A shocker from Assam

It is no less than shocking that senior Assam minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, the BJP’s blue-eyed boy who the party has entrusted with the key responsibility of roping in all northeastern states into its fold, should propose a two-child norm for Assam, effective April 2018, without giving any evidence of serious reflection. The draft policy, announced last April, is to be introduced in the next Assembly session with some changes, Mr Sarma told journalists on Sunday. In this scheme of things, people with more than two children will not be eligible for government jobs or any kind of government service. Nor will they be eligible to become members of panchayats and civic bodies.

This is a draconian, semi-fascist, approach to governance, reminiscent of China’s erstwhile one-child norm that Beijing was forced to abandon as the system began to produce a ballooning of the category of senior citizens, and is likely to face legal challenges on several counts.

While it is next to impossible to defend such an approach in any democracy, the senior minister has argued that Assam faces a “population explosion” to justify this kind of thinking. But this is a patently false claim. According to the 2011 census, Assam ranks 14th among states and Union territories on the country’s population table. Even on the count of population density, it is behind seven states. By no means do such characteristics suggest a “population explosion”.

Forced methods to check population, like the late Sanjay Gandhi’s sterilisation programme, is in line with thought processes that compels people about what to wear, eat, view or worship.