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Counter-Productive

That’s the myth of high fertility in Muslims

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Counter-Productive
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“You see this is because of low literacy. Most of the Muslims are illiterate. Every family has six, seven, eight, nine, 10 members.”

 

—Assam chief minister
Tarun Gogoi

Did a Congress CM just make a statement evocative of Narendra Modi’s “hum do, hamare do, woh paanch, unke pachchis”? Tarun Gogoi’s response during a television interview last week had the BJP claiming he was “a man after our heart”, “someone beating us at our game”. But demographers and sociologists were less amused. They have for long held socio-economic factors rather than one’s religion responsible for high fertility rates. So, contrary to Gogoi’s assertion of Muslims having “six, seven, eight...too many” children, in reality, the nominally higher Muslim fertility rate is declining faster than for other communities.

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Fertility rates are complicated and vary from region to region for the Muslim community. A low fertility rate reflects greater prosperity and education. In Kerala, for instance, the Muslim fertility rate is lower than the national average. Says P.M. Kulkarni, a professor at the Centre for the Study of Regional Development in JNU, “Fertility across the country has been declining; this is the case for Muslims too. The gap between the Hindu birth rate and of Muslims cannot be explained away by education alone. More complex reasons are at work here.”

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With the census figures for 2012 still awaited, the data currently being used for reference is the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) data for 2005-06. Going by its figures, the fertility rate for the country stands at 2.7, and that for Muslims at 3.1. However, one may well ask why Hindus should be lumped as a whole across caste, tribe and class, and that figure be put up for comparison against the one for Muslims.

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Experts also predict that the Muslim fertility rate will be the same as the national average in another seven to 10 years as the decline in fertility rate is greater in the minority community. The little higher rate currently is interpreted as a sign of backwardness. But one only has to look at the NFHS data to realise that fertility rates are always higher among the disadvantaged groups. So, it is 3.1 among STs, 2.9 for SCs and 2.8 in other backward classes.

In the current scenario, Muslim women are less likely to use contraceptives (46 per cent) as opposed to other religious communities (Hindus, 58 per cent) and 58-75 per cent among other religious communities. The reasons go beyond education and poverty. Mohan Rao of JNU’s Centre of Social Medicine and Community Health says they have been trying to understand the reasons for the declining fertility rate among Muslims. “In the absence of hard figures,” he says, “one can only speculate, but we can see the investment being made in education among Muslims despite factors like high unemployment and family-based employment stacked against them.”

And comments such as Gogoi’s or the regular potshots from the BJP, activists say, often work against women. The Union women and child development ministry recently endorsed the two-child norm by linking it with schemes for women and children. “This was a direct attack on women and their fertility,” says social activist Sejal Dand. The ministry’s diktat is now being fought in the courts. Meanwhile, one of the great half-truths about Muslims continues to breed more distortions, lies and politics.

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