ARSHAD SHAIKH debunks the myth of Muslim overpopulation or what they call Hindu khatrey mein hai and asserts the reality that Muslims can “never overtake the Hindus”.
Overpopulation or overabundance occurs when the population of a species becomes excessive. So much so, that it becomes imperative to control it. This oversupply in numbers can result from an increase in births (fertility rate), a decline in the mortality rate, and an increase in immigration, or a depletion of resources. When overpopulation occurs, the available resources become too limited for the entire population to survive comfortably or at all in the long term. While the above concept applies to wildlife management, some erroneously and sometimes deliberately try to apply it to certain ethnic, religious, cultural, linguistic groups found in our society. They feel that if the population of the targeted group is not controlled then their numbers will swell and reach unmanageable levels. Indian Muslims are aware that their population has been turned into an issue by vested interests for seeking political mileage and creating a fear in the majority community that they will soon become outnumbered in their own country.
The people who raise this bogey may be categorised from the fringe to the intellectual. They have done their homework well and their narrative is quite compelling when first encountered and absorbed at a cursory level. However, once we dig deep into the data and dissect the assumptions made for their assertion, we realise that their entire hypothesis is based on selective data and projections that are not supported by sound scientific principles of statistics and mathematics.
The overpopulation of Muslims in India is a myth, but one that is a reality in the minds of the majority community due to incessant propaganda and a lack of proper debate and repudiation required to neutralise the dangerous fearmongering that is alleged to be a precursor to violence and ethnic cleansing.
PARALLELS
Take the example of the Rohingya. A Muslim minority group belonging to Burma, they face systematic state sponsored violence and ethnic cleansing resulting in the displacement of thousands of Rohingya to Bangladesh and other countries. One of the main propaganda points used against them was the issue of their population. It is said that Burmese officials and the Buddhist nationalists often claimed that the Rohingya Muslim overpopulation threatens the Buddhist majority.
Krithika Varagur reporting for the Atlantic (‘The Muslim Overpopulation Myth That Just Won’t Die’ dated 14 November 2017) writes, “The population growth of Rohingya Muslims is 10 times higher than that of the Rakhine [Buddhists],” said Win Myaing, a spokesperson for Burma’s western Rakhine State, where most of the stateless Rohingya live. That was in 2013, when the state passed a controversial two-child limit law that applied only to Muslims.
Just last month, an administrator of a “Muslim-free” village outside Yangon told The New York Times, “[Rohingya] are not welcome here because they are violent and they multiply like crazy, with so many wives and children.”
The motto of Burma’s immigration ministry is, “The Earth will not swallow a race to extinction, but another [race] will.” The race card has always been played by American politicians to garner votes. The perils of raising fears about a non-white America have been brilliantly captured thus: “The majority-minority narrative contributes to our national polarisation. Its depiction of a society fractured in two, with one side rising while the other subsides, is inherently divisive because it implies winners and losers. It has bolstered white anxiety and resentment of supposedly ascendant minority groups, and has turned people against democratic institutions that many conservative white Americans and politicians consider complicit in illegitimate minority empowerment. At the extreme, it nurtures conspiratorial beliefs in a racist “replacement” theory, which holds that elites are working to replace white people with minority immigrants in a “stolen America.” (The Myth of a Majority-Minority America by Richard Alba, Morris Levy, and Dowell Myers for the Atlantic dated June 13, 2021).
SCAREMONGERING
It is quite paradoxical that leaders openly advocating for Hindu supremacy in this country have to resort to playing the victim card to further their diabolical agenda. The major plank of their “Hindu khatrey mein hai” (Hindus are in danger) narrative is that the Hindu population is declining and that of Muslims is on the rise.
They derive their intellectual fodder from the book – ‘Religious demography of India’ by A.P. Joshi, M.D. Srinivas, J.K. Bajaj in which the authors allege, “The population of Indian Religionists (non-Muslims) in (undivided) India has declined by 11 percentage points during the period of 110 years Indian Religionists formed 79.32% of the population in 1881 and 68.03% in 1991. If the trend continues, then the proportion of Indian Religionists in India is likely to fall below 50 per cent early in the latter half of the 21st century. A pocket of high Muslim influence seems to be now developing in the northern border belt covering Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal and Assam. And a border pocket of even more intense Christian influence has developed in the north-eastern states”.
Obviously, it is then left to the pro-Hindutva political class to come up with solutions to fix this problem of Muslim overpopulation. The CAA, the NRC and proposals in BJP-ruled states to debar those with more than two children from political office should be examined in this context.
THE REALITY
Former Chief Election Commissioner of India, SY Quraishi has authored an excellent book The Population Myth: Islam, Family Planning and Politics in India in which he utilises the Census as well as data from the National Family Health Survey to bust the fallacy built around Muslim numbers in India.
In an interview to the Hindustan Times, the ex-CEC says: “The allegations from the right wing have been that the Muslims have been multiplying fast as an organised conspiracy. I admit that the Muslim birth rate is the highest and demography has changed in the last 70 years. 84% Hindus has come down to 79.8% and Muslims have gone up from 9.8% to 14%. But Muslims are catching up fast with family planning and they will not overtake Hindus in birth rate. After 60 years, there was 4.2% increase in the Muslim population; the projection is that in 2100, Muslims will become 18% of the population. There is no question of Muslims overtaking the Hindus. Professor Dinesh Singh, former VC of Delhi University, who is an expert, studied the data and said that they can never overtake the Hindus.”
Unfortunately, this counter narrative did not get the publicity it deserved. Both the mainstream media and the political class did not use it to refute the divisive and polarising myth about Muslim overpopulation. Is it not ironical that those who accuse their adversaries of looking at all issues through a communal prism are in fact the biggest practitioners of using the religious lens to segment society and devise plans and strategies to target and punish citizens of their own nation merely because they profess and practise a different faith.
In an article called “The Ten Stages of Genocide”, Dr. Gregory H. Stanton states: “The first stage can be termed as “Classification”. All cultures have categories to distinguish people into “us and them” by ethnicity, race, religion, or nationality: German and Jew, Hutu and Tutsi. Bipolar societies that lack mixed categories are the most likely to have genocide”.
These words should trigger the alarm bells for all those who truly love this country. Ignoring and refusing to learn lessons from history may have dire consequences.