More than 960 million people have registered to cast ballots in India over the course of six months, making this the largest poll in the world.
Current Prime Minister Narendra Modi is heading the Bharatiya Janata Party ( BJP) campaign and traveling extensively throughout the nation to deliver a message that he hopes will win the party’s overwhelmingly in the election.
He is both a well-known and controversial number. Modi’s remarks are drawing heating for their anti- Arab rhetoric. At a campaign rally on April 21, 2024, he referred to Muslims as “infiltrators“.
He later doubled down on those remarks, suggesting that if India’s largest opposition group, the Indian National Congress, came to power, the success of Hindus had been snatched and given to communities that “have to some children”, a relatively lightly veiled reference to Indian Muslims.
Such language highlights a dread that Modi and the BJP have frequently stoked: that Muslims may pose a significant risk to India’s Hindu-majority population.
Although Modi has since claimed that his conversation did not specifically address Muslims, his thoughts were undoubtedly taken as they were.
To some observers, the speech serves as an indication that the BJP campaign’s campaign is trying to secure a two-thirds supermajority in Parliament. According to the discussion, Modi is trying to combat voter apathy by appealing to the group’s Hindu foundation in the face of rising economic inequality and youth unemployment.
As an Indian writer of public health, I think it is crucial to understand how anti-Muslim language came about and how it fits with growing concerns about the Hindu majority’s decline in India.
Doubts of a Muslim acquisition
Political and administrative picture has been a source of skepticism in India since the days of English colonialism.
In 1919, the American granted Indians a limited company, American politicians were allowed to create legislation in specific fields, such as health care and education, but not on law and order.
After the 1931 population, Indian leaders – primarily Hindus, but also some Muslims – and American officials expressed concern about the ostensibly quick rate of population growth in India, which at the moment was growing by over 1 % annually.
These officials started promoting new birth control methods to American women, in keeping with similar efforts around the world.
However, colonial officials and Hindu administrators had to deal with the fact that Indians of all religions were averse to birth control propaganda in order to effectively persuade a large number of women to adopt household planning practices.
These skepticisms stemmed from social practices that were prevalent in both Hindu and Muslim communities, including marriage, baby marriage, and seclusion practices.
Policies that attempted to stifle American women’s standard lives, including birth control, were widely regarded as harmful forms of imperial control.
Role of British settlers
Hindu nationalist organizations created a unique narrative while the English used these social practices and suspicions to make the claim that all Indians were to blame for the rapid population growth and the accompanying poverty and hunger.
These border organizations, which gained popularity as a political power in the 1930s, popularized the notion that procedures that promoted people rise were particularly widespread among the Muslim community.
The Indian National Congress group and the Muslim League were at odds with one another at the same time. The League was established in 1906, but it soon started pressing for a independent country for Indian Muslims in the late 1930s.
Before the American era, there were divisions in American society. British colonial leaders made these personalities and divisions more restrictive by categorizing Indians into caste and religion, putting different communities in conflict with one another.
The British were able to defend the notion that Indians were capable of self-government and progressive politics without the supervision and control of colonial rule.
Although the American emigrated from India and Pakistan in 1947, growing Hindu-Muslim tensions after division continued to influence home planning propaganda in separate India.
Hindu separatists had anticipated the establishment of a one country with Hindu majority rule. In this context, they saw the establishment of Pakistan as a country and nation-state for South Asian Islamists as a huge failure and a reduction for India.
Also, the majority of Hindu guys and some women served as post-partition leaders and officials in India because the majority of the educated and wealthy Muslim classes ended up in Pakistan.
In the wake of the colonial period views of Muslims, Indian policymakers and administrators created and put into practice health care and education coverage. Preexisting views of Muslim hyperfertility in American policymakers specifically grew more deeply ingrained after split.
Population control applications
Officials at all levels of government assumed that the adoption of birth control may be lessened as India’s second significant population control program was launched in 1951.
In fact, the factors that influenced the rate of absorption of IUDs, oral contraceptives, and tubectomies in postindependence India were more influenced by geographical ( whether people lived in rural or urban regions, were from the country’s north or south ), as well as school position.
Population control has been one of the main objectives of Indian policymaking since 1951 as part of a campaign to end poverty and promote public health. However, the misconception that Indian Muslims are unwilling to participate in population control measures has fueled the perception that Islam is” superstitious” or “backward” in the eyes of the public.
This stereotyping has been felt by Indian Muslim communities across the country, particularly in northern India, according to research. Muslims claimed to be disproportionately targeted by population control initiatives.
These worries among the Muslim community grew more severe as a result of the state’s aggressive forced sterilization policy under Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in the 1970s.
Using religion for politics
Modi’s party, the BJP, was formed in 1980 but failed to win significant elections until the 1990s.
In the 1980s and 1990s, their main organizing pushed for the destruction of a mosque built by Mughal emperor Babur in Ayodhya, which is renowned as the site of Rama’s birthplace.
The BJP promoted fears of a Muslim demographic dominance in India by promoting demands for” taking back” the land on which the Babri Masjid was built with worries of a Muslim majority.
But such fears are unfounded. Despite the Muslim minority growing from 11 % in the mid- 1980s to 14 % today, its representation in Parliament has actually declined, from 9 % in the mid- 1980s to 5 % today.
Since the BJP took control of India in 2014, party leaders have relied on historical reassurances about projected increases in the number of Muslims to help them win successive state and national elections and pass laws like the Citizenship Amendment Act, which discriminates against Muslims.
BJP leaders have accused Muslim men of forcibly converting Hindu women to Islam through “love jihad,” a fabricated claim that Muslim men deceive Hindu women to increase their demographic appeal.
The most recent iteration of a long history of Hindu demographic fears has proved to be a lasting one thanks to Modi’s most recent statement making reference to” those who have too many children.”
Clemson University’s assistant professor of history is Archana Venkatesh.
This article was republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.