Over the years, the nation has come to expect the most bizarre and dangerous statements from the hyper-nationalist Rashtriya Swayam Sewak Sangh and its leadership - ranging from demands for eradicating neighboring countries to a sustained diatribe against Muslim and Christian religious minorities who are citizens of India. RSS views on the status of women, their contempt for the Constitution of India and their infinite capacity to attempt to overwhelm Indian plurality and the identity of Tribals, ethnic and linguistic minorities have alarmed Civil society for undermining the democratic norms that sustain the unity and integrity of India.
But the septuagenarian and bachelor RSS chief Kupahalli Sudershan’s call that Hindu couples produce more than three children - indeed advocating 11 or a dozen sons per family - to sustain their religious majority in India goes beyond the bizarre and the irrational. It is a racist statement soiled by foul religious bigotry and harks back to an era of eugenics and population manipulations that died out with the end of Hitler’s “pure race” concepts. Similar ethnic logic in certain pockets in Europe and Africa led to genocidal cleansing within living memory.`
As callous and terrible is the implied super-patriarchal attitude Mr. Sudershan and the RSS have of the Indian woman - victim of child rape in the guise of traditional marriage, and now presented as a political womb at the service of a maniacal ideology and its demonic hatred towards other communities. The Indian woman is now being asked to produce enough children to correct fancied and imagined imbalances in the population of one religion. The poor woman would be dead long before she achieves the target set for her by Mr. Sudershan.
The RSS demographic thesis has been given the veneer of academic exactitude by the highly suspect work of another frontal organization, the Chennai based Centre for Policy Studies. This work was brought out soon after the 2001 Census with a foreword by the then Deputy Prime minister Lal Krishan Advani. The entire purpose of the voluminous tome, bought by many government departments at the then BJP-led government’s insistence, was to raise a bogey of a Muslim population explosion, and fears of terrorism in a so called Christian-majority North east.
The statistical data presented was even then exposed to be false extrapolation. The arguments were against the scientific and official data produced by the People of India Project of the Government under the directorship of the redoubtable scholar Dr K S Singh. That series had in fact even established that polygamy is more common in several non-Muslim groups than in Muslim groups, which is the standard falsehood and pet RSS grouse.
On Christians, the 2001 census once again established that the percentage of the Christian population in India is steadily going down because of the norm of one or two children per family, even among the poor and in rural areas. The myth of a Christian conspiracy in the northeast based on population and conversion was also conclusively exposed to be false, highly motivated and mischievous and meant entirely to defame an entire community.
It is for senior BJP leaders such as Mr. LK Advani, former Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and the women leaders of the group to answer Mr. Sudershan.
All India Catholic Union
Founded 1919, Registered under Societies Registration Act 1860,
Representing the Catholic Laity of India through 120 diocesan, units nation-wide
Administrative Office: DTC Building 3rd Floor, EDC Complex, Patto, Panaji, Goa-403001 India
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Secretary General: Mr. Elias Vas
Treasurer: Mr. Eugene Gonsalves