a difference as far as differential growth of population is concerned.
It is also not generally known that in some states, according to 1988 data the family planning rate among Muslims is higher than that of Hindus as the literacy rate among Muslim women and their economic status is better than their Hindu counterpart. Thus in 15 states the family planning among Muslims is higher than that of Hindus in U.P. In U.P. the family planning figures among Hindus was, according to statistics compiled in 1988, lesser than those of Muslims in 15 states.
In U.P. the acceptors of family planning among Hindus in Bihar and Rajasthan are 29.4, 32.6 and 30.9 percent respectively. Among Muslims, on the other hand, acceptors of family planning were Kerala (64.4%), Andhra Pradesh (51.1%), Chandigarh (35.8%), Delhi(53.8%), Goa (46.1%), Gujarat (49%), Jammu and Kashmir (35%), Karnataka ( 34.4%), Madhya Pradesh (39.6%), Maharashtra (45.8%), N. E. States (33%), Orissa (44%), Pondichery (77%), Tamil Nadu (56.6%) and West Bengal 42.2%). Of course in U.P. and Bihar the family planning acceptance among Muslims is as low as 18.1 and 14. percent respectively.
Thus it can be seen that religion is not the only criterion as the Sangh Parivar thinks. There are several other factors which impinge on acceptance or otherwise of family planning. Had religion been the only factor than Muslims in the 15 states as mentioned above, would not have accepted family planning in larger proportion than that of Hindus.
Also Bangladesh and Iran which are Muslim countries would not have taken lead in making family planning much greater success than that of India. In Bangla Desh the rate of growth of population has come down from 6.1 in 1980 to 2.9 percent. India‚s fertility rate declines in the same period from 5.0 to 2.9 percent. Thus Bangladesh Muslims have reduced fertility much faster than that of Hindus in India. In Iran the fertility rate is just two per woman amounting to zero population growth.
It is not correct to say that Islam comes in the way of family planning. There is no clear injunction in the Qur‚an against family planning. The Holy Prophet himself permitted what is called 'azl' i.e. coitus interruptus which was the only method then known for prevention of conception. Imam Ghazzali, a great Islamic thinker of 12th century has even permitted abortion up to third month (before life begins in the foetus according to the Qur‚an) in case if mother‚s health or life is in danger.
Similarly Maulana Abdulaziz, an Islamic scholar of 18th century India and son of celebrated Islamic thinker Shah Waliyullah also permitted Œazl and abortion on similar grounds. The grand Mufti of al-Azhar in Egypt Shaltut bin Shaltut also approved of family planning. Imam Shafi'i while commenting on the verse 4:3 of the Qur‚an recommends small family as large family is likely to become burden on man. And now even Muslim Personal Law Board has declared its intention to promote family planning among Muslims on the pattern of Iran which has reached the goal of zero growth in population.
In view of all this evidence it is difficult to maintain that Islam categorically opposes family planning. It is true that there are different opinions and some Œulama oppose family planning, particularly those rooted in old tradition and closer to poorer and illiterate Muslims. This should also be noted that religious teaching, even if opposed to family planning, is not the only consideration in human behaviour. Human behaviour is too complex to be reduced only to religious teachings.
In fact religious teaching may be only one among many other considerations, particularly of socio-economic nature. Economic and educational factors play an important role in fertility behaviour, among others. That is why in states like Pondichery and Kerala where female literacy rate among Muslims is higher and women are more independent, family planning acceptance is much higher compared to other states where female literacy rate is comparatively low among Muslims.
There are other factors as well like widow re-marriage. This has been acknowledged by demographers. Also, male-female ratio among Muslims is comparatively higher i.e. there are 936 female per thousand compared to 931 female per thousand male among Hindus. And among children up to 6 this ratio is 950 girls per thousand boys among Muslims and only 925 for Hindus. Mr. Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar explains it thus: "Female infanticide and foeticide reduces population indirectly as well as directly. Even after contraception lowers the total fertility rate (lifetime births per woman), population growth can be rapid for two decades because of what demographers call population momentum: future mothers have already been born. But female infanticide and foeticide ensure that future mothers are not born, and so reduce population momentum." (See TOI of 12/9/04). According to Mr. Aiyar this is part of the reason for falling Hindu population growth, but not something the Hindus should boast about.
Thus there are several factors to be taken into account for understanding the dynamics of population growth in any community and for devising remedial measures. Communalists, more often than not, always bring religion into focus ignoring very vital factors as their primary obsession is with denunciation of a religious community. The BJP better take these factors into account if they really care for the country rather than the narrow interests of a section of the majority community.
The literacy rate among the Muslims according to the census figures is lowest on all India level i.e. around 59.1 per cent whereas among Hindus it is 65.1 percent for those above 7 years of age. The gap of course is only of 6 per cent, not too wide. In fact matter is more complex than it appears. As in case of family planning the rate of literacy among Muslims in 15 states and Union Territories is more than 70 per cent. It is also to be noted that in Jharkhand, Orissa, Chandigarh, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Daman and Diu, Dadra and Nagar Haveli, Tamil Nadu, Pondichery and Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Muslims are doing better than Hindus. In Chattisgarh, the Muslims are ahead by 17 percentage points.
All these fact have to be taken into account. Like that of family planning this myth also needs to be shattered that Muslims do not take to modern secular education per se. There is increasing trend among Muslims both for family planning and for modern secular education. One should not take static view of situation as many scholars do and particularly those who are inclined to the Sangh Parivar. In secular India Muslims, despite many difficulties, also have greater opportunities as there are lesser constraints and more freedom from orthodox point of view.
Post-Babri demolition riots Muslim outlook has changed greatly and they have realised that emotional issues and confrontationist politics will take them nowhere and it is only modern education and economic progress which will ensure better future for them. Whatever figures are available point to the fact that trend for modern education is progressively increasing. What lacks are economic means rather than any traditional obstacle for modern education. One has to work hard to provide such opportunities to poor Muslims. Partly it is for the government and partly for Muslim leadership to create opportunities for education and economic uplift of Muslims.
And the RSS propaganda that Muslims will overtake Hindus by 2050 should be dismissed with the contempt it deserves. No serious demographer will buy it.
__________________________
Centre for Study of Society and Secularism
Mumbai:- 400 055
Website:- www.csss-isla.com
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