Let us examine two momentous national elections through the reproductive lens; one that recently concluded over the summer in India and the other, entering a new and more hopeful phase in its presidential election to be held this winter, in the US.
Geographical, cultural, and economic differences notwithstanding, there are some glaring similarities in how reproduction is framed within these two countries. The manner in which reproduction and population is showing up in right-wing discourses in these two elections amply vindicates what feminists have argued – that all politics is reproductive politics.
In the US, the Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance has disparagingly labeled childfree individuals as “the childless cat ladies,” while in India, Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi in his electoral speeches pilloried the Muslim community for their fecundity, marking them collectively as “zyadha bacche paida karne waale log (people who produce too many children)”. One man ridicules child-free Americans while the other attacks Indian Muslims for having too many. But for both, the focus must be on women’s reproductive bodies.
Pro-natalist Vance and anti-natalist Modi, while spouting seemingly contradictory visions, are ironically both drawing from a shared political understanding of reproduction, population and national wellbeing. In caricaturing both child-free choices and that of birthing more than one child, Vance and Modi pull from a politics of reproductive futurism whereby the absent child and too many children (of a particular sort) endanger their respective nations. Both men lean into competing anti-choice positions, as they mark Black, brown, and Muslim reproductive bodies as selfish, irresponsible and anti-national.
For Vance, it is the feminist/queer reproductive subject who, in abandoning their procreative responsibilities towards the nation, demonstrate their lack of sustained, long-term investment and commitment to national wellbeing. For being reproductively derelict, Vance is proposing to disenfranchise these individuals and rewarding those with more children with additional votes. In refusing to produce future citizens for the nation, child free individuals automatically forfeit any legitimate claims to citizenship and hence, he is proposing they be denied their right to the ballot. On the flip side, those who have responsibly reproduced should be rewarded with more than one vote, voting on their children’s behalf. Citizen’s worthiness is unequivocally tied to their commitment to producing the next generation of Americans. In Vance’s national vision, reproductive choices qualify and disqualify American citizens to vote. His extrajudicial definitions impose reproductive worthiness as a litmus test for citizenship as he regards childfree women as “parasitic” freeloaders who, in refusing to reproduce, are not “productive” citizens.
While Vance’s attacks are aimed widely at child-free Americans, they are also laser focused on the Democratic nominee Vice-President Kamala Harris. Through his tortured logic, Vance seeks to ridicule her for both being a woman of colour and what he considers to be her reproductive unworthiness. In choosing to be child-free, Harris, he argues, should automatically be disqualified from the possibility of leading the nation and becoming the next commander-in-chief. Harris’ reproductive body is marked as nationally suspect even as she has two stepchildren from her marriage. What we are witnessing in the current moment is a conservative push-back against impressive feminist success in divorcing definitions of womanhood from biology. In the face of this feminist rewriting of gendered scripts, we are encountering a fierce resurrection of the idea of biological motherhood as the mark of “true” womanhood from various right wing constituencies.
On a lighter note, Vance’s imagination is flawed by his overly masculine and anthropomorphic bias. This imagination is also bankrupt in its failure to recognise that not all child-free humans are singularly feline lovers and that many extend their affections to all sentient beings, including household canines, farm cattle, and/or botanical marvels. Nor are their families solely determined by bloodlines perpetuated through conjugal sex located strictly within monogamous heterosexual matrimony. They forge close and loving bonds with fellow humans and our young ones through exploratory familial and community partnerships. Therefore, what Vance fails to recognise is that child-free individuals can, and many are, deeply committed to kin-making that is expansively interspecies and planetary rather than being strictly tied to human children and man-made national borders.
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Shifting our gaze to India, Modi is proposing the opposite argument of overly fecund Muslim reproductive bodies as nationally suspect. Muslim bodies in India are seen as differently derelict from childfree Americans. Historically, the trope of over-population has dogged elite public discourses and sensibilities about India since the early 20th century. Paul Ehrlich’s infamous doomsday book, The Population Bomb, which opens with a dehumanising description of Delhi streets, played an important role in generating alarm about hyper-fecundity and planetary destruction. Even as his was not a new argument, either for Indians or for the global community of eugenicists and neo-Malthusians, the hold of over-population as the principal, if not the singular cause of India’s “under-development,” has been impossible to shake off even in the face of declining national fertility rates across the board, including among the Muslim community.
Mapping the political trajectory of India’s reproductive history illuminates the workings of power across intersecting axes of gender, class, community and caste. Within modern Indian history, a differential reproductive worth was assigned to subaltern subjects, carrying with it a special burden to prove loyalty to the nation. Starting with the 20th century, the management of sex required the ability to divorce it from procreation. This responsibility was not only directed towards Indian subalterns but also generally upon the “lesser” people of the global south. Within postcolonial India and much of the global south low fertility and small families quickly became an unquestionable marker of modernity.
In postcolonial India the norm for an ideal heterosexual family moved from having three, to two, to one child between 1950-1990s. Progressively moving towards smaller families and lower national fertility rates was commonly understood to ensure development, progress and national prosperity. Citizens who failed to abide by this familial ideal had to be punished through a withdrawal of national recognition. Indian politicians from time to time issued calls to refuse Indians with too many children the right to vote, for they were seen to endanger the collective national aspirations for a more developed and prosperous nation.
Too many Indians was a danger to India, therefore, the history of anti-choice in India has been underwritten with a different logic. The Indian state and its auxiliary organisations prioritised the curtailment of procreation especially within heterosexual matrimony, the otherwise legitimate institutional location for sexual expressions. Let us not forget that the Indian state’s enthusiasm to curtail reproduction led to a singularly sordid episode of national emergency enacted between 1975-77, when over 8 million Indians were forcefully sterilised. In this instance too, Indian subalterns including the working poor, lower caste communities, rural populations and Muslim were much more viciously targeted.
State governments of Uttar Pradesh and Assam have recently proposed that Indians with large families be denied full access to state resources. The UP-state law commission drafted a bill on population in 2021 that sought to promote a two-child policy through a series of incentives and disincentives. Other states such as Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh also promote the two-child policy.
Even as over-population continues to frame much of Modi’s speeches, numerous commentators have highlighted the false communalising narrative as it defies current declining fertility trends within India. Under the Modi government, the Muslim community has been accused of unleashing a “population jihad” against the majoritarian Hindu community and the nation at large. Ironically, just as Muslims are being targeted for high fertility within India, India is being heralded as the most populous nation that demographically surpassed China in 2023.
The idea of demographic dividend has been injected into global discussions on demography that seek to displace the older more apocalyptic Neo-Malthusian scenario of doom and gloom. Some demographers now argue that India’s current population gives the country “bragging rights,” placing it at a greater advantage than the West and China where fertility rates have been on a downward trend. Indian leaders, especially those from the Hindu-right, have been slow in recalibrating their public speeches and policies to better reflect both the declining fertility and the country’s new “psychological-edge,” as the most populous nation boasting of a young population. The recently concluded national elections in India saw politicians, especially Modi and UP chief minister Yogi Adityanath, return to the tired old trope of over-population in the most dangerous and distasteful communal manner conceivable.
By way of a conclusion, on the one hand, US conservatives are seeking to reinstate fresh reproductive burdens onto women citizens, using slurs for those who are seen as transgressing these nationalistically assigned maternal identities. On the other hand, the votaries of the Hindu right in India mark the Muslim minority community as a looming threat to the nation. Even as fertility rates are steadily declining, it seems nearly impossible to shake off the historical charge of reproductive irresponsibility and hyper-fecundity for Indian subalterns.
What we see play out in electoral politics across the US and India are two distinct articulations of anti-choice reproductive politics, whereby the intent is to ensure specific reproductive subjects i.e. American women and Indian Muslims are denied agency over their sexual and procreative bodies in 2024. The cost of reproductive disobedience is indeed high. In both instances, American women and Indian Muslims render themselves unrecognisable as citizens worthy of national rights, protection, and privileges.
Dr Sanjam Ahluwalia is a professor of WGS and history in the US.
