WMC Women Under Siege

Proposed Islamophobic Two-Child Policy Threatens to Harm Women of All Faiths in India

Lucknow, India — On July 11, the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, the most populous state in India, unveiled a proposed law to slow population growth in the state through a two-child policy.

With over 240 million residents, Uttar Pradesh (UP) has a population density of more than double the national average. But the draft Uttar Pradesh Population (Control, Stabilization and Welfare) Bill, 2021, which proposes a system of incentives and disincentives for families to have no more than two children, has been criticized by population and public health experts as not only unnecessary but discriminatory—particularly, against the state’s Muslim minority.

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Local residents of Kanpur in Uttar Pradesh, India, on March 12, 2013. (Graham Crouch / World Bank via Creative Commons)

Islamophobia embedded in population policies

Narratives surrounding population control policies have been communalized in India for years, with several cases of ministers from the ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) engaging in loose talk about the Muslim population rising at an alarming rate. 2011 Census data initially provoked speculation that the Muslim population was increasing at a higher rate than previously thought — and the bogey of “Hindu khatre mein hai” (“Hindus are in danger”) was born.

In 2015, the former president of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, considered a sister-organization to the BJP, demanded family planning for Muslims, warning that Muslims were committing “demographic aggression” with their high fertility. In 2018, one parliamentarian from UP even claimed that terrorism and rape crimes were on the rise due to “the rising Muslim population.”

And in June this year, Himanta Biswa Sarmam, the chief minister of the state of Assam, announced a similar two-child policy, claiming that controlling the population growth among the state’s Muslim minority was “the only way to eradicate poverty and illiteracy” among that group.

There are currently eight Indian states with an active two-child policy, and elected representatives of the BJP — from the states of Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, and Uttarakhand— have advocated for implementing a similar policy in their respective states.

But reality betrays the bias behind these communal statements.

In UP, from 1998 to 1999, the total fertility rate (TFR, or the average number of children that women of reproductive age group have had in their lifetime) was 3.87 for Hindus and 4.76 for Muslims. In 2015 to 2016, the TFR decreased to 2.67 for Hindus and 3.1 for Muslims, indicating that, while Muslims in UP have typically had more children, their TFR has declined at a higher rate than Hindus — without the help of population control measures.

In fact, most states have already reached “replacement fertility levels” — or, the fertility rate at which a population completely replaces itself from generation to generation — according to the latest National Family Health Survey, 2019-20 (NFHS-5) data. Only Bihar, Manipur, and Meghalaya states have yet to achieve a TFR of 2.1 or less; UP is among the states where NFHS-5 data has yet to be provided.

But when the data is available, Saswata Ghosh, an associate professor of population studies at the Institute of Development Studies Kolkata (IDSK), says that we will notice that the fertility rates of both Hindus and Muslims have declined even further — again, without population control measures.

Ghosh goes on to point out that the fertility rate for Hindus is actually greater than Muslims in 22 of 75 UP districts. According to his research, UP will achieve TFR 2 — or an average of two children per family — by 2025 or 2026, “so implementing a hasty population policy now is completely unwarranted,” he said.

India isn’t the only country that has hid behind an imagined threat of Muslim takeover: The idea of Muslims outnumbering the “native” population of the country is employed in China, too, where draconian measures have been undertaken since 2014 to slash birth rates among Uighur Muslims in China’s Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR). A 2017 paper by the Institute of Sociology at the Xinjiang Academy of Social Sciences even suggested that a growing Muslim population was a breeding ground for poverty and extremism, which could “heighten political risk,” The Associated Press reported.

Forced pregnancy checks, intrauterine devices (IUDs), sterilization, and even abortions are among the population-control methods deployed against Uighur Muslims in China. Even having too many children has been cause for sending Uighurs to internment camps. The Han majority, on the other hand, have been encouraged to have more children, suggesting that the birth control initiative is part of a larger state-sponsored drive to assimilate and convert Uighurs.

A dark first

In 1952, India became the first country in the world to make family planning a state-sponsored program, utilizing intrauterine devices and sterilizations for controlling population growth in the decades that followed.

Coercive male sterilizations were the final objective of Sanjay Gandhi’s Five-Point Programme during the 1975 “Emergency,” a “gruesome campaign” to sterilize poor males when civil freedoms were suspended. Police reportedly cordoned off villages and dragged the men to surgery by the collars in states like UP and Bihar. According to science writer Mara Hvistendahl, some 6.2 million Indian men were sterilized in a year, “15 times the number of people sterilized by the Nazis.”

Coercive sterilizations by the state have long been weaponized against people from marginalized communities as well. Many of the recruitment strategies used to encourage women to have tubal ligations were developed during the early male sterilization campaigns. Women from ethnic and racial minorities, women with disabilities, HIV-positive women, and poor women have all been targeted by such population-control policies.

There is still a strong preference for long-term birth control methods in India, but according to government figures, women make up 93 percent of all sterilization patients today.

Women bear the burden

It is women who are ultimately responsible for keeping India’s population balanced.

“Population control policies have always been skewed towards birth limitation rather than planning,” says Ghosh. “In a patriarchal and casteist society, the decision maker for sterilization or abortion is the husband, but the burden is on women.”

According to the NFHS 2015-2016 report, India’s total wanted fertility rate (TWFR), or the average number of children if all unwanted births were avoided, was 1.8. This suggests that women on average do not want more than two children. But their desire is often hampered by a lack of accessibility to contraceptive measures and safe abortion services.

A 2005 study conducted in five states that had already implemented a two-child policy (which was largely used during local elections) pointed to an increase in prenatal sex determination and unsafe abortions, with men divorcing their wives to be eligible to run for office, and families giving up children for adoption to avoid election disqualification. Then, as now, two-child policies across the country included political disincentives for having more than two children, such as barring parents from applying for government jobs, seeking promotions in existing government positions, applying for government subsidies, benefiting from welfare schemes, and running in local elections. UP’s new draft legislation includes the same disincentives.

Deepika Hungenahally, a litigation associate at the Center for Law and Policy Research in Karnataka state, says that when looking into the cultural and social dynamics of Indian society, it is the woman who will bear the physical and emotional burden, undergoing sterilization or abortion.

“Voluntary sterilization is very restrictive as a concept,” says Hungenahally, who specializes in gender and child rights. “It is completely giving up other facilities that are available, such as contraceptive measures. Are surgical procedures the only way to determine population control?”

Given India’s skewed sex ratio, cases of female feticide and sex-selective abortions of girl children will likely rise as well, since couples will want to abide by government norms as well as keep their preference for male children intact.

Section 15 of UP’s proposed law also says that the disincentives will not apply if the couple loses one of their children from their three children or if one of the first two children has a disability — an insinuation that, Muralidharan Viswanath, secretary of the National Platform for the Rights of Disabled, finds overtly ableist.

“The law is institutionalizing the mindset that the disabled child is inferior to a non-disabled child and is as good as dead,” she said.

Political motives

The national population policy that the Indian government implemented in 2000 has led to 24 states achieving the replacement-level fertility rate of 2.1. The remaining states, including UP, will likely reach that rate by 2025, Ghosh predicts.

Ultimately, says Ghosh, UP’s new proposed law “is an eyewash against more pressing issues of the state.”

“The whole issue is about consolidating Hindu votes in the Legislative Assembly Elections 2022 in UP, especially since the current Hindu nationalist government miserably failed in providing adequate health facilities during the second wave of COVID-19.”

In the first two weeks of May this year, the situation in UP alone following the second wave of the pandemic was a ready example of a “dystopian nightmare.”

Punitive measures such as the two-child policy have a basic and pragmatic flaw: they are based on a fundamental misinterpretation of the relationship between population growth and economic growth. By investing in social welfare programs that promote family planning — such as promoting girls’ education, making contraception more widely available, limiting child marriages, and focusing on women’s health and development — rather than regulating fertility, states have proven able to achieve demographic transition. But what the UP government has chosen to do instead is to fall back on time-tested Islamophobic fearmongering at a critical time in the election cycle. And women of all faiths will pay the price for it.

Using Muslims as a scapegoat isn’t the solution — much less to a problem that doesn’t exist.



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