Muslim misinformation fuels Islamophobia in India

AMIT Upadhyay repeats online misinformation as he claims to know why India’s population is growing: he says his Muslim neighbours are having too many babies, so Hindu women have a responsibility to bear more of their own.

A pharmacist by trade, Upadhyay is one of many social media influencers from India’s majority faith to have cultivated large audiences by spreading false demographic data to claim the country is being refashioned into an Islamic state.

For them, last month’s announcement that India had overtaken China to become the world’s most populous nation was not a cause for celebration, but a call to action.

“I tell all my Hindu customers to produce more children, to counter Muslims,” Upadhyay, who in his spare time curates a popular Facebook page from his home in Uttar Pradesh state, told AFP.

“Or else they will become a threat and eventually wipe out the Hindu religion from India.”

Upadhyay regularly publishes widely shared Islamophobic posts to his nearly 40,000 followers.

One post in April warned of an alleged plot by Muslims to “multiply their population to take control of India”.

India is home to 1.4 billion people, including around 210 million Muslims, but birthrates have declined across the board over recent decades in tandem with global trends.

The country’s last National Family Health Survey in 2021 showed an overall fertility rate of 2.0 children per woman, rising marginally to 2.3 for Muslim women.

A forecast issued the same year from the Pew Research Center said that India’s Muslim community would grow to 311 million by 2050.