Of all the theories we tackle in the book, this is perhaps the oldest—a Muslim conspiracy to reduce India’s Hindus to a minority through a population explosion. The argument goes back more than 100 years. It was the subject of a book published in 1909 called A Dying Race by Lieutenant Colonel Upendro Nath Mukerji, an Indian Medical Service officer who went on to become an influential figure in the nascent Hindu Right movement.
Mukerji compared the disappearance of indigenous populations under colonial rule in countries like New Zealand to the situation of Hindus in Bengal. ‘We are also a decaying race,’ he wrote. ‘Every census reveals the same fact. We are getting proportionately fewer and fewer. There is no actual decrease; but the rate of increase compared with that of the Mahomedans is extremely small’. After ninety-seven pages of analysis, he concluded: ‘The Mohamedans have a future and they believe in it. We Hindus have no conception of it… They are growing in number, growing in strength, growing in wealth, growing in solidarity, we are crumbling to pieces. They look forward to a united Mohamedan world—we are waiting for our extinction.’
Over a century later, Hindus are far from extinct. India alone has nearly a billion of them. Hindus make up 79.80 per cent of the country’s population, with 966 million people, according to the last Census. Muslims account for 14.23 per cent, with 172 million people. And yet, the threat posed by supposed Muslim overbreeding continues to loom large in the Hindutva universe, frequently raised by top political leaders.
For instance, in 2002, Narendra Modi, then chief minister of Gujarat, had called relief camps housing Muslim families fleeing religious violence ‘child producing centres’. Two decades later, Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath, without naming any community, said: ‘It should not be the case that the population growth rate and share of a particular group should continue to increase, while the population of mool nivasi (original inhabitants) is stabilised through awareness and enforcement programmes.’
Such population stabilization is ‘a matter of worry for any country’, he argued, since it ‘has a negative impact on religious demography and after a while chaos and anarchy is created’. Other wings of the Hindutva ecosystem have been more explicit—the RSS-affiliated publication, Organiser, in a 2021 piece accused Muslims of carrying out ‘population jihad’:
The doctrine of Islam is based upon the total Islamisation of the world; there should not be a single non-Muslim left over before the Jihad ends. With such a philosophy in mind, increasing population is one of the forms of Jihad. Whereas the entire world is limiting the family size, only Muslims are growing at an alarming pace. So, the Population Jihad is real and ticking… And, of course, social media is where ‘population jihad’ is repurposed for the WhatsApp forward era. Online posts about an uncontrolled rise in the Muslim population are often accompanied by pictures of large Muslim families—pictures that sometimes aren’t even from India. For instance, an image of a Muslim man riding a scooter with six family members circulated widely before fact-checkers traced its origin to Bangladesh.
Not that such debunking makes a difference to the proponents of the Muslim takeover theory. For them, even large Muslim families in Bangladesh pose a danger to India. This is because the thesis of Hindu supremacists doesn’t just rest on the claim of a planned population explosion by Indian Muslims, but on the related assertion that Muslims from India’s neighbouring countries are crossing borders illegally. Together, they argue, this will soon lead to Hindus getting outnumbered by Muslims. Does either claim measure up?
This excerpt from Sreenivasan Jain, Mariyam Alavi and Supriya Sharma’s ‘Love Jihad and Other Fictions: Simple Facts to Counter Viral Falsehoods’ has been published with permission from Rupa Publications.
The Muslim population given here is wrong. Add the population of Pakistan and Bangladesh with that of 172million. You will get the fact then.
Allover globe from Europe to Africa muslims have highest birthrates it’s proven fact in India also case is same go and check any data. What Mr Mukharjee told in 1907 proved correct, India was divided for muslim in 1947. Hindus wiped out from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh you can check and compare population data of 1947 and present. While muslim population doubled in India. Sadly Leftist and Congress are still peddling false narratives when we are facing Gazwa e hind 2047.
Seriously ?
Are the writers of this articles are monkeys of Gandhi , who can not see , hear or speak ?
After 1907 our country devided in Three parts , of which Two became Muslim countries. States likes Kashmir became Hindu less. Nine other states / UTs have Hindus in Minority.
What rubbish these pig writers are writing ?