India Tomorrow
NEW DELHI—The Centre for Studies of Plural Societies (CSPS) organised a book discussion on ‘Population Myth: Islam, Family Planning and Politics in India’ authored by former Chief Election Commissioner Dr. S.Y. Quraishi.
The key participants were Ambassador K.P Fabian, Prof. Neshat Quaiser, Prof. Arvinder Ansari, Dr Nazima Parveen, Dr. Omair Anas and Dr. Javed Iqbal Wani. The session was moderated by Dr. Azeemah Saleem.
Highlighting the decades old issue of Muslim stereotype and political propaganda of blaming Muslims for having ulterior motives of disbalancing the demography, Dr. Quraishi began the discussion by explaining his purpose for undertaking such a project.
He said his project aimed at countering certain myths being perpetuated about the Muslim community having aversion to Family Planning. He took on about five myths one-by-one, explaining the rationality behind their perpetuation, and countered each one of them with facts and data obtained from government reports on Indian demography and national-level surveys like National Family Health Survey (NFHS) and Census etc.
Dr. Quraishi argued that the fear created by the right-wing leaders about the organised conspiracy by Muslims to overtake the Hindu population and capture the political power is absurd.
To substantiate his arguments, he referred to the Mathematical Model on ‘Population growth comparison of Hindus and Muslims’ prepared by former Delhi University vice-chancellor Prof Dinesh Singh and Prof Ajay Kumar. The model demonstrates that Muslims can ‘NEVER’ overtake Hindus for the next 150 years.
Dr. Quraishi critically engaged with the concept of polygamy or polygamous marriages among Muslims which is frequently advanced by right-wing leaders to support their arguments that Islam is opposed to family planning.
He highlighted the Government of India study of 1975 that suggested that Muslims are the least polygamous community. Besides the asymmetrical sex ratio of India makes it statistically impossible for polygamy to become prevalent.
Furthermore, he explained that the idea of polygamy in Islamic Texts is conditional, that is, one has to do justice with all the wives. It must be mentioned here that the Quran restricted a man not to marry more than four wives though the pre-Islamic cultures in Arab and other parts of the world allowed men to keep dozens of wives which is prevalent in tribal communities in India even now. So, Islam came as a type of reformist movement against the practice of polygamy and successfully curbed it.
The core argument of the book that ‘Islam is not against family planning’, resonated throughout the discussion of Dr Quraishi. Referring to Islamic scriptures, he said that the family planning in Islamic teachings give priority to the health of women and children and assign men the responsibility to support their well-being. In fact, he advanced the claim that Islam is the pioneer of family planning.
Dr Quraishi highlighted that the fertility of all communities is contingent upon socio-economic factors like literacy, income, and delivery of family planning services with regional variations. Therefore, the regional analysis of the population problem would be more appropriate for the administration rather than the religious one.
He identified the administrative failure as the major reason for ineffective family planning in Indian societies and its negligence of seriously engaging and addressing the issues causing population boom in India.
The book discussion concluded with policy recommendations. He suggested that the administration should work towards developing the National Population Policy for targeted solutions. Governmental staffs should be trained to address the prenatal and postnatal needs of the people, a comprehensive resource book must be created for staffs and political leaders for sensitisation and the cross-learning of Ulama of India with Ulama of other countries can be encouraging.
The session was later opened for question and answer session. Ambassador Fabian complemented Dr Quraishi for his research work.
Dr. Parveen highlighted that Hindutva politics is not the only culprit responsible for perpetuating the Muslim population myth and stereotype. Secular political parties like the Congress has the historical role in the development of the myth as well. So does the patriarchal readings of Islamic texts by the Muslim clergy.
The session concluded with CSPS director Dr. Omair Anas highlighting the aim of CSPS which is to bring together all the political, social, and cultural perspectives of the country. To promote dialogue for the common interest among all the citizens of the country, to give opinions and to have opinions for the betterment of the country and to have differences and to respect differences which is very important to strengthen democracy. With this aim, CSPS has started a series of discussions on important topics between intellectuals and researchers.
