Shah-Modi to Unleash Spectre of 'Unnatural' Demographic Change; Quad FMs Meet to Tread Water; However Kashmiris May Excel, They Remain Outliers
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Snapshot of the day
May 26, 2026
Siddharth Varadarajan
Following up on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Independence Day promise of a future “high-powered demographic mission” to deal with a nebulous “conspiracy” to change India’s demography through “infiltration”, the government today announced the composition and mandate of the panel. To be headed by former Supreme Court Justice P.P. Naolekar, instead of a demographer of repute, the committee is to examine “demographic changes occurring across India due to illegal immigration and other unnatural causes” (including what the Union home ministry calls “orchestrated migration”) and look at “abnormal population shifts at the levels of religious and social communities”.
The spectre of ‘unnatural demographic change’ – driven by Muslims, of course – is a longtime obsession of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the BJP frequently invokes it in poll-bound states. However, whenever questions have arisen in parliament about the scale or extent of “illegal immigration” into India, the government has said that it has no official estimate.
One of the members of the committee is the Census Commissioner of India, whose main preoccupation right now ought to be the proper conduct of India’s delayed decennial census. His presence raises a serious conflict of interest. Census work requires counting the population and measuring objective demographic change – rather than getting caught in the subjective weeds of what is “unnatural”.
Another member of this panel is Shamika Ravi, a member of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister, who during the 2024 general elections – which the BJP and Modi himself contested with all communal cylinders firing – had co-authored a dubious paper pointing to an increase in the Muslim share of India’s population between 1950 and 2015 and a decrease in that of Hindus. It also argued that the share of minorities represented “a cumulative outcome measure of their well-being”. The Population Foundation of India had said at the time that the paper’s highlighting the former figures was alarmist given that the growth rate among Muslims had declined between 1981 and 2011, in fact more steeply than that of Hindus.
‘Demographic change’ has also been raised by the BJP as a reason behind the contentious special intensive revision of voter rolls but it is still not known how many undocumented immigrants the exercise discovered, in Bihar or Bengal or elsewhere.
Fun fact: Nowhere is the term ‘Unnatural Demographic Change’ defined. One unusual demographic change the new committee will almost certainly not investigate is the actual death toll from the two waves of Covid. The official count of 530,000 deaths is much lower than the 3.8 million to 4.7 million excess deaths that independent studies by Banaji et al. and the WHO have estimated.
The Quad met today at the foreign ministers level but the latter were able to do little more than tread water since it is clear there is no buy in at the level of the US president and hence no clarity about whether and when the group
