Mumbai, India – Across northern and central India, a campaign for a population control law is gaining momentum.
The movement ostensibly seeks to raise awareness of the need to curtail India’s population of 1.34 billion, second only to China’s 1.39 billion.
But its subtext reflects a core belief of right-wing Hindu organizations: that Muslims are trying to “overtake” Hindus.
The campaign, backed by Islamophobia, is being promoted in the real world and online.
Facebook posts spread conspiracy theory that India’s Muslim population – currently around 200 million – will at some point surpass the 966 million Hindu population, as WhatsApp groups share messages sparking fear and hatred.
And offline, public meetings are held blaming Muslims for India’s population explosion.
The NGO Jansankhya Samadhan Foundation (or Population Resolution Foundation), for example, is traveling across northern India, rallying support for a two-day march to New Delhi, scheduled for October.
“If we don’t pass a law now, India will see a civil war very soon,” Chaudhary, the head of the NGO, said in an interview with Al Jazeera.
There is a sense of paranoia that the Muslim population is increasing, which is causing the population agenda to relaunch.
The Jansankhya Samadhan Foundation supports a two-child standard, with sentences including jail time for offenders.
Chaudhary says the group has held 150,000 protests and meetings in nearly half of India 725 administrative districts, manages more than 400 WhatsApp groups and is connected to 100,000 people.
“When we travel across the country, 95% of people say that Muslims are the cause of India’s population explosion. The Hindus tell me, ‘it’s no use telling us to control the population, you should tell the Muslims.’ The thing is, it’s a fact.”
The Chaudhary meetings were attended by a government minister, Giriraj Singh, and leaders of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a paramilitary volunteer organization seen as the ideological parent of the ruling right-wing Hindu nationalist party, the BJP.
Last year, Singh noted that “a single community” was responsible for India’s population explosion, in reference to Muslims.
Chaudhary insisted that his organization is apolitical.
“Initially we tried to defend that with the [Muslim] community. But they would have told us that for religious reasons the community would never accept such a law,” he said.
After the October march, his team intends to travel to southern Indian states to mobilize support for a proposed population control bill.
Dr Al Sharada, director of Population First, a Mumbai-based NGO that works on health and population issues, called the calls dangerous and inadvisable.
“Calling for such a law is an authorized and privileged position and always targets the poor and the disenfranchised,” she told Al Jazeera.
In another example of the movement’s online success, Amit Pandey, a 36-year-old pharmaceutical trader from Lucknow, has amassed more than 30,000 followers in just two months on his Facebook page, Jansankhya Niyantran Kanoon (Population Control Law ).
He devotes an hour a day to working on his “cause”, calling on people to write to Prime Minister Narendra Modi of the BJP party, and asking him to legislate on population control.
His efforts, he claims, have seen 150,000 letters sent to Modi on the issue.
Pandey has long believed that Muslims are conspiring against the country.
“Among Muslims, there is no humanity. Each of them is a jihadist in its own way. With a growing population, they will become huge vote banks and their votes will start to count more than Hindu votes,” he told Al Jazeera.
He publishes several times a day, often disinformation. His page is full of photos, gifs and videos – one featuring a right-wing Hindu activist advocating a modern crusade against Muslims in Europe, another calling Muslims “Arab slaves”.
He believes that government data indicating a slowdown in the growth rate of the Muslim population is fake and manipulated.
“The government does not want to tell citizens the real extent of the problem,” he said, dismissing reports of hate crimes against Muslims as a “false narrative set up by the media.”
His experiences with Muslims, he said, showed him that they cannot be trusted.
“They don’t consider themselves Indians; they don’t have the right intentions. Every Muslim thinks how to defeat the Hindus and wage a Ghazwa-e-Hind (holy war against India),” he said, referring to a term used by armed groups based in Pakistan to justify attacks.
“Every day I do small meetings of 20 to 30 people and convince them of the urgency of getting the law in,” he said. “Days after I created this page, national leaders started talking about such a law,” he says, referrer to a statement in May from popular yoga guru Yoga Ramdev that the government should deny the right to vote to a third child.
Another one group on Facebook, Ab Ek hi Maang – Jansankhya Niyantra Kanoon (One Goal – The Population Control Act) has over 14,000 subscribers. In the northern city of Kanpur, a Facebook page entitled Jansankhya Niyantran Kanoon (Population Control Act) at more than 9,400 followers.
Meanwhile, WhatsApp groups run by BJP supporters are inundated with xenophobic messages about Muslims, while offering a population control law as a solution.
Much of the Indian right has long believed that Muslims have plotted to accelerate their population, with the aim of overtaking the country’s Hindus.
Led by the RSS, BJP-affiliated organizations such as Bajrang Dal and Vishwa Hindu Parishad stoked fears among the country’s Muslim population, called for restraints on the growth of the Muslim population, and pushed for Hindus to produce more children.
RSS has previously claims that European nations, including Germany and France, are on the way to becoming “Islamic states” due to the rapid growth of Muslim communities.
The last Indian census, held in 2011, show that Hindus make up 79.8% of the population while Muslims make up less than a fifth, at 14.2%.
The proportion of Hindus to the country’s population fell by 0.7%, according to this census, while the proportion of Muslims increased by 0.8%.
Islam was also the fastest growing religion in the country between 2001 and 2011 with a growth rate of 24.6%, while the Hindu growth rate was 16.8% during the same period.
Hindu nationalists have used these figures to support their argument.
Experts, however, say the data is incomplete and misleading.
“The data also shows that the Muslim fertility rate has fallen more than the Hindu fertility rate. Despite this, there is a sense of paranoia that the Muslim population is increasing, resulting in the revival of the population [control] program,” said Sharada of Population First.
Sharada pointed to the recently released government Data showing a sharp decline in India’s population growth.
A deputy calls for the maintenance of the “religious balance”
In July, a BJP MP, Rakesh Sinha, propose a private member’s bill – the Population Regulation Bill, 2019 – in the Parliament of India.
It has yet to be discussed in parliament and the government may reject it, but the move represents growing support for population control legislation.
Sinha told Al Jazeera that India’s growing population has made the country restless and although he has stopped blaming Muslims openly, he has pleaded for “religious balance”.
“There are three implications [of population growth] – regional imbalance within the country, with some regions being more populated than others; the scarcity of resources and, therefore, the lack of equitable distribution and finally, the religious balance that must be maintained,” he said.
“We are a multi-faith and multi-caste people, so there should be total harmony between all these faiths.”
When asked to elaborate on the cause of the “religious imbalance”, Sinha said he was busy and could not answer any further questions.
In May, another BJP leader, Ashwini Kumar Upadhyay, deposit public interest litigation in the Delhi High Court, asking for a similar law, alleging that population size was the “root cause of all crimes” in India.
Sharada, meanwhile, advised looking at the issue from an economic perspective.
“There is a misunderstanding that our problems stem from a scarcity of resources,” she told Al Jazeera, “while they stem from a misallocation of resources.”
