India to become world's largest Muslim country in..., population will cross..., Hindus will be...
India to become world's largest Muslim country in…, population will cross…, Hindus will be…
Hindu-Muslim Population of India: According to a study that was published in 2015 by the United States-based Pew Research Center, the Muslim population in India is expected to increase to such an extent that it will become the country with the largest Muslim population in the world. Currently, Indonesia has the largest population of Muslims. However, India's rapidly growing population, combined with a high growth rate of the Muslim community, may change the scenario soon.
According to the report, by 2050 the total population of India will be 166 crores, in which the population of Hindus is expected to be 130 crores. The population of Muslims will be 31 crores by then. In 2050, the country's share in the total world's Muslim population will be 11 percent. This change will majorly impact demographics and consequently, social, cultural, and political discussions. How Many Hindus-Muslims Between 1951 And 2011?
From 1951 to 2011, in India, the trend of population growth has witnessed a drastic change on the basis of religion. As per Pew Research's data, the fastest growth has been recorded in the Muslims of the country. In 1951, the population of Muslims in India was 3 crore 54 lakh, which has increased to 17.20 crore in 2011. A jump of 386 percent was recorded in the population of Muslims during this period.
Between 1951 and 2011, the Hindu population grew from 300 million to 960 million, a 218% increase. This growth rate was significantly lower than that of the Muslim population. However, the Muslim population's rapid growth is tempered by a concurrently declining fertility rate. Over the same period, the Sikh and Christian populations increased by 235% and 232%, respectively. Decline In Fertility Rates
The Pew Research Report also revealed that there has been a clear decline in the fertility rate in both Muslim and Hindu communities, a positive sign towards population stabilisation.
If we look at the fertility rate among Muslims, the fertility rate of women was 4.4 percent in 1992-93, which recorded 2.3 in 2022. Meanwhile, a decline of 47 percent was recorded.
The fertility rate of Hindu women was 3.3 in 1992-93, which became 1.9 in 2022, with a decline of 42 percent. Is Population Growth A Matter Of Social Concern?
Analysis of religious population data reveals that the growth of the Muslim population in India is attributable to socioeconomic factors like access to education and wealth, rather than being a cause for political or social alarm. A consistent decline in fertility rates is observed across all religious groups. Consequently, India's population is projected to be multi-religious but increasingly socially homogenous by 2050.
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Time of India
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The Wire
an hour ago
- The Wire
Are Election Malpractices Undermining India's Claims of Being ‘the World's Biggest Democracy'?
For the best experience, open on your mobile browser or Download our App. Next Support independent journalism. Donate Now Politics Santosh Mehrotra and Jagdeep Chhokar 8 minutes ago Several methods have emerged in which the will of the people can be dishonoured. Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty Real journalism holds power accountable Since 2015, The Wire has done just that. But we can continue only with your support. Contribute Now In recent years, the election process in India has been converted into one party's fiefdom. Two sets of methods have been weaponised to subvert the verdict of the people, which are adopted at each stage of the electoral voting system. They are used before voting day, or on the voting day, and after the voting day. We discuss each in turn. Before voting day There are at least three methods used to unfairly impact election results before voting day. First, through electoral rolls or voter lists, which see a selective deletion of voter names from a list. Reports essay the deletion of Yadavs or Muslims in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. In Delhi, the removal of jhuggi-jhopri (slum resident) voters' names was alleged to be a factor that is likely to have led to the defeat of Arvind Kejriwal's Aam Aadmi Party. Names from voter lists were allegedly deleted ahead of the Delhi elections, as well as Maharashtra state elections. Both occurred in quick succession after the Lok Sabha polls. This is an age-old method which has now been taken to new heights. The founders of Missing Voters, a smartphone app to track disenfranchised voters in India, estimated that nearly 120 million citizens were missing from voter lists in the 2019 national election. More than half of those disenfranchised citizens were Muslims or lower-caste Dalits – minorities who would, put together, normally constitute less than a third of the country's population. Women are also disproportionately affected: the political scientists Prannoy Roy and Dorab Sopariwala calculated in their book released in 2023 that, on average, approximately 40,000 female voters are missing from the electoral rolls in every constituency in India, a number often higher than the winning margin in many Lower House electoral contests. A National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam had declared 1.9 million people potentially stateless, and while Hindus in the list have been promised their paperwork through a new Citizenship Amendment Act, Muslims are left to face detention, and potentially even deportation. Members of the ruling party have promised to expand the NRC across India, sending some Muslims in big cities running to gather their documents lest they need to prove their citizenship to the government. A 2018 study published in the Economic and Political Weekly found that in the May state elections in Karnataka that year, an estimated 1.2 million Muslims were not able to vote – a number that suggested Muslims were disproportionately missing from the electoral rolls. The study was conducted by comparing single-voter households in the state with record population data. The root cause behind the voter registration manipulation is Rule 18 of the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960, which allows for deletion of voter data without notice or an opportunity to be heard by the affected citizen. At the EC's assurance, the Supreme Court also disposed of a PIL which challenged the constitutional validity of Rule 18. This has clearly contributed to what many allege are large-scale deletion or addition of votes just before the elections in Maharashtra. It is not difficult to see why Muslims, Christians, Dalits and Adivasis would be the main targets for this electoral roll purge. For the 2019 Lok Sabha election, India had nearly 900 million registered voters and there have been reports of mass deletion of names from voters' lists from Assam, Andhra Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka, Uttarakhand and Delhi. The ECI has denied this. The outcome of such disenfranchisement of minorities is already visible: The 18th Lok Sabha (2024) has the lowest share of Muslim MPs in six decades. Less than 5% of its members currently are Muslims despite people from the community forming over 15% of the country's population. In fact, the decline in the share of the Muslim MPs in the Lok Sabha, in the 1990s, coincided with the rise of the BJP, whose total MP tally crossed the 100 mark for the first time in the 10th Lok Sabha (1991-96). Across India's 28 states, Muslims hold roughly 6% of the seats in state legislatures, which is less than half of their national population percentage. The representation of Christians is no better. The second method is to pay voters cash – bribery on a large scale. Small sums have now increased. The ruling party's hold of funds accumulated through the electoral bonds scheme was enormous. The SC judgment came five years too late, when the money had already been collected, and when the judgment did come, it did not require forfeiture of funds collected over the five years that the scheme was in operation. The ECI says it seized nearly half a billion dollars of cash. As cited by NPR, the last available survey, conducted years ago by Association of Democratic Reforms, suggested it plays a role for nearly 40% of voters. The higher capacity to pay is with the biggest political party, of course. A third method has recently emerged: to insert travelling voters of one party from other states (with duplicate identity cards) to polling booths in a state where elections are taking place, by duplicating Electronic Photo Identity Card (EPIC) numbers across states. This method was used, allegedly in Maharashtra and Delhi, to general acceptance. In Bengal, there was political upheaval over this. The ECI's response was: 'In this regard, it is clarified that while EPIC numbers of some of the electors may be identical, the other details, including demographic details, Assembly Constituency, and polling booth, are different for the electors with the same EPIC number.' The matter has rested there. These methods supplement a long-standing method that has been to physically prevent anti-government voters from coming out to vote – using state police force. The Ramgarh case in Uttar Pradesh is a classic and prevented the popular leader of the Samajwadi Party, Azam Khan, from being elected. After voting day (but before counting day) We now turn to the king of the insidious deeds being committed in cahoots with the ECI. But before we do that it is important to establish how the appointments of ECI members have been 'used' by the ruling government. Originally, the three members were to be selected from a list finalised by three people: the prime minister, the leader of the opposition, and the Chief Justice of India (CJI). That rule was changed by the ruling dispensation. In doing so, the government ignored a November 2023 judgement of the Supreme Court and passed a law in contravention of the court's conclusions by removing the CJI from the appointments committee, and replacing it with a cabinet member nominated by the Union government. This tilted the balance irreversibly in favour of the political executive of the day. The importance of this development will be seen below. To understand how this second set of methods has been used to subvert the electoral verdict of the people, it is important to explain the EVM system. To make the EVM system auditable and voter-verifiable, the Supreme Court had, in 2013, ordered introduction of Voter-Verified-Paper Audit Trail (or VVPATs). But in violation of Supreme Court order, the ECI, in February 2018 directed State Chief Electoral Officers to mandatorily verify VVPAT slips in only one randomly selected polling station in each assembly constituency. There is no statistical basis for this choice. This 0.3% sample size defeated the objective of installing VVPATs in all EVMs. The ECI in later hearings before the same court has stuck to its guns, and days before the April-May 2024 Lok Sabha polls were to begin, the SC accepted, without any basis, the ECI's plea that this sample size is sufficient. There are hardly any countries in the world that have adopted EVMs on the scale on which they have been used in India, for all types of elections. EVMs are nowhere the norm, in the world, certainly not for national elections (though several countries use it for local elections, which have reliable means of auditing EVM vote, especially in the US). We believe that if the EVM is to be continued to be used in India, the only possible way it should be allowed to continue is if the vote is verified by a paper trail in 100% of cases. Now let us turn to the ECI's purported methods for subverting the voter's vote as cast. The absence of a paper trail has enabled the insertion of votes in various constituencies by the hiking of vote percentages in all phases of polling. ECI announces only percent of votes cast (from among the eligible voters in a constituency), not the number of votes cast – violating the Representation of the People Act, which requires numbers of votes cast to be made public; accordingly, if the number of eligible voters is also made known, anyone can estimate the percentage. ECI is then free to announce, before the day of counting of the votes, a much higher percentage of votes cast – which are bogus votes. A study by the Vote for Democracy after the Lok Sabha elections 2024, concluded that 79 seats were won by the now ruling party, largely, on the basis of this method. It happened in the Lok Sabha elections to the extent of 55 million votes – that turned the election in constituencies that were marginal (i.e. where the margin of victory in the last election was small). Another study by the Association of Democratic Rights came to a similar conclusion about the total number of votes first announced by ECI, and then later enhanced before counting day. That essentially implies that voter names loaded onto EVM are of voters that did not vote and after polls closed – with ECI officers in collusion. This is what Congress's Rahul Gandhi has alleged for Maharashtra, that there were 6.5 million new voters added between 5.30 pm and 7.30 pm. There are stunning increases (7 to 12%) between the figures of votes polled and made available immediately after polls and before counting in the 2024 Lok Sabha. The same meticulous game appear to have been played in the elections to the state assemblies of Haryana and Maharashtra in 2024, where there was little likelihood of the sitting government being re-elected back to power – so great was the anti-incumbency. In addition, the ECI has played yet another game. At the end of polling on election day the ECI is required to provide 17-C forms – which can enable a candidate (or anyone) to verify the actual votes polled. This is to be provided to all candidates and their agents and also made public, but the ECI has not done so of late, except in a minority of cases. Is the EVM reliable? The EVM-centred electoral system has four critical components – microchips to record the votes as cast by the voter, VVPATs to audit and verify that the votes are counted as recorded, the voters' list and Symbol Loading Units (SLUs) that upload the name and symbol of the candidates contesting on a particular seat on VVPAT or paper trail machines roughly 10-15 days before. This change came in 2017. The fact that post 2017, the EVS (electronic voting system) is no more stand-alone but linked to the internet with the SLU having a labile memory has made the system susceptible to manipulation. The integrity of the microchips in the SLU is suspect because very few from the ECI, government and directors on the board of public sector undertakings BEL and ECIL (with known links with the ruling party) know about their design and source. The EVM contains multiple labile (i.e. writable) memories that records each vote as it is cast. The presence of labile memory implies that those values can be manipulated if access is available in any manner, externally. Some manipulations may not leave any trace and will not be visible in a forensic investigation. SLUs are not subject to any security protocol. The SLU is not, after or before election, stored in the strong-room. In other words here is another method for ensuring results can be manipulated. In July 2023, Sabyasachi Das of Ashoka University published a research paper called 'Democratic Backsliding in the World's Largest Democracy' which outlined two manipulations in detail that were carried out in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. 1) Registration manipulation, which is the padding of the electoral roll. By adding and deleting voters strategically. By manufacturing fake voters, most, if not all, of whom vote for the BJP. 2) Turnout manipulation, which is the addition of voter tallies after the polls have closed-most, if not all, of whom vote for the BJP Examples were given, claims supported. Soon thereafter Ashoka University was raided and given a strict warning by the government. Das was forced to quit. Linking Aadhaar with the Voter ID could also facilitate 'registration manipulation' causing mass disenfranchisement. This linkage could well be the cause for the current controversy concerning duplicate EPIC numbers which has been raised by Bengal's Trinamool Congress and admitted by the ECI. Finally, there is always the possibility of toppling the government already formed by buying out the MLA or MP. Over the period 2015 to 2024 as many as 10 state governments led by opposition parties were toppled by the ruling party government at the Union. This is done by simply buying the MLAs of the state ruling party, with the goal of making them support the party with the largest financial ability to buy MLAs. The defence of the ruling party is that this method has historically been adopted for a long time. However, the moot question here is: the use of the Enforcement Directorate, CBI and state police has been well demonstrated over the last decade. When the opposition complains about post-2024 election losses in state elections, as in Haryana, Maharashtra or Delhi, the defence of the ruling party is that they lost in Haryana and Maharashtra, so the opposition complains. They don't complain about Jharkhand. What is forgotten by those defending this response is the following fact, which turns out to be of singular importance: Haryana and Maharashtra were ruled by BJP, so the opposition is alleging state government-enabled fraud. This was not so easily possible in Jharkhand as the government belonged to an opposition party. Santosh Mehrotra was professor of Economics at JNU. Jagdeep Chhokhar was an IIM professor and is the founder of the Association of Democratic Rights. The Wire is now on WhatsApp. Follow our channel for sharp analysis and opinions on the latest developments. Politics 'Prove it': Rahul Gandhi Doubles Down on Rigging Allegations After ECI's Unsigned Rebuttal View More
New Indian Express
an hour ago
- New Indian Express
Nexus between bureaucrats and politicians root cause of unrest in society: Former IGP Gopal Hosur
At the heart of any sustainable solution is good governance — one that is inclusive, transparent, just and not vindictive. Governance must rise above political expediency and resist exploiting social divisions for short-term gains. Instead, it should invest in long-term social cohesion, said former IGP Gopal B Hosur. In an interaction with TNIE, he talked about coastal Karnataka, his experience working there, reasons for communal clashes and solutions too. He highlighted that governments have a tendency to withdraw cases, especially related to communal violence, saying it should not be done and the courts should decide these cases. You were posted in coastal Karnataka. What was your experience? Coastal Karnataka is unlike any other region in its geography, culture and especially its communal dynamics. When I was posted as Inspector General of Police for the Western Range nearly 15–16 years ago, I had never worked in the area before, but was aware of the tensions there. The region was tense with communal clashes, attacks and stabbings. Despite its tensions, coastal Karnataka amazed me. It's one of the most vibrant and organised regions — Hindus, Muslims and Christians alike. Every festival or event is run better than most government functions — be it a temple fair, mosque celebration or church gathering. The people are highly enterprising and tech-savvy. However, there are deep divides, especially after the Babri Masjid incident, but the region also has immense potential — socially, economically and culturally. Do you think the interference of politics in bureaucracy is the main cause of communal disharmony? Has it increased over the years? If politics enters the administration system, it will lead to 'communal politics' which propagates violence. All parties are equally culpable. I place more blame on the bureaucracy than on the political establishment. Why don't even a few bureaucrats come together and say, 'We will uphold the rule of law'?
