By Dev Kar
Invocation of Muslim population growth has been a recurring feature of Indian electoral politics. In September 2002, ahead of that year’s Gujarat assembly elections, Narendra Modi, then the state’s caretaker chief minister, used the phrase “hum paanch, hamare pachees” (we are five, ours are twenty-five) in reference to Muslim family size, a remark widely reported at the time and later. Since then, similar themes have surfaced periodically.
In 2015, a BJP MP implored Hindu women to bear more children while in 2024, a Union minister’s campaign attributed the rising share of the Muslim population to “appeasement.” Most recently, in the run-up to the April 2026 West Bengal assembly elections, the BJP attributed the growth of the state’s Muslim population to sustained cross-border infiltration from Bangladesh (the so-called ghuspaithiyas). It won the elections by a landslide.
What is the factual basis underlying this narrative? It undoubtedly works as politics, but the question is whether it works as demography. Can Muslim population growth, whether from natural increase or from illegal immigration, invert the religious composition of a country in which Hindus form the overwhelming majority?
The decennial census, conducted in its post-independence series since 1951, with the most recent religion data from 2011, allows the question to be answered based on data and mathematics rather than assertion.
What the census counts
A threshold point matters for everything that follows: The Indian census does not enumerate citizens; it enumerates people. Conducted under the Census Act, 1948, it counts every “usual resident” of India, defined as a person who has lived in a locality for six months or more or intends to, irrespective of nationality or legal status. Thus, a Bangladeshi national who crossed the border without documents and settled in Murshidabad is, for census purposes, as countable as anyone else.
This cuts against the instinct to dismiss census data as blind to illegal immigration. On the contrary, precisely because the census counts everyone present, any mass settlement of foreign migrants would leave a footprint in the total population, its religious composition, and above all, in the relative growth rates of the regions where migrants settle. The census cannot tell us who is a citizen, but it can tell us whether the people are there.
This story was originally published in thewire.in. Read the full story here.