The world's largest election is currently going down in India. with greater than 960 million registered voters over a period of six weeks. Incumbent Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who’s leading his Bharatiya Janata Party's election campaign, is spending this time traveling across the country delivering a message Hopes shall be for a landslide victory for the Hindu Nationalist Party.
He is a popular figure but additionally a divisive one. Modi's speeches cause excitement anti-Muslim rhetoric. At a campaign rally on April 21, 2024, he referred to Muslims as “Intruders.”
He later doubled down on these comments, suggesting that if India's fundamental opposition party, the Indian National Congress, got here to power, Hindu wealth could be stolen and given to communities that “have too many children“, a seemingly thinly veiled reference to Indian Muslims.
Such language reflects a fear that Modi and the BJP have have stoked often: that Muslims develop into one numerical threat to India's predominantly Hindu population.
Modi has since claimed this He didn’t specifically address Muslims in his speechbut his words – widely recorded and disseminated – were actually taken that way.
For some viewers, the rhetoric is a A touch that every one just isn’t well within the BJP campaign prefer it goals for a two-thirds majority in Parliament. By appealing to the party's Hindu base, the argument goes, Modi wants to attain this Apathy of opposing voters given high youth unemployment And increasing economic inequality.
As a Historian of Public Health in IndiaI consider it can be crucial to light up the precise origins of anti-Muslim rhetoric and the way it aligns with long-standing fears of Muslim population growth and the erosion of India's Hindu majority.
Fear of a Muslim takeover
Demographic fears in India are linked to political and administrative representation and have existed because the days of British colonialism.
In 1919 the British granted Indians limited voting rights; Indian legislatures were allowed to make policy decisions in certain areas reminiscent of healthcare and education, but not in law and order.
After the 1931 census, Indian leaders – mostly Hindus, but additionally some Muslims – and British officials began to specific concern concerning the seemingly rapid population growth in India that was increasing on the time over 1% annually.
Along with similar efforts world wide, these leaders began to advance recent contraceptive methods towards Indian women.
However, to successfully persuade large numbers of girls to adopt family planning practices, colonial officials and Indian administrators had to return to terms with the indisputable fact that there have been Indians of all religions were suspicious of contraception propaganda.
These suspicions stemmed from cultural practices that each shared Hindu and Muslim communities that shaped the status of girls in society, including child marriage, female seclusion, and polygamy.
Policies attempting to interfere with the normal lives of Indian women, including contraception, were widespread are considered harmful examples of colonial control.
Role of the British colonizers
While the British used these cultural practices and suspicions to suggest that they were all Indians responsible for rapid population growth and the associated poverty and hunger, Hindu nationalist groups created a distinct narrative. These fringe groups, which emerged as a political force within the Thirties, spread the concept that practices that promote population growth were particularly necessary widespread within the Muslim population.
At the identical time, tensions grew between the 2 Indian National Congress Party and Muslim Leaguewhich was founded in 1906 but began demanding a separate homeland for Indian Muslims within the late Thirties.
Departments existed in Indian society before British rule. However, by dividing Indians into categories based on caste and religion, The British colonial rulers exacerbated these identities and divisions, pitting different communities against one another.
The tensions between communities allowed the British to cling to the concept that without the control and supervision of colonial rule The Indians were unable to control themselves and liberal democracy.
Although the British left the brand new nation states India and Pakistan in 1947The increasing tensions between Hindus and Muslims after Partition continued to shed light Family planning propaganda in independent India.
Hindu nationalists had expected the creation of a single nation with Hindu majority rule. Therefore, they viewed the creation of Pakistan – a homeland and nation-state for South Asian Muslims – as an enormous failure of the Indian freedom movement and a Loss to India.
Furthermore, post-partition leadership and administration in India consisted largely of Hindu men and a few women, as most of them educated and elite Muslim classes landed in Pakistan.
As a result, colonial-era ideas about Muslims continued to shape the best way Indian politicians and administrators operated Health and education policy created and implemented. In particular, pre-existing perceptions of Muslim hyperfertility The division has develop into much more deeply anchored within the minds of Indian politicians.
Population control programs
When India launched its first major population control program in 1951, leaders in any respect levels of presidency expected contraception to be implemented could be lower in Muslim communities than in Hindu communities.
In fact, these were the aspects that influenced the speed of uptake of IUDs, oral contraceptives and tubectomies in post-independence India more determined by geography – whether women lived in rural or urban areas and got here from the north or south of the country – and sophistication status.
Since 1951, population control has been considered one of the fundamental objectives of Indian policy as a part of a program to attain this Reduce poverty and improve public health. But the persistent assumption that Indian Muslims are unwilling to take part in population control measures it result in public perception of Islam as “superstitious” or “backward”.
Research has shown that Indian Muslim communities across the country have done this felt the results this stereotyping, especially in northern India. Muslims reported that they were disproportionately affected by population control initiatives. These concerns throughout the Muslim community increased with the Indian state's aggressive forced sterilization program under Prime Minister Indira Gandhi within the Seventies.
Using religion for politics
Modi's party, the BJP, was founded in 1980 but didn’t win significant elections until the Nineteen Nineties.
Douglas E. Curran/AFP via Getty Images
The focus of their organization within the Eighties and Nineteen Nineties was demand Demolition of a mosque on behalf of the Mughal Emperor Babur in Ayodhya, which is traditionally considered the birthplace of the Hindu deity Rama.
In parallel with this campaign, the BJP stoked fears of Muslim demographic dominance in India and linked calls to “reclaim” the land on which the Babri Mosque was built with fears of a Muslim majority.
But such fears are unfounded. Although the Muslim minority has grown from 11% within the mid-Eighties to 14% today, its representation in parliament has actually declined 9% within the mid-Eighties to five% today.
Since the BJP got here to power in India in 2014, party leaders have relied on historical fears imagined Muslim population growth to assist them win successive state and national elections and pass laws just like the Citizenship Amendment Act, which discriminates against Muslims. BJP leaders have accused Muslim men of forcibly converting Hindu women to Islam through “love jihad”. This is a conspiracy theory that Muslim men fraudulently seduce Hindu women to extend their demographic strength.
Modi's latest statement, referring to “those who have too many children”, is the newest installment in an extended history of Hindu demographic fears – and has proven lasting.
image credit : theconversation.com