Demography and communalism in India.

• Author: DeVotta, Neil

"In India ... radical Hindus claim that they are heading for minority status despite current estimates placing the Hindu population at 830 million and the Muslim population at 130 million."

When India and Pakistan gained independence in 1947 amidst the subcontinent's dismemberment, their combined populations stood at around 400 million. If Mohammed Ali Jinnah's two-nation theory, which claimed that Hindus and Muslims were different nations by any definition and that the subcontinent's 100 million Muslims were therefore entitled to a Muslim state, had justified creating Pakistan, the Indian elites' determination to fashion a secular democracy also enabled many Muslims to stay in India. Consequently, India's first post-independence census in 1951 showed 304 million Hindus, 35 million Muslims and 8.3 million Christians. (1)

In May 2000, just 53 years after independence, India's overall population reached one billion. This figure was 2 1/2 times the European Union's (EU) population. Furthermore, while 343,000 people were born within the EU states in 2000, India added as many to its population during the first week of 2000. When birth rates were combined with immigration, the EU's population in 2000 grew by approximately 1.2 million; the Indian population grew as much in just the first three weeks of that year. (2) Demographers claim that at this growth rate the country's population will reach 1.5 billion by 2050.

This population bulge not only creates economic and environmental challenges for the Indian state, but it also has political ramifications for parties and elites determined to attain and maintain power. Indeed, population growth rates, when disaggregated along religious lines, provide fodder for religious extremists, who may use the figures to fan communalism. This, however, is to be expected in polyethnic societies where each group's growth rate is scrutinized for how it may affect politics. As Howard Wriggins and James Guyot have noted, demographic changes can cause competing ethnic elites to worry that their groups' reduced numbers would cost them political clout and thereby "precipitate ethnic group conflict." (3)

To examine how these observations apply in India, it is useful to analyze (i) the genesis of the numbers game in India (ii) the Hindu-Muslim demographic differential in India and the possible reasons for it and (iii) how the subcontinent's partition combined with Hindu fundamentalism have enabled Hindu extremists to manipulate fear of the supposedly philoprogenitive urge of the Muslims and threaten India's secular credentials.

GENESIS OF THE NUMBERS GAME

While it is debatable whether Hindus and Muslims were concerned about their groups' numbers prior to colonization, it is indisputable that they became overly interested in each other's populations after the British sought to classify those living in the subcontinent. India's Mughal rulers had mapped the areas they controlled for taxing purposes, but they did no head count. (4) The British, on the other hand, introduced the first all-India census in 1871 and from the very beginning displayed an obsession with population figures. The British and subsequent Indian governments have since held a decennial census that has yielded a wealth of data (5) that has in turn influenced ethno-religious rhetoric and politicking.

The British were most responsible for emphasizing religion in the census. While the very first census conducted in Britain in 1801 eschewed focusing on religion, British authorities in India, according to one scholar, "were fascinated by religion and every thing related to it." (6) Indeed, "religion in the minds of the [British] census officials was not merely a basic category but a factor which cut across nearly all of human existence." (7) This infatuation consequently led them to try to tabulate population growth, population distribution, education and literacy rates using religion as the primary identification marker. If focusing on education and literacy along religious lines allowed the various religious communities (Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Jains, Sikhs and Parsis) to compare their gains and gauge their potential for upward mobility, it also encouraged feelings of relative deprivation among the groups. Conversions and reconversions, for example, influenced religious leaders to focus obsessively on their communities' gains and losses and encourage/discourage proselytizing, which only further increased interreligious tensions. Thus the census in India attained power in its own right by accentuating identity formation and encouraging mobilization to seek recognition, scarce resources and political representation.

India's religious populations and their respective growth rates became increasingly significant especially after the British used the Minto-Morley Reforms of 1909 and the Montague-Chelmford Reforms of 1919 to institute elective representation along communal lines. (8) While the British were genuinely surprised to learn that India's Muslims comprised 22.8 percent of the country's inhabitants in 1871, the steadily rising Muslim population caused immense concern among Hindu academics and politicians who feared that the Hindus were destined to be a minority community in their own land. This led to a situation in which, as one observer put it, the population figures "took on a concrete form based on the authoritative evidence of the census, evidence provided by the government itself." (9) It did not help that certain British authorities irresponsibly speculated as to how long it would take for Muslims to outnumber Hindus in certain districts and regions. For example, H. H. Risley, the Government of India's Home Secretary, wondered if "the figures of the last census [could] be regarded in any sense the forerunner of an Islamic or Christian revival which will threaten the citadel of Hinduism or will Hinduism hold its own in the future as it has done through the long ages of the past." (10) Disregarding the rising communalism during the early twentieth century, one census official noted that increasing population figures were mainly dependent on "natural growth, and ... this largely depends on [the] strength of Mussalmans, who, as is well known, are more prolific than Hindus." (11) The Hindus were further concerned and aggrieved by British insults about their physical weakness and "effeminacy" versus the virility and masculinity of Muslims, especially those from the northwest region.

Some Hindu scholars and politicians soon started to portray their community as a "dying race" and at the turn of the twentieth century it was common for various Hindu leaders to speculate that the Hindus were bound to disappear in 100, 200 or 400 years. (12) Hindu concern over the rising disparity between Hindu and Muslim numbers led the Arya Samaj, a Hindu revivalist organization, to institute a shuddhi (purification ceremony) movement, whereby those Hindus who had converted to Islam or Christianity or whose ancestors had changed faiths (and thereby contributed toward depleting their community's relative numbers) were returned to the Hindu fold. The Muslims retaliated by creating tabligh (education) and anzim (organization) movements, which then further sharpened the animus between the two communities. (13)

The subcontinent's partition saw the Muslim ratio in India drop from nearly 25 percent to 9.61 percent. This, however, did not allay Hindu fears because the Muslim population continued to grow and Hindu extremists kept questioning the Muslims' loyalties to the Indian state, while migration from Bangladesh also added to the Muslims' numbers. As Sudhir Luxman Hendre, a Hindu writer noted for his communalist agitprop, noted,

As compared to the price the Hindus have already paid in terms of the partition of the country in 1947, the price the Hindus will be required to pay in 2000 and 2051 will be much higher.... At the rate at which the majority of the Hindus have been declining in India from 1881 to 1961, it will surely show further decline in [the future].... The 10.70% of Muslims in 1961, in union with other ... groups will numerically overtake the Hindus in 2051 so...