The Economic Advisory Council’s report on religious demography has understandably incurred criticism on both its timing and its findings. Released last week, bang in the middle of the 2024 Lok Sabha election, it underlines a 7.8% decrease in India’s Hindu population share and a 43.1% increase in its Muslim population share between 1951-2015. These figures, however, represent a rate of change not its quantum, and in the current context are highly misleading. In percentage points the figure for Muslim share increase is 4.2 and for Hindu share decrease is 6.6. These are not significant changes over a period of sixty-five years. Putting them in comparison to other countries only confirms that India’s demography remained largely the same until 2015.
Irrespective, these findings have been seized upon by BJP leaders such as MP Giriraj Singh and Acharya Pramod Krishnam to reiterate a hoary claim of Hindus in danger. Commenting on the report, Information and Technology Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar asked whether the rise in Muslim population share crowded out other minorities from government aid programs, though his own government’s figures show large cuts in Muslim welfare funding. A few weeks earlier, PM Modi had accused ‘infiltrators’ of having more children than others, to whom, he said, the Congress party wanted to divert benefits that rightfully belonged to disadvantaged Hindu communities, an utterly absurd allegation.
The PM’s Economic Advisory Council has given no explanation of why its report was released during an election campaign when its subject was bound to be contentious, apart from a weak comment by council member Shamika Ravi, that its findings should not be contentious since they merely demonstrate that India is a liberal democratic country in which minorities are doing well. Demographic diversity is an indicator of liberalism while demographic domination is a sign of autocracy, she said in an interview to India Today television.
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On the face of it, there is little to cavil at in this statement. But it hides more than it reveals. First of all, it is not established that demographic diversity on its own indicates a country’s liberalism; that depends on the type and nature of treatment of its diverse communities. According to the report’s authors – Ravi, Abraham Jose and Apurv Kumar Mishra – they have not enquired into those issues. Without doing so, however, their conclusions are questionable. To start with, demographics reveal quite different points in relation to immigrants and settled minority populations (existing citizens). A country’s commitment to demographic diversity is most evident in relation to its immigration policy – whether it is closed or open door – and the Modi administration has demonstrated an aversion to immigration by Muslims such as Rohingya or Afghans, or even relatives of Indian citizens.
More importantly, given that India’s minorities comprise mostly citizens not new immigrants, the test of a country’s commitment to the diversity of its settled populations lies in their status not their number. The 2006 Sachar committee report revealed alarming figures for Muslim employment, education and health, placing them below other minorities and in some instances below even scheduled castes and tribes, which prompted then PM Manmohan Singh to call for priority remedy. The fact that the Muslim population share had increased at the same time did not indicate that Muslims were doing well, as Dr. Singh recognised.
In fact, a declining demographic trend amongst settled populations generally indicates improvement in their economic and human development, as any demographer would point out and the authors’ own data for other countries indicates. By that yardstick, the fall in the Hindu population share appears to indicate that they have done better economically than Muslims or smaller minorities since independence. Of course, the decrease applies only to some Hindus: the population share of scheduled castes has also increased between 1961-2011, though at a lower rate than that of Muslims. The share of other disadvantaged communities, such as scheduled tribes, has grown too. In other words, the increasing percentage of minorities and scheduled castes and tribes more probably indicates that they remain economically stressed, not that they are doing well in India.
To argue the contrary raises the question – in comparison to what? If an increasing minority population share indicates support for diversity, what would a declining share indicate: that this support has dwindled, minorities are leaving the country or being forced to do so? Or would it simply indicate what demographers have forecast: that the Muslim population is reaching its replenishment level and will begin to decline, as the Hindu population share has done, and both are positive indices of development though not necessarily of support for diversity?
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This is not the only puzzling argument made in the report. It appears to claim that India 2024 is a liberal democracy while using data that stops almost immediately after the Modi administration came to power in 2014. Since then, innumerable media and independent reports have shown a rising graph of unspeakable attacks on Muslims and to a lesser but still significant extent, on Christians, prompting US president Joe Biden to remark that contemporary India harbours xenophobic impulses.
That the report is intended to rebut US and other countries’ reports on growing ethnic chauvinism in India is no secret. That goal is indirectly referred to by the report’s authors themselves. But its argument is less than convincing. Data for previous periods does not shed light on current ones. Given that no census has been held for 2021, we don’t know whether the minority population share has continued to rise since the 2011 Census or the 2015 family health survey.
It would indeed be illuminating to see whether the religious demography of India has changed in any significant way since 2014/2015 and if so, which. Has there been an increase in Muslim emigration in the face of repeated attacks on their lives, homes and livelihoods? Alternatively, or additionally, has there been Muslim migration from Indian states where they are discriminated against to Indian states where they are less or not discriminated against? What might then be the impact on Indian politics of such demographic shifts?
We cannot even guess at the answers to these questions until there is a census. In the meantime, we can hope that the Indian election commission will take note of the political misuse of what can only be called a disingenuous report which omits more than it reveals.
Radha Kumar is a writer and policy analyst. Her most recent book is The Republic Relearnt: Renewing Indian Democracy, 1947-2024 (Penguin Vintage).
