{"id":885,"date":"2023-08-13T15:24:40","date_gmt":"2023-08-13T11:54:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/muslimpress.com\/?p=885"},"modified":"2023-08-13T15:24:40","modified_gmt":"2023-08-13T11:54:40","slug":"muslim-population-misinformation-fuels-islamophobia-in-india","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/muslimpress.com\/?p=885","title":{"rendered":"Muslim population misinformation fuels Islamophobia in India"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"entry-highlight\">\n<ul>\n<li>\n<blockquote><p>India is home to 1.4 billion people, including around 210 million Muslims, but birthrates have declined across the board over recent decades in tandem with global trends<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"entry-content\" data-io-article-url=\"https:\/\/www.arabnews.com\/node\/2296671\/world\">\n<div class=\"field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden\">\n<div class=\"field-items\">\n<div class=\"field-item even\">\n<p>NEW DELHI: Amit Upadhyay repeats online misinformation as he claims to know why India\u2019s population is growing: he says his Muslim neighbors are having too many babies, so Hindu women have a responsibility to bear more of their own.<br \/>\nA pharmacist by trade, Upadhyay is one of many social media influencers from India\u2019s majority faith to have cultivated large audiences by spreading false demographic data to claim the country is being refashioned into an Islamic state.<br \/>\nFor them, last month\u2019s announcement that India had overtaken China to become the world\u2019s most populous nation was not a cause for celebration, but a call to action.<br \/>\n\u201cI tell all my Hindu customers to produce more children, to counter Muslims,\u201d Upadhyay, who in his spare time curates a popular Facebook page from his home in Uttar Pradesh state, told AFP.<br \/>\n\u201cOr else they will become a threat and eventually wipe out the Hindu religion from India.\u201d<br \/>\nUpadhyay regularly publishes widely shared Islamophobic posts to his nearly 40,000 followers.<br \/>\nOne post in April warned of an alleged plot by Muslims to \u201cmultiply their population to take control of India.\u201d<br \/>\nIndia is home to 1.4 billion people, including around 210 million Muslims, but birthrates have declined across the board over recent decades in tandem with global trends.<br \/>\nThe country\u2019s last National Family Health Survey in 2021 showed an overall fertility rate of 2.0 children per woman, rising marginally to 2.3 for Muslim women.<br \/>\nA forecast issued the same year from the Pew Research Center said that India\u2019s Muslim community would grow to 311 million by 2050.<br \/>\nBut despite their growing share of the national population, Muslims would remain a small minority in a country of 1.7 billion people by mid-century, according to the US-based think tank\u2019s projections.<br \/>\nThat has not stopped the spread of viral disinformation on Facebook, WhatsApp and other social media platforms claiming India is soon to become a Muslim-majority country.<br \/>\nOne Facebook post sarcastically greeted news that India\u2019s population had overtaken China\u2019s by thanking Muslims \u201cfor producing 5-10 children\u201d each.<br \/>\nAnother post on Twitter said that the Hindu faith would soon disappear from India, while a supposed Muslim majority would replace the country\u2019s constitution with \u201cIslamic law.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Conspiracy theories that allege a Muslim plot to secure the faith\u2019s numerical supremacy in India have been a staple of Hindu nationalist ideologues for years. Similar theories of immigrants and minorities \u201creplacing\u201d majority populations have also been embraced by the far-right in other countries.<br \/>\nAt times the theories have been indulged by Prime Minister Narendra Modi\u2019s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has come to dominate national politics partly through its muscular appeals to the country\u2019s Hindu majority.<br \/>\nBJP lawmaker Rakesh Sinha introduced into parliament a population control bill in 2019 that proposed to limit all Indian households to two children, garnering the support of 125 other MPs.<br \/>\nThe bill was withdrawn after critics accused Sinha of targeting Muslims when he gave a speech on the supposedly glaring disparity between Hindu and Muslim birthrates \u2014 an accusation he denied.<br \/>\nThe UN\u2019s April announcement that India is now home to more humans than any other country on the planet has reinvigorated these claims.<br \/>\n\u201cHindus will get married once, and have two children,\u201d Ishwar Lal, a member of a Hindu-nationalist group affiliated with the BJP, said in a public speech after the announcement.<br \/>\n\u201cWhereas Muslims get married four times and have so many children that they can have their own cricket teams.\u201d<br \/>\nThe same month, at a popular pilgrimage destination in the Himalayan foothills, a religious sermon exhorted a crowd of the Hindu faithful to wage their own demographic counter-offensive.<br \/>\n\u201cFrom two children, Hindus have come down to producing one child,\u201d priest Ravindra Puri told a crowd of hundreds at Haridwar. \u201cThis is causing an imbalance in the population.\u201d<br \/>\nThe solution to this imbalance, Puri said, was for the pious to have three children: \u201cOne to serve the nation, one to take care of the home and one to serve the religion by becoming a priest.\u201d<br \/>\nIndia\u2019s former election chief, S.Y. Quraishi, has written extensively on the spread of disinformation about the country\u2019s Muslim birthrate.<br \/>\nHe said that claims Muslims would soon become India\u2019s majority religion had proved to be a salient \u201cpropaganda\u201d tool for Hindu nationalists.<br \/>\n\u201cThey continue to provoke Hindus to produce more children by creating a fear that Muslims will outnumber them,\u201d he told AFP.<br \/>\n\u201cThis will never happen.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>India is home to 1.4 billion people, including around 210 million Muslims, but birthrates have declined across the board over recent decades in tandem with global trends NEW DELHI: Amit Upadhyay repeats online misinformation as he claims to know why India\u2019s population is growing: he says his Muslim neighbors are having too many babies, so [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":886,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0},"categories":[371],"tags":[387,375,388,389,386],"video-categories":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/muslimpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/885"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/muslimpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/muslimpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/muslimpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/muslimpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=885"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/muslimpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/885\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":887,"href":"https:\/\/muslimpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/885\/revisions\/887"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/muslimpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/886"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/muslimpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=885"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/muslimpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=885"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/muslimpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=885"},{"taxonomy":"video-categories","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/muslimpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fvideo-categories&post=885"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}