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.”
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un sent Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) greetings with what appeared to be restrained rhetoric that comes as Pyongyang moves closer to Russia and depends less on its long-time Asian ally. Kim wished “the Chinese people greater success in building a modern socialist country,” in a reply message to Xi for his congratulations on North Korea’s birthday, the state-run Korean Central News Agency reported yesterday. The 190-word dispatch had little of the florid language that had been a staple of their correspondence, which has declined significantly this year, an analysis by Seoul-based specialist service NK Pro showed. It said
On an island of windswept tundra in the Bering Sea, hundreds of miles from mainland Alaska, a resident sitting outside their home saw — well, did they see it? They were pretty sure they saw it — a rat. The purported sighting would not have gotten attention in many places around the world, but it caused a stir on Saint Paul Island, which is part of the Pribilof Islands, a birding haven sometimes called the “Galapagos of the north” for its diversity of life. That is because rats that stow away on vessels can quickly populate and overrun remote islands, devastating bird
‘CLOSER TO THE END’: The Ukrainian leader said in an interview that only from a ‘strong position’ can Ukraine push Russian President Vladimir Putin ‘to stop the war’ Decisive actions by the US now could hasten the end of the Russian war against Ukraine next year, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Monday after telling ABC News that his nation was “closer to the end of the war.” “Now, at the end of the year, we have a real opportunity to strengthen cooperation between Ukraine and the United States,” Zelenskiy said in a post on Telegram after meeting with a bipartisan delegation from the US Congress. “Decisive action now could hasten the just end of Russian aggression against Ukraine next year,” he wrote. Zelenskiy is in the US for the UN
A 64-year-old US woman took her own life inside a controversial suicide capsule at a Swiss woodland retreat, with Swiss police on Tuesday saying several people had been arrested. The space-age looking Sarco capsule, which fills with nitrogen and causes death by hypoxia, was used on Monday outside a village near the German border. The portable human-sized pod, self-operated by a button inside, has raised a host of legal and ethical questions in Switzerland. Active euthanasia is banned in the country, but assisted dying has been legal for decades. On the same day it was used, Swiss Department of Home