Media and census data: a response

BY chekutty| IN Opinion | 01/10/2004
Far from being the villain, within 24 hours the national media thoroughly exposed the hoax and forced these "experts" to withdraw their own analysis.
 

N.P. Chekkutty 

Ammu Joseph chides the media for its lack of care in reporting  issues of live national concern like the comparative religious data brought out by the recent national census 2001 which provoked a nation wide controversy on the "sudden and phenomenal growth of the Muslim population", which however turned out to be a myth within just 24 hours. She tells us in the media  profession to be more vigilant, more analytical and also to take advice from the experts in case of doubt. 

Very good advice indeed and timely too, but as a media practitioner based in Delhi who had to report on these developments, I personally feel she has chosen the wrong subject to lecture media on how to proceed with its own work. The fact is, it was those "experts" in the august organization called the Registrar General and Census Commissioner,(under the Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India, which has its origins way back in the 1860s when the British Administration decided to launch the decennial  census operations in the country which brought out its first report in 1872) who were making a great attempt to mislead the nation. And the media, which I am sure is the villain of the piece in many other national tragedies, was the real hero here as within 24 hours the national media thoroughly exposed the hoax and forced these "experts" to withdraw their own analysis prepared after three years of careful study,  analysis, etc, all at the nation’s expense.  

But Ammu Joseph complains that the media published the faulty analysis on the "sudden spurt in the Muslim population" in the last decade without even cross-checking the information and then the next day proceeded to demolish its own case, as if the media has been playing a game here. I beg to disagree, madam, because the fact is that the information provided by the Census Commissioner at the press conference called at his office  on the evening of sixth September 2004 and the detailed analysis prepared and distributed by the Census Commissioner’s office and the official press release put out by the Government of India’s own Press Information Bureau never contained any hint of how the data was being manipulated. Luckily, some of the journalists  who thought it fit to purchase the original volume titled The First Report on Religious Data, priced Rs. 250,  for their own reference came upon the most crucial information buried as a footnote on page xxvii, which said: No census conducted in Assam in 1981 and in Jammu& Kashmir in 1991. 

That is how the next day some of the national dailies like Times of India, The Hindustan  Times and The Indian Express carried their stories on how the Census Commissioner bungled in his analysis of the data on Muslim population and how the nation was being taken for a ride over this issue by the Sangh Parivar leaders like BJP president Venkiah Naidu and RSS spokesman Ram Madhav who had already jumped to their conclusion that the nation was "sitting on a demographic  time bomb" as the Muslim population had been registering skyrocketing growth levels. 

Now I am not suggesting that Mr. Jayant Kumar Banthia, the Census Commissioner who was chosen for this high office during the period of the previous National Democratic Alliance Government, with Mr. Lal Krishna Advani presiding over the Home Ministry, was deliberately falsifying the data. It is a matter now under investigation of the Home Ministry and hopefully we will come to know about its outcome when the Government comes to a conclusion. But the sequence of events at the press conference and later developments make it amply clear that these experts were not as innocent as they claimed later on, as to the real implications of the analysis they were trying to sell. 

Let me submit the point out that there was indeed an evident attempt to bury this crucial information that the apparent increase in Muslim population growth rate in the  period from 1991 to 2001 was basically as a result of the fact that census operations could not be conducted in the State of Jammu&Kashmir, which has  67 per cent of Muslims and only 29.6 per cent of Hindus. This information is provided only as a footnote to the data which forms part of voluminous report. However, the decadal increase in Hindu and Muslim population is highlighted in the analysis as follows:In the section ‘Brief Analysis’, at page xvii of the original report, the Census Commissioner says: "The growth rate of Hindu population has come down from 25.1 per cent  in 1981-91 to 20.4 per cent in 1991-2001." Then further down the same page, it declares: "Among the six major religious communities, the decadal growth of the Muslims is the highest (36.0 per cent) at the 2001 census." 

What is to be noted here is that when making this point on Muslim growth rate,  it is imperative on the part of the Census Commissioner to refer to the footnote, which comes 13 pages further down which demystifies this phenomenal Muslim growth rate. 

This is a very strange omission indeed. Because anyone familiar with academic and official reports know that they are meticulously footnoted, and each and every bit of information is properly annotated. But somehow, this Census Commissioner did not find it necessary to qualify his statement. Perhaps he is not aware of the Muslim population time-bomb theory which has been doing rounds in this country at least from the 1890s when U N Mukherjee wrote his famous article, The Dying Hindus, in a Calcutta journal, and which has been ,off and on,  repeated ad nauseam by those in the Sangh Parivar? Not likely, because he is a well known expert and indeed a great scholar. 

Now let me address the question raised by Ammu Joseph in her article about how the media failed to question this crucial assertion made by the census report knowing fully well how pregnant it was with political meanings. Who said  the media did not question this point? Indeed there were questions from a number of journalists who attended the press conference but what they have received were a number of explanations which  included points like the delinking of many smaller religions like the Jains and others from the Hindu list and how the tribals and others who were earlier catgorized as part of Hindu fold became a separate category thus bringing down the Hindu growth rate. 

The details about the way religion data were collected and entered in the official forms, described by the Census Commissioner in his report, make it clear that these exercises did have an impact on the growth figures of all communities. For example, the Jain population which was only 4.6 per cent as per 1981 -91 census jumped to 26.0 per cent in 2001 which is evidently a result of making separate entries for Jains instead of clubbing them in the Hindu fold as has been the practise in the past. But even then the learned experts at the Census Commissioners office did not think it fit to tell the journalists about the Jammu&Kashmir omission. But two days later they withdrew their own analysis and came out with a fresh one which said the Muslim growth was falling, and it was falling much faster than that of the Hindus. 

And interestingly, the Census Commissioner himself speaks in his introduction of how some of his colleagues advised him not to go for this kind of an exercise warning about the pitfalls. The Census Department used to collect the religious data from the first census onwards, but kept them confidential. He knew it was not a simple and straight road, but there could be pitfalls. Still he failed to warn the media. 

Now, I expected the commentators to commend the media for what it did in this case, demolishing a communal campaign and upholding the secular national traditions, bringing out the truth within 24 hours of the official efforts to misrepresent the nation’s demographic character. But Ammu Joseph seems to miss her point when she thinks media did not do its homework.

 (N P Chekkutty is a journalist based in Delhi.)

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