Indian women decry ‘politics on the womb’ | John Dayal

December 7, 2024

Bhagwat’s 3 child norm

Indian women, still deemed politically passive, have taken the lead in shooting down an advisory form the ruling party’s chief ideologue that couples now have three children to ensure the country does not fall sort of the workforce it will need to be among the top economies of the world.

Mr Mohan Bhagwat, the supreme leader of the Rastriya Swayamsevak Sangh, RSS, in a recent statement advocated that couples have three or more children for India to avoid the problems being faced by developed economies such as Japan, Korea, China and several in Europe.

Ms. Renuka Chowdhury, a Congress member of Parliament retaliated in a talk with the media: “Mr Bhagwat is saying produce more children. Are we rabbits that we will keep reproducing?”

A 2023 UN study estimated that 20 per cent of India’s population will be elderly by the year 2050. By the end of the century the percentage will be around 36 per cent, it has been estimated.

The subtext of Mr Bhagwat’s speech however was his group’s fear that Muslims will overtake, and overwhelm, the Hindu community which will cease to be a majority in its birthplace sooner rather than later this century.
Religious demography is serious political and ideological business. The RSS has made huge political capital, and vast sums of money from devout Hindus among the NRI diaspora, claiming they will be swamped and overwhelmed by “alien Abrahamic religions”, Christianity and Islam. Venomous slogans have been coined against both Muslims and Christians.

While Muslims are presented as pro-Pakistan and terrorists, Christians are said to be secessionists and devouring Indian cultural values. As part of this, various political and Sangh leaders have been calling for disenfranchisement of Christians, curbs in Muslims and exhorting Hindu women to have anything from four to ten children in this Demographic Great War.

The RSS is the mother organisations of the Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party which has been power in the country for a decade. The government has officially not discarded the two-child policy initiated 48 years ago to bring some semblance of control over a galloping population which still promises to take India past 1.60 billion by middle of this century.
India will hold its next census in 2025. The 2021 decadal Census was not held in the lockdown following the Covid pandemic. The government has not explained the delay, specially as it very successfully carried out the general elections this year, as also elections to several large state legislatures.

The 2011 recorded India’s population at 1.21 billion with Hindu at 79.8 per cent, Muslims at 14.2 per cent, Christians2.3 per cent, Sikhs 1.7 per cent, Buddhist 0.7 per cent, Jain 0.45 0.4 per cent) and Other Religions and Persuasions at 0.7 per cent. About 0.2 per cent did not disclose their religion.

Like clockwork to time with the national census, and elections, the country has seen fears by various groups of the Hindu majority groups, their voice magnified a thousand-fold by social media, of a demographic battle, ‘population jehad’ as its leaders call it, being waged by Muslims, the country’s second largest religious community, which is accused of rampant polygamy and multiple children in the family.

The Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), which shares many leaders with the RSS and the BJP, and some sadhus associated with the organisation have been especially vocal. Ahead of the 2014 Lok Sabha election, then VHP chief Ashok Singhal claimed that the population of Hindus was growing at a much slower rate than the populations of Christians and Muslims. “Hindus should not restrict themselves to two children per family. Only when they produce five children will the population of Hindus remain stable,” Mr. Singhal said.
In fairness to them, it is not just the Hindu religious and political leadership wary of the Muslims. Similar sentiments have been voiced by a section of the Catholic religious heads in Kerala and by indigenous groups in states such as Assam in the country’s northeast.

Statistical projects do not support this political xenophobia, with even the US based PEW foundation saying it will take over 250 years for Muslims to equal the number of Hindus. the decadal growth rate for Muslims decreased from 32.9 per cent in 1981-1991 to 24.6 per cent in 2001-2011. This decline is more pronounced than that of Hindus, whose growth rate fell from 22.7 per cent to 16.8 per cent over the same period. Both communities, the decline has been attributed largely to the education of girls.

While the 2011 census data shows that the rate of growth of the Muslims in India is higher than that of the Hindus, both are, however, above the national average. The decennial rate of growth of the Muslims is indeed decelerating. [As far as the Christians are concerned, they are stagnating at a mere 2.3 per cent, their growth rate for at least three decades, and may in fact be declining, as in Nagaland, the small State which was one of three, with Meghalaya and Mizoram, to have a Christian-majority population.]

The US-based Pew Foundation showed that Christians have been significantly below the national average while Hindus, and of course Muslims, have been well above that figure. In fact, the population of Sikhs and Buddhists is proportionately decreasing. Buddhists specially are one of the major religions in India for 2500 years and their current figures are of civilisational concern.
The replenishment rate for populations to remain the same or increase is just about 2.1 per cent. India’s top two most populous states Uttar Pradesh with 2.35 per cent and Bihar with 2.98 per cent – which lag behind in the education of girls - by themselves are seen as more than

Historically, the Hindu revivalist movement of the 19th century is the period that saw the demarcation of two separate cultures on religious basis, the Hindus and the Muslims that deepened further because of the partition. Since the demolition of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya, this division which has become institutionalized in the form of a communal ideology, a major challenge for the country’s secular social fabric and democratic polity.
 Professor Amitabh Kundu, arguably one of India’s most senior statistical social scientists, allays all fears on population projections. Demographic parameters have traditionally been considered as stable — unlike socioeconomic indicators, they change only in the long run.

“The narrative of the demographic dragon eating up all the benefits of development due to uncontrolled fertility has, however, changed within a decade into concerns that labour shortage could decelerate economic growth.”

Political leaders and others in the southern part of India have since Mr Modi’s second coming in 2019, said they see the danger to democracy from the differential birth rate of three major north Indian states, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh, and the rest of the country, the southern states and how it skews the political dynamics of the country.

The commission to demarcate new parliamentary constituencies will be working on the 2025 Census figures. UP and Bihar will get more seats in proportion, making their share even more than the massive figure they have now. The result will be that in parliament, whether the total seats remain the same or are increased - the southern states may find themselves all but marginalised, their voice muted.