Amit Upadhyay repeats online misinformation as he claims to know why India’s 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.
A pharmacist by trade, Upadhyay is one of many social media influencers from India’s majority faith to have cultivated large audiences by spreading false demographic data to claim the country is being refashioned into an Islamic state.
For them, last month’s announcement that India had overtaken China to become the world’s most populous nation was not a cause for celebration, but a call to action.
Photo: AFP
“I tell all my Hindu customers to produce more children, to counter Muslims,” said Upadhyay, who in his spare time curates a Facebook page from his home in Uttar Pradesh state. “Or else they will become a threat and eventually wipe out the Hindu religion from India.”
Upadhyay regularly publishes widely shared Islamophobic posts to his nearly 40,000 followers.
One post last month warned of an alleged plot by Muslims to “multiply their population to take control of India.”
India is home to 1.4 billion people, including about 210 million Muslims, but birthrates have declined across the board over the past few decades in tandem with global trends.
The country’s most recent National Family Health Survey in 2021 showed an overall fertility rate of 2.0 children per woman, rising to 2.3 for Muslim women.
A forecast issued the same year from the Pew Research Center said that India’s Muslim community would grow to 311 million by 2050.
However, despite their growing share of the national population, Muslims would remain a small minority in a country of 1.7 billion people by the middle of the century, the US-based think tank’s projections showed.
That has not stopped the spread of viral disinformation on Facebook, WhatsApp and other social media platforms claiming that India is soon to become a Muslim-majority country.
One Facebook post sarcastically greeted news that India’s population had overtaken China’s by thanking Muslims “for producing 5-10 children” each.
Another post on Twitter said that the Hindu faith would soon disappear from India, while a supposed Muslim majority would replace the country’s constitution with “Islamic law.”
A UN announcement last month that India is now home to more humans than any other country on the planet has reinvigorated demographic claims.
“Hindus will get married once, and have two children,” Ishwar Lal, a member of a Hindu-nationalist group, said in a public speech after the announcement. “Whereas Muslims get married four times and have so many children that they can have their own cricket teams.”
The same month, at a pilgrimage destination in the foothills of the Himalayas, a religious sermon exhorted Hindus to wage their own demographic counteroffensive.
“From two children, Hindus have come down to producing one child,” priest Ravindra Puri told people at Haridwar. “This is causing an imbalance in the population.”
The solution to this imbalance was for the pious to have three children, Puri said.
“One to serve the nation, one to take care of the home and one to serve the religion by becoming a priest,” he said.
S.Y. Quraishi, a former head of India’s elections, has written about the spread of disinformation about the country’s Muslim birthrate.
Claims that Muslims would soon become India’s majority religion had proved to be a salient “propaganda” tool for Hindu nationalists, Quraishi said.
“They continue to provoke Hindus to produce more children by creating a fear that Muslims will outnumber them,” he told reporters. “This will never happen.”
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