The rapid population growth in the world, especially in the Global South, is haunted by Reverend Robert Malthus’ Ghost, who pioneered the modern population control mechanism in the 18th century. He believed that humans would always reproduce faster than Earth’s capacity to feed them. Still, the rapid agricultural advances in the 19th century proved his main premise wrong because food production generally more than kept pace with the growing population. The accelerated pace of population in the Global South, mired in slow growth of economies, unstable governments, and frail civil society, puts pressure on these states to keep check on their population growth to avoid becoming another menace. India, the world’s most populous country across the globe, is facing a population outburst. Leaders now and then demand a population control policy to curtail the meteoric ballooning of the population in India.
RSS and its affiliates have made demands for the need for population control policy for quite some time. Recently, VHP joint general secretary Surendra Kumar Jain said that India had reached the stage of “population explosion” and is the “worst sufferer” from demographic imbalance, and their organization favours the two-child norm as part of a uniform population policy. Speaking on the same line, RSS chief Mohan Bhagawat in 2022 said that community-based population imbalance was an important subject and should not be ignored. Population imbalances lead to changes in geographical boundaries and cited East Timor, Kosovo, and South Sudan as examples of “new countries that emerged because of religious community-based imbalances”. He advocated for a comprehensive population policy. The appeal for population control by such people reflects the hidden Islamophobic motives under the disguise of population control where they want to control the Muslim bodies to build the “Akhand Bharat”.
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and its affiliates that comprise the Sangh Parivar have long campaigned on the existence of a Muslim “conspiracy” to render the Hindus into a religious minority in “their country.” Pompous arguments have been repeatedly made by right-wing people that India would become an “Islamic state” if people did not stand up against “population jihad.” The whole rhetoric of ‘Islam invading India flies in the face when we look at the data. In his book, The Population Myth: Islam, Family Planning, and Politics in India, S Y Quraishi, former chief election commissioner of India, demonstrated that the growth rate of Hindus decreased from 19.2% to 16.76% in the 2001-2011 decade, while that of Muslims fell drastically from 29.42% to 14.6% in the same period. Data from NFHS-4 also shows that the fertility rate of Muslim women declined by 0.78% as opposed to 0.67% among Hindu women. This shows that the cry for controlling the population by basing it on communal lines is nothing but a farce.
Another sinister motive that generally remains hidden underneath the surface is the misogynistic face of the population control policies. Nira Yuval Davis, the famous anthropologist, has argued that the ‘nation’ is imagined on the bodies of women, and in India, it’s no different. The burden of producing children is carried by the women solely. This can be seen clearly when we look at the percentage of sterilizations done in India. According to the National Health Mission report of 2018, 93.1% of sterilizations were done on women’s bodies. Sterilization has remained a pan-India population control measure for decades, and the burden of sterilization has remained enormously high on women.
Population control has been a tricky issue for the RSS and its affiliates. While some folks have called for enacting laws to curb what they allege is the fast growth in the population of minorities, others have called on Hindus to produce more children. Though the Indian government had denied any claims for uniform population policy, the members of the ruling party, rather than asking people to have fewer children, appealed to Hindu women to produce more children to protect the Indian nation-state. The top brass of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS), BJP Parliamentarians including Sadhvi Pragya and Sakshi Maharaj, and other right-wing groups have frequently demanded that Hindus outpace Muslims’ population growth rate and that Hindu women should produce more children to tackle the ‘Islamic’ threat. The appeal to produce more children, or even two children, shows that women are the pivot around which the whole narrative of population control revolves.
The phenomenon of subjugating women’s bodies on which men try to fulfilll the fanatical fantasies is common among fascist governments. Every fascist government tries to subjugate the bodies to maintain their rule. In Hitler’s Germany, if you had a particularly large family, you were awarded the Mother’s Cross. If you had no children after five years of marriage, your taxes were increased. Mussolini’s regime provided financial rewards to women who birthed six or more children
Diana Garvin, author of the book “Feeding Fascism: The Politics of Women’s Food Work,” argues that women’s reproductive choices have historically acted, and currently continue to serve as a keystone, to connect and support multiple issues for the far right. She argues that women’s fertility became a public good that belonged to the state. Women’s rights, even a woman’s purpose, were narrowed to one goal: advancing the greatness of the state.
Population control in India is located on a contested terrain with a hideous history. Leaders have used the tool of ‘Population Control’ to bake their utopian claims. During the Emergency, the Indira Gandhi regime forced thousands of people to have involuntary sterilization.
Population Control Discourse in India is replete with politics. It’s neither a recent nor a neutral phenomenon. Bigoted leaders devise policies to attain their fanatical dreams, and this is certainly exhibited in the advocacy for population control in India by RSS and its affiliates. On the one hand, it shows their hatred towards Islam and their urge to control their bodies, and on the other hand, it shows the misogyny in their visage, which wants to subjugate women’s bodies irrespective of any religion. In this way, the dual purpose of subduing Muslim bodies and female bodies will be served. The appeal for population control has strong communal and misogynistic connotations and engages in a maze that, rather than solving the issue, will complicate and hamper the demographic constitution and the basic fabric of Indian society.
Sambhav Suman is a Master’s student at the Centre for Political Studies in Jawaharlal Nehru University.
