The prime minister’s peddling anti-Muslim prejudice is not new. But his unapologetic virulence is a reflection that bigotry resonates with the BJP support base.

By Harsh Mander

Holocaust survivor Abe Foxman, from Poland, declared, “The crematoria, gas chambers in Auschwitz and elsewhere did not begin with bricks, they began with words…evil words, hateful words, antisemitic words, words of prejudice. And they were permitted to proceed to violence because of the absence of words.”

Both the words – and the absence of words – of Prime Minister Narendra Modi through 10 years of his leadership of what is now the world’s most populous country are salient to understand India’s swift descent into a land increasingly hostile and fearful for India’s largest religious minority, its 200 million Muslim citizens.

The dust raised by the succession of bellicose hate speeches by Modi while on the campaign trail of the midsummer Indian national elections of 2024 has not settled. It is not likely to, not for a long time.

In his speeches while seeking votes that would enable him to rule India for another five years, Modi stigmatised Muslims in India as a people who deliberately breed large families, are infiltrators and wage a “vote jihad”.

The Hindutva propaganda machine routinely accuses Muslims of conspiring in many jihads – love jihad, land jihad, corona jihad, mazaar jihad, even “thook” (or spit) jihad – but vote jihad is a new invention. To vote for his party is a signal of loyalty to the Hindu religion and to the Indian nation. To vote for the political opposition is a threat to both, a sinister jihad.

Modi otherwise fell back on standard tropes from the Hindutva stable to pillory Muslims with claims that they are conspiring to swell their numbers in Hindu-majority India, both by producing large families and by “infiltrating” as illegal immigrants from Muslim-majority countries in the neighbourhood like Bangladesh. Through these stratagems they eventually aspire to outnumber the Hindu majority in the country.

Evidence, of course roundly, contradicts these claims. Official data reveals very small numbers of illegal immigrants into India. There is nothing either conspiratorial or culturally specific about this empirical reality of larger average family sizes among Muslims. After all, the fertility rate of India’s only Muslim majority erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir is 1.4, well below the national average of 2. Muslims in Tamil Nadu have smaller families on average that Hindus in Bihar.

Several demographic studies have established that the reproductive behaviour of both Hindus and Muslims are similar for those with similar economic and educational levels. Since impoverishment and educational deprivation is higher on an average among Muslims as compared to Hindus, they do tend to have larger families.

This story was originally published in scroll.in. Read the full story here.