Union Home Minister Amit Shah on Friday said that the rise in India’s Muslim population was not due to fertility rates but because of “large-scale infiltration”.
Addressing a lecture on “Infiltration, Demographic Change and Democracy”, organised by Dainik Jagran, Shah said that the Muslim population in the country had “increased at a rate of 24.6%, while the Hindu population had decreased by 4.5%”.
“This decline is not due to the fertility rate but rather due to infiltration,” the Bharatiya Janata Party leader said. “When India was partitioned, Pakistan was formed on both sides based on religion, which later split into Bangladesh and Pakistan… infiltration from both sides has led to such a significant change in the population.”
Shah said the disparity in population growth across religions observed in the census from 1951 to 2011 was primarily due to “infiltration”.
He added that his party had “adopted the three principles of detect, delete and deport” since the 1950s.
The BJP was formed in 1980, though it traces its roots to the Bharatiya Jana Sangh set up in 1951.
The home minister said that the BJP government will “identify infiltrators, make every effort to ensure their names are removed from the voter list, and subsequently work to deport them to their countries”.
The statement came against the backdrop of a crackdown in several BJP-ruled states, where since May, thousands of Bengali-speaking migrant workers have been rounded up and asked to prove that they are Indian citizens and not undocumented immigrants.
In several cases, workers have been declared foreigners within days and forced into Bangladesh, despite being Indian citizens.
During his Independence Day speech, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had announced the formation of a “high-powered demography mission” to deal with “infiltrators” who, he claimed, were snatching away the livelihoods of the country’s youth.
Modi had said at the time that such “illegals” would be dealt with in a “planned and determined manner within a fixed timeframe”.
Shah on voter roll revision
The home minister also defended the special intensive revision of electoral rolls that took place in Bihar ahead of the Assembly elections in November, saying that “when infiltrators are included in our voter list, they become participants in the country’s political decision-making process”.
“Conducting the [special intensive revision] is the responsibility of the Election Commission,” Shah said. “The Constitution entrusts the Election Commission with the responsibility of conducting free and fair elections, which is only possible when the voter list is prepared in accordance with the definition of a voter.”
He added that “some political parties see not a threat to the country in infiltrators but rather a vote bank”.
The revision of the electoral rolls in Bihar was announced by the Election Commission on June 24.
As part of the exercise, persons whose names were not on the 2003 voter list needed to submit proof of eligibility to vote.
Concerns were raised that the process could risk disenfranchising many voters, and several petitions were filed in the Supreme Court challenging it. In September, the court directed the Election Commission to accept Aadhaar cards as a valid identity proof for the drive.
The Aadhaar card was not among the 11 documents that the poll panel had said could be submitted as proof of citizenship. Several petitioners had objected to the exclusion of Aadhaar, the most widely held ID, from the list of permissible documents, calling it “absurd”.
The court had earlier said that the entire exercise could be set aside if it was found to be illegal.
The Election Commission has defended the voter roll revision as a clean-up exercise to remove names of the deceased, duplicate entries and undocumented migrants ahead of the elections. The poll body has also said that after Bihar, the special intensive revision will be carried out across the country. Assembly elections in Assam, Kerala, Puducherry, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal are due in 2026.
A Scroll analysis of the data published by the Election Commission on August 1 showed that women made up 55% of voters who were excluded from Bihar’s draft voter list after the revision.
It also showed that five of the state’s 10 districts with the largest share of Muslim population had the highest number of excluded voters.
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