The right lessons

In knee-jerk fashion, the Bharatiya Janata Party has latched on to the latest census data on the religion-based composition of India's population to buttress its anti-Muslim campaign.

No less a personage than the BJP president, Venkaiah Naidu, has described the sharp rise in the growth of the Muslim population during the nineties as a "dangerous trend" and a cause for concern to all those who want to preserve India's unity and integrity! Clearly, the advice of the chairman of the National Commission for Minorities, S. Tarlochan Singh, that the census data on religion are not meant for political slogans has not cut much ice.

The Census Commissioner has needlessly complicated the matter by not publicising the fact that the 2001 data include the Muslim-majority state of Jammu and Kashmir, which had been excluded in the 1991 census on account of the disturbed conditions there.

The growth of the Muslim population has therefore been exaggerated by the artificially low base. On a like-to-like comparison, the growth in India's Muslim population declines to 29 per cent in the nineties from 34.5 per cent during the previous decade.

This is of course much too high, and certainly higher than the national average. But the trend is in the right direction and should therefore be welcomed.

Equally, the rate of growth of the Hindu population may have been under-stated somewhat because more Jains have declared themselves as such, whereas in the past many of them were categorised as Hindus.

This is the first time that the census data on religion has been cross-classified by socio-economic variables like work participation, literacy and child sex ratio.

Thus, the latest data reveal that the Jains, Christians, Buddhists and Sikhs have notched up a literacy rate well above the all-India figure of 64.8 per cent. And as expected, the Muslims have shown a literacy rate of only 59.1 per cent, six percentage points below that of the Hindus.

The child sex ratio (the number of female children per 1000) is the most adverse in case of Sikhs at 786, while it is the most favourable for Christians at 942.

Interestingly, the Muslims have recorded the best child sex ratio at 950, compared to the all-India average of 927. Clearly, the girl child's condition remains poor, and female infanticide may be more prevalent than most people would like to believe.

The even more illuminating finding is the one pertaining to the work participation rate, captured in the census data as a percentage of workers to the total population.

Muslims have recorded the lowest work participation rate at 31 per cent. The Sikhs are slightly better at 37.7 per cent, but Hindus have clocked a work participation rate of a little over 40 per cent, a shade above the all-India rate of 39.1 per cent.

These findings confirm widely held notions of how Muslims in particular have lost out in the job market, and how population growth rates are inversely proportionate to the increase in literacy.