New Delhi, India – The share of Indian Muslims in the country's population has soared by more than 43 per cent since 1950 – that is the key finding of a new working paper released by Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Economic Advisory Council (EAC).
Amid India's heated national election campaign, as Modi has painted increasingly terrifying scenarios of Muslims backed by opposition parties seizing the nation's resources, the report has sparked criticism about its timing. Sections of Modi's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have amplified the document's conclusions to emphasize a narrative long spread by the Hindu right that the religious majority community in the country is under threat.
So what does the article claim and what do the facts say? Is India's Muslim population really growing exponentially faster than that of other communities, including Hindus? And why is the report criticized?
What does the working document say?
The report analyzes global demographic trends between 1950 and 2015. It is based on statistics from the Association of Religion Data Archive (ARDA), a free online database of global religious data.
It concludes that in the period studied, the proportion of Muslim population in India increased by 43.15 percent, from 9.84 percent to 14.09 percent. By contrast, he says, the proportion of the majority Hindu population decreased by 7.82 percent between 1950 and 2015, from 84.68 percent to 78.06 percent.
The proportion of India's Christian population rose from 2.24 percent to 2.36 percent – an increase of 5.38 percent; and the Sikh population by 6.58 percent, from 1.74 percent in 1950 to 1.85 percent in 2015. The report mentions that the proportion of India's Buddhist population has grown from 0.05 percent at 0.81 percent, but omits the percentage increase: almost 1,600 percent, according to this methodology – for the community.
It concludes that in the majority of the 167 countries studied, the proportion of the population of the majority religious faith has decreased; and some in India's neighbors, including Muslim-majority Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan, and Buddhist-majority Sri Lanka and Bhutan, bucking that trend. .
In the case of India, the report says, the increase in the population of multiple religious minorities was a reflection of a “cumulative measure of their well-being.” The data shows, according to the newspaper, that in India “minorities are not only protected but also prosper”; Even multiple international reports and rankings warn of the decline in religious freedom in the country.
However, the document lacks critical context and its timing (in the middle of the election) raises questions about its motivation, some economists suggest.
“The paper serves the purpose of the regime and not 'research,'” said Santosh Mehrotra, a development economist and visiting professor at the University of Bath in the United Kingdom.
Do these numbers lack context?
The report is based on survey data, not the decennial national census that was last conducted in 2011. The 2021 census was postponed due to COVID-19, but the Modi government has not yet announced a timeline for delayed exercise. Demographers often consider census data to be more robust because the outcome of surveys, with smaller sample sizes, may depend on the selection of participants.
“There is no substitute for the census, and nothing policy can be done without this missing data,” said Aashish Gupta, a demographer and Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the University of Oxford. “This currently has widespread implications, from fund allocation to policy formulation; none of the changes that have occurred in the last 14 years in India have been accounted for.”
The newspaper, its critics say, overlooks the actual increase in the Hindu population in this period and how it compares with the increase in the Muslim population in this period. Between 1951 and 2011, the Muslim population increased from 35.4 million to 172 million. The Hindu population increased from 303 million to 966 million in the same period, a five-fold increase.
All of this undermines the newspaper's credibility, Gupta said. “This article makes a mountain out of a molehill,” she said. “It is an exercise in propaganda and politics and should not be considered academic.”
The myth of the Muslim population boom
India's Hindu-majority right has long pushed a conspiracy theory, “population jihad,” that suggests Indian Muslims are reproducing faster, with the intention of eventually outnumbering Hindus.
In reality, however, Muslim fertility rates are falling the fastest among all of India's major religious groups, according to the government's own data. The fertility rate (the average number of children a woman gives birth to) among Muslims fell from 4.41 to 2.36 between 1992 and 2021, while for Hindus it fell from 3.3 to 1.94.
The report ignores this change, Gupta said.
Critics of the new government document say it ends up giving credence to a debunked narrative. When politicians peddle anti-Muslim conspiracy theories, Mehrotra said, they may pass themselves off as dog whistles, but a “divisive document bearing the EAC name carries credibility.”
“This government is misusing its resources to sow its political agenda,” Mehrotra said. “For the last 100 years, the Hindu right has been spreading fear over the Muslim population, and this document contributes to that history without being critical.”
Why the report is important
As the re-election campaign progresses, Modi has redoubled his rhetoric against India's 200 million Muslims, apparently calling them “infiltrators” and referring to them as “those who produce more children,” although he appeared to distance himself from those comments in a subsequent interview.
The new government report offered fresh fuel for unfounded suggestions by the prime minister's party that India's Hindu majority was under threat.
The proportion of Hindus fell by 7.8% between 1950 and 2015. The Muslim population grew by 43%.
This is what decades of Congress rule did to us. If they were left in their hands, there would be no country for Hindus. pic.twitter.com/xNUramJyNE
— Amit Malviya (मोदी का परिवार) (@amitmalviya) May 9, 2024
Amit Malviya, head of the BJP's national information department, cited the report to publish in X that if the country were left in the hands of the opposition Congress party, “there would be no country for Hindus.” Another minister in Modi's cabinet, Smriti Irani, said the report was “evidence of the harm done to Hindus” and that the Congress' legacy is one of “torture and disrespect to the Hindu community.”
The new EAC document “plays on fears that are used to demonize India's minority communities,” Gupta said. “In a sense, it's a strategic exercise: doing it for propaganda purposes.”
As some sections of the Indian media amplified the report's conclusions, the Population Foundation of India, an independent think tank, expressed concern, accusing them of “sowing alarm about the growth of the Muslim population”, calling the interpretations as “not only inaccurate but also misleading and unfounded.”
