By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, Sep 13 2004 (IPS)

Misleading census data showing a 33 percent rise in India’s Muslim population for the decade ending 2001 but corrected afterwards, has become grist in the mill of pro-Hindu political parties defeated in the recent elections.

Almost immediately after the data was released last week, the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) convened a ‘we-told- you-so’ press conference to reiterate a bogey that has long been spreading through India – the fear that India’s Muslim and Christian populations were increasing faster that that of the majority Hindus.

The BJP is still struggling to digest its loss in the April/May general elections. As the party tries come to grips with the reality, a fatigued leadership, ideological contradictions and absence of a well-defined strategy stare it in the face.

”It is disturbing that Muslims now form 13.4 percent of the population,” said Venkaiah Naidu, president of the BJP which was voted out of office in May after presiding over the 2002 anti- Muslim pogrom in western Gujarat which claimed more than 2,000 lives in the worst communal violence since India became independent in 1947.

Naidu said he was concerned about the ”imbalance” especially because colonial India was partitioned in 1947 – into Pakistan and post-independence India – on the basis of the size of the Muslim and Hindu populations.

As controversy grew over the stunning figures, Registrar General of Census J.K. Banthia released ‘adjusted’ growth figures last Thursday that showed that the Muslim growth rate had in fact dropped from the 34.5 percent recorded during the 1991 census to 29.3 percent in the 2001 decennial census.

It turned out that the growth rates were erroneous because they were based on the 2001 census which had – for reasons of the armed insurgency prevailing there – not included the 6.7 million people in Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority state.

Indeed Pakistan’s main claim to Indian controlled Kashmir rests on the fact that 67 percent of the population is Muslim. In the past, Pakistan President Gen. Pervez Musharraf has described the Kashmir issue as the ”unfinished business of the partition.”

Banthia’s adjusted figures showed the proportion of Muslims in India’s total population of 1.01 billion in 2001 standing at 12.4 percent against Hindus who form an overwhelming 81.4 percent of the population.

At best what had happened was a case of poor math and at worst a case where some official had decided to put a spin on data that was bound to be controversial in a country where communal relations are notoriously fragile.

Some members of India’s ruling Congress party called for the removal of Banthia, saying he was an appointee of the BJP and showing his bias.

Shriprakash Jaiswal, junior minister in the union home ministry said he has ordered a probe into the affair to ascertain if the erroneous data was released ”deliberately and mischievously.”

Commenting on the row, an editorial in the ‘Indian Express’ newspaper on Thursday said: ” We do not know whether Banthia, appointed by the BJP-led regime, sparked off an entirely irrelevant debate deliberately but his actions were certainly irresponsible.”

For his part, Banthia who had come under heavy flak from several quarters through the week said ”he was pained at the way motives were being attributed due to a clerical error.”

But even after the corrections were publicly made, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) which provides ideology and muscle to the BJP persisted with the chauvinistic view that Hindus were in danger of being swamped by Muslims.

Speaking to IPS in an interview RSS leader Ram Madhav said his organisation viewed the Indian sub-continent as a whole and one in which the Muslim populations of Pakistan and Bangladesh were growing faster that that of Hindus in India.

”At current rates of growth, by the year 2050 there will be more Muslims on the Indian sub-continent than Hindus and this is certainly a cause for worry,” said Ram Madhav.

Madhav said even the revised figures for the Indian census showed that over the last decade the Hindu population had grown by only 19.9 percent while the Muslim population had grown by 29.3 percent.

”What we are saying is that the larger families that Muslims tend to have is good neither for the community or for the country,” he added.

Sociologists and human rights activists, notably Syeda Hameed, attribute higher growth rates among Muslims to the fact that literacy rates within the community were significantly lower than that of Hindus.

Hameed, now a member of India’s Planning Commmission said she considered literacy rates among Muslim women – 59.1 percent in the 2001 census – to be a factor that called for urgent attention among policy makers.

A former member of the National Commission for Women (NCW), Hameed pointed out that the controversy had obscured more serious issues revealed by the 2001 census figures – among them being the rapidly dwindling sex ratio as result of couples increasingly resorting to female foeticide.

The worst hit by this trend was the Sikh community concentrated in the prosperous north-western state of Punjab which recorded just 882 females for every thousand males.

Interestingly there were 936 Muslim women for every thousand males, which was better than the national average of 933 women for every thousand males.

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