The Population Propaganda: What does India’s right-wing achieve by promoting a false tale of Muslims overtaking Hindus?
A Dispatch from ‘Indian Affairs’
If you access an Indian person’s WhatsApp chats, chances are high you will find in there a family group. [Unless they have quit the group like me, having had enough of a confusing mix of harmless good morning pictures and hate spewing forwards. Sometimes, in quick succession.] These are not groups just comprising of one’s immediate family. Rather, there could be hundreds of members on them, comprising of uncles, aunts and cousins one has at best seen few times in life.
But what is to marvel here is not the size of our families or of the groups, but the very fertile ground they make for the circulation of fake news. Unlike say Twitter that is a public platform where messages can be detected, challenged and taken down (to a certain extent), WhatsApp, as an encrypted personal messaging app, makes detection and tackling of false information almost impossible. And it has been heavily weaponised by the those linked to India’s ruling party, the BJP — having been deployed extensively during elections.
This feature of reaching many rather quickly, with minimal costs, and the lack of any real oversight governing communications has meant that family WhatsApp groups have become an interesting phenomenon in themselves— a not very micro microcosm of ideological rinse and repeat. It is a place where scores of people can be reached by simply forwarding stock messages, but also facilitates the creation of a more intimate family space where such ideas and ideologies are easily reinforced. From my experience, I would say it has much to do with trust, wanting to fit in and avoiding confrontation with one’s family. I was rather an anomaly in questioning especially senior family members on these messages. Most people either agreed (given they all strongly identified with their Hindu religious identity), or even those who did not, did not wish to challenge and debate given they wanted to avoid discord.
The one particular example of disinformation I have picked for this piece (what I refer to as ‘population propaganda’) has been doing the rounds on these groups since I was a teenager. I am nearing mid-20s now. That is almost a decade of the same piece of fake news surfacing every so often without much scrutiny. With time just gaining more and more legitimacy as if it were an undeniable fact.
What is this ‘population propaganda’?
Put simply, it is that the population of Muslims will exceed that of Hindus in the country, turning the now Hindu-majority India into some kind of an Islamic nation dominated by a majority of Muslims. It is a grand tale of a majority under threat as if it were the minority.
The way these messages are framed, they tell a story of a rise in Muslim population over the past decades that is outpacing the rise in Hindu population in the same time frame. And somehow concludes that by some said year (usually 2050), the Muslim population will therefore overtake that of Hindus.
But what are the numbers and what do they actually say?
In 2015, a Pew Research Center report declared: “By 2050, India to have world’s largest populations of Hindus and Muslims”. The report said that India already has the largest Hindu population in the world and that by 2050, it will also have the largest Muslim population (which will rise to 311 million). These numbers were given comparing India to other countries. But absolute numbers came to be taken out of context to paint a false narrative of a ‘Muslim boom’, concluding that they will come to form the majority in India.
It is true that the report projected that in comparison to 2010 when Muslims comprised of 14.4% of the population, they will make 18.4% of the total population in 2050. The study attributed this to a greater fertility rate and lower median age in Muslims in comparison to people belonging to other religions. As for Hindus, it said that there will be growth in population too, but it will be slower.
These statistics since have been used to misrepresent realities. The study also said that while Hindu population will grow slower, Hindus will still make up 76.7% of the population in 2050. The growth in Muslim population in no way will surpass the the growth in Hindu population in a way that Muslims will exceed Hindus in 2050. But that seems to be the narrative that the right-wing seems to be getting at. While the first part of statistics is used, the second half that compares the growth is left out conveniently. Not to mention there is also the presence of fake news forwards that are fully unfounded and false, like some claiming that Muslims form 30% of population in India.
What does the Indian right-wing achieve from this narrative?
The population propaganda has been so effective because while the facts actually don’t add up, it taps into the Hindus under danger sentiment — which has been established by the right-wing through various means. Tales of widespread forceful conversions of Hindus — of Muslim boys luring Hindu women into marriage and conversion (what’s termed ‘love jihad’) — or of Christian missionaries manipulating and undertaking conversions, are ripe in India’s media landscape. These are reported as facts without any scrutiny. Given there is no larger challenge to these narratives in the mainstream media, along with existence of historical tensions between religions, a large chunk of the Hindu population seems to believe them without much critical thought. And given the thorny ethos the Indian government has created for any dissenters and critics, anyone raising alarm over these stories is automatically termed ‘anti-national’ and there is no space to have a logical debate. People believe what they want to.
As social psychology research points out, for people who have strong social identification with a particular variable (like religion, caste, etc), a perceived threat to their cherished social identity can strengthen an in-group bias/favoritism. And all of these tales, of population boom, of conversions, target that vulnerability — telling the Hindus (who love being Hindus) that there will be no Hindus left if they do not act against the out-group, in this case the Muslims.
In fact, if one looks at a very recent Hindu Mahapanchayat meet held in Delhi’s Burari ground on 3rd April, Yati Narsinghanad (an extremist Hindu priest who has been arrested before and faces 20 different charges), asks Hindu brothers to go have more children and also take up arms in what is painted as a righteous battle for the protection of Hindus. It is outright fear mongering and spreading of hared against a community, saying that if Muslims are allowed a position of power, they will destroy Hindus. He says if India elects a Muslim Prime Minister, 50% of the population will convert to Islam. Ground to such claims? None. But they effectively rile up and target vulnerabilities that Hindus hold. So who cares if these are outright lies, right?
Some final thoughts on this
As I see it, there are two major issues with the population propaganda I have described in this piece:
(1) That it paints a false picture of Muslims overtaking Hindus to becoming a majority
(2) Another, unfortunately, is that somehow a rise is Muslim population is of itself some kind of a bad thing. It points to the vilification of Muslims and stereotypes of religious fanaticism and evil-ness they come to be associated with — that their mere existence and thriving has to be some kind of danger to others.
So the next time you hear of these tales, come across dodgy or incomplete numbers, remember to ask yourself, what is the agenda behind the narrative you are reading…
Header image: Photo by Shashank Hudkar on Unsplash
