Mohan Bhagwat, chief of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), is the latest to board the pronatalist bandwagon. Speaking at a Nagpur clan gathering, Bhagwat exhorted couples to have three children each.
He said India's population fertility rate is falling precariously. “Modern demographic studies indicate that when the population of a community falls below a fertility rate of 2.1, that society faces extinction. It does not need external threats to vanish; it disappears on its own,” Bhagwat was quoted as saying. He was referring to the population replacement rate, which is considered to be between 2.1 and 2.3.
The RSS chief is not the only one urging couples to show up for national service. Attending a mass wedding in October, where 31 couples tied the knot, Tamil Nadu chief minister M.K. Stalin spun an old Tamil blessing of prosperity, asking them to have ‘16' children.
Stalin And Naidu Bat For More Too
Stalin sees having children as a political act in service of the state. Over the years, the southern states of Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, and Andhra Pradesh have successfully controlled their population growth rates. It has helped them improve per capita incomes and state capacity to deliver services to their citizens. The population decline, however, affected their share of the national resources pie. The headcount of a state and its economic condition have the most weightage when the Finance Commission determines the formula for dividing central tax collections. That means states that controlled their population growth are seemingly punished for their efficiency.
Andhra Pradesh chief minister Chandrababu Naidu is going one step ahead and planning to incentivise those who produce more children and rap those who have less. “We have repealed the earlier law barring people with more than two children from contesting local body elections,” he was quoted as saying. “We will bring in a new law to make only those with more than two children eligible to contest.'' Naidu worries that Andhra will mirror Japan, China or Europe—more old people than young—by 2047.
Why Population Is Not An Advantage Anymore
Throughout human history, having a large cohort of young people was considered a strength as it meant more able hands to work and fight. Since much of human preoccupation during most of that history has centred around feeding and procreating, when English cleric-economist Robert Malthus made a dire theoretical connection in the late 18th century between demand, supply and babies born, it shook the academic firmament. But Malthus did not foresee the fall in fertility rates. He also failed to acknowledge the power of innovation and the impact of technological progress on productivity, potentially weakening his central argument that population growth will ensure that demand would far outstrip supply and consequently impoverishment.
There is still widespread poverty but not because of an increase in population. India and China have always been the most populous countries in the world. Yet, they were arguably more poor a few centuries ago than today, when they are bursting at the seams.
The requirement of humans to carry out tasks is perhaps the lowest in history and is rapidly falling as technological advance replaces humans with robots. Even advanced thinking, once considered the sole preserve of humans, is being threatened by artificial intelligence. Even those at the forefront of technological progress, however, are ardent pronatalists.
Tesla chief and SpaceX founder Elon Musk believes that declining birth rates is a civilizational concern. Musk, who himself has fathered a dozen children, says couples in developed countries should have at least three children. Don't worry about how they will feed and live, he suggests with no viable plan to offer. Government support is unlikely to be his choice as he has been entrusted by US President-elect Donald Trump to reduce government spending, including by eliminating as many humans from government as possible.
What Really Vexes RSS
Back home, what's vexing the RSS chief is quite something else. His concern is the rising share of the Muslim and Christian population. At the Akhil Bharatiya Pratinidhi Sabha or general body meeting in 2015, the RSS adopted a resolution seeking strict implementation of population control policies. “The share of population of religions of Bharatiya origin, which was 88%, has come down to 83.8%, while the Muslim population, which was 9.8%, has increased to 14.23% during the period 1951-2011.” It does not appreciate, however, that during the inter-census period of 2001-2011, the growth rate of the Muslim population was lower than that of Bihar's overall population growth rate. It also does not acknowledge that fertility rates across socio-religious cohorts in India will converge by 2030.
Calling for a “reformulation of the national population policy keeping in mind resource availability”, it said, “In Arunachal Pradesh, the people of religions of Bharatiya origin were 99.21% in 1951. It came down to 81.3% in 2001 and to 67% in 2011. In just one decade, the Christian population of Arunachal Pradesh has grown by almost 13 percentage points. Similarly, in the population of Manipur, the share of religions of Bharatiya origin, which was more than 80% in 1951, has come down to 50% in 2011.”
A Tricky Question For RSS
For the RSS, whose pracharaks ironically have to remain celibate as long as they are in the organisation, the tribulation is not new. It started after the 2001 socio-economic census which, for the first time, counted Indians according to their religion. It showed that Muslim population had grown at 36% in the previous decade, faster than Hindus who grew at 20.4% and Christians at 22.6%. The Bharatiya Janata Party published a booklet soon after the census data was out, lamenting, "History is witness to the fact that whenever majority has been pushed to a position of minority, that country had to face the curse of partition." Sangh Parivar ideologue S. Gurumurthy commented in the same booklet that “secularism cannot survive without a dominant Hindu majority”.
But why does Bhagwat's Sunday statement seem to suggest that the RSS has not-so-subtly shifted its stance from controlling the population of non-Hindus to increasing the population of Hindus? The trigger is likely the arrest of Hindu priests and attacks on Hindus in Bangladesh. The origin of the trepidation is in an RSS seminar held in 2003, where researchers from the Centre for Policy Studies presented from their study Religious Demography of India. The presenter, JK Bajaj, said data showed that Muslims and Christians could become the majority in the Indian region—encompassing Pakistan, Bangladesh and India—early in the second half of the 21st century.
Encouraging procreation in male-dominated, overcrowded societies tends to ignore the wishes and aspirations of the half of the population that actually bears children. In India, where women are vanishing from the workforce, upward professional mobility is restricted, and social obligations are often oppressive, alluding to bearing children as a national duty is grossly unfair.
It begs another question: Does the flip to pronatalism also mean the RSS will revisit its policy of celibacy for pracharaks?
(Dinesh Narayanan is a Delhi-based journalist and author of 'The RSS And The Making Of The Deep Nation'.)
Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author