Census snafu highlights Indian
rift By Ranjit Devraj
NEW
DELHI - Misleading census data showing a 33% rise in
India's Muslim population for the decade ending 2001 -
but corrected afterwards - has become grist in the mill
of pro-Hindu political parties defeated in the recent
elections.
Almost immediately after the data
were released last week, the opposition Bharatiya Janata
Party (BJP) convened a "we-told-you-so" press conference
to reiterate a bogey that has long been spreading
through India - the fear that India's Muslim and
Christian populations were increasing faster that that
of the majority Hindus.
The BJP is still
struggling to digest its loss in the April/May general
elections. As the party tries come to grips with the
reality, a fatigued leadership, ideological
contradictions and absence of a well-defined strategy
stare it in the face.
"It is disturbing that
Muslims now form 12.4% of the population," said Venkaiah
Naidu, president of the BJP which was voted out of
office in May. During its tenure in 2002, an anti-Muslim
pogrom in western Gujarat claimed more than 2,000 lives
in communal violence.
Naidu said he was
concerned about the "imbalance" especially because
colonial India was partitioned in 1947 - into Pakistan
and post-independence India - on the basis of the size
of the Muslim and Hindu populations.
As
controversy grew over the stunning figures, Registrar
General of Census J K Banthia released "adjusted" growth
figures last Thursday that showed that the Muslim growth
rate had in fact dropped from the 34.5% recorded during
the 1991 census to 29.3% in the 2001 decennial census.
It turned out that the growth rates were
erroneous because they were based on the 2001 census
which had - for reasons of the armed insurgency
prevailing there - not included the 6.7 million people
in Kashmir, India's only Muslim-majority state. Indeed,
Pakistan's main claim to Indian-controlled Kashmir rests
on the fact that 67% of the population is Muslim.
Banthia's adjusted figures showed the proportion
of Muslims in India's total population of 1.01 billion
in 2001 standing at 12.4% against Hindus, who form an
overwhelming 81.4% of the population.
At best,
what had happened was a case of poor math, and at worst
a case where some official had decided to put a spin on
data that was bound to be controversial in a country
where communal relations are notoriously fragile.
Some members of India's ruling Congress Party
called for the removal of Banthia, saying he was an
appointee of the BJP and showing his bias. Shriprakash
Jaiswal, junior minister in the Union Home Ministry,
said he has ordered a probe into the affair to ascertain
if the erroneous data were released "deliberately and
mischievously".
Commenting on the row, an
editorial in the Indian Express newspaper said: "We do
not know whether Banthia, appointed by the BJP-led
regime, sparked off an entirely irrelevant debate
deliberately but his actions were certainly
irresponsible."
For his part, Banthia, who had
come under heavy flak from several quarters through the
week, said "he was pained at the way motives were being
attributed due to a clerical error".
But even
after the corrections were publicly made, the Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) , which provides ideology and
muscle to the BJP, persisted with the chauvinistic view
that Hindus were in danger of being swamped by Muslims.
Speaking to Inter Press Service (IPS) in an
interview, RSS leader Ram Madhav said his organization
viewed the Indian sub-continent as a whole and one in
which the Muslim populations of Pakistan and Bangladesh
were growing faster that that of Hindus in India.
"At current rates of growth, by the year 2050
there will be more Muslims on the Indian sub-continent
than Hindus, and this is certainly a cause for worry,"
said Ram Madhav, adding that even the revised figures
for the Indian census showed that over the past decade
the Hindu population had grown by only 19.9%, while the
Muslim population had grown by 29.3%.
"'What we
are saying is that the larger families that Muslims tend
to have is good neither for the community or for the
country," he added.
Sociologists and
human-rights activists, notably Syeda Hameed, attribute
higher growth rates among Muslims to the fact that
literacy rates within the community were significantly
lower than that of Hindus. Hameed, now a member of
India's Planning Commission, said she considered
literacy rates among Muslim women - 59.1% in the 2001
census - to be a factor that called for urgent attention
among policy makers.
A former member of the
National Commission for Women, Hameed pointed out that
the controversy had obscured more serious issues
revealed by the 2001 census figures - among them being
the rapidly dwindling sex ratio as a result of couples
increasingly resorting to female foeticide.
The
worst hit by this trend was the Sikh community
concentrated in the prosperous northwestern state of
Punjab, which recorded just 882 females for every
thousand males. Interestingly, there were 936 Muslim
women for every thousand males, which was better than
the national average of 933 women for every thousand
males.
