NEW DELHI: Amit Upadhyay repeats false information from the internet while claiming to know why India's population is increasing. He states that because his Muslim neighbours are having too many children, Hindu ladies must have more children of their own.
Upadhyay, a chemist by profession, is one of many social media influencers from India's dominant religion who have built sizable followers by disseminating incorrect demographic information to suggest that the nation is being transformed into an Islamic state.
They saw the declaration that India had surpassed China as the world's most populous country as a call to action rather than reason for celebration. "I tell all my Hindu customers to produce more children, to counter Muslims," Upadhyay told AFP from his home in Uttar Pradesh state, where he also runs a popular Facebook page in his spare time. "Or else they will become a threat and ultimately drive the Hindu religion out of India," the speaker said.
Upadhyay frequently shares posts that are widely circulated that are anti-Islam to his nearly 40,000 followers.
A tweet from April raised the possibility that Muslims were planning to "multiply their population to take control of India." There are 1.4 billion people living in India, including 210 million Muslims, but birthrates have fallen significantly over the past few decades in keeping with worldwide trends.
The most recent National Family Health Survey conducted in the nation in 2021 revealed a fertility rate of 2.0 children per woman nationwide, with a little increase to 2.3 among Muslim women. According to a prediction made by the Pew Research Centre that same year, India's Muslim population would increase to 311 million by 2050.
By the middle of the century, Muslims would still make up a small minority in a nation of 1.7 billion people, despite their increasing proportion of the population. That hasn't stopped the viral spread of false information that India will soon have a Muslim majority on Facebook, WhatsApp, and other social media platforms.
One Facebook post mockingly thanked Muslims "for producing 5-10 children" apiece in response to the news that India's population had surpassed China's.
Another tweet said that the Hindu religion would soon be extinguished in India while a purported Muslim majority would replace the country's constitution with "Islamic law."
Hindu nationalist ideologues have long favoured conspiracy theories that claim a Muslim plot exists to ensure the faith's numerical dominance in India. In other nations, the far-right has embraced beliefs that immigrants and minorities are "replacing" the main population.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has come to dominate national politics in part because of its forceful appeals to the nation's majority Hindu population, has occasionally engaged in the ideas. With the assistance of 125 additional MPs, BJP legislator Rakesh Sinha sponsored a population control bill into parliament in 2019 that called for a two-child maximum for all Indian homes.
When Sinha gave a speech on the allegedly stark difference between Hindu and Muslim birthrates, detractors charged him of prejudice against Muslims; Sinha refuted the charge. These assertions have gained new life since the UN declared in April that India now has the largest population on Earth.
After the declaration, Ishwar Lal, a representative of a Hindu-nationalist organisation connected to the BJP, made a public address in which he said that Hindus will only get married once and have two children.
Muslims, in contrast, have four marriages and several children, which allows them to have their own cricket teams. The same month, a religious preacher urged a congregation of Hindu believers to launch their own demographic counter-offensive at a well-known pilgrimage site in the Himalayan foothills. Priest Ravindra Puri told a large crowd in Haridwar, "From two children, Hindus have come down to producing one child. "This is causing a population imbalance."
Puri suggested that the religious have three children in order to correct this imbalance: "One to serve the nation, one to take care of the home, and one to serve the religion by becoming a priest."
S.Y. Quraishi, a former election head in India, has written extensively about the propagation of false information about the Muslim birthrate in the nation. He claimed that assertions that Muslims would soon overtake other religions as the majority in India had proven to be an effective "propaganda" tactic for Hindu nationalists.
By instilling a sense of impending Muslim overpopulation in Hindus, they continue to encourage them to have more children, he told AFP.
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