The Hindu : National : Amar Singh questions census figures

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Thursday, Sep 09, 2004

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National

Amar Singh questions census figures

By Neena Vyas

NEW DELHI, SEPT. 8. The Samajwadi Party has questioned the "deliberate or accidental" release of "false" growth figures of religious communities by the Registrar-General and Census Commissioner of India and said those indulging in such mischief on "highly sensitive subjects" should be "held accountable."

The party general secretary, Amar Singh, who was speaking to the press here today referred to the "apparently false figure" of a 36 per cent growth in the Muslim population in the 1991-2001 decade.

While decrying the "communalisation" of the census data, he said: "We should be concerned with the increase in the total population of the country, not with the increase in the number of people belonging to a particular caste or community."

Mr. Singh said that after making a "false statement" that the Muslim population had grown by a whopping 36 per cent over the last decade, it had now come to light that this figure had been arrived at by ignoring the fact that in the 1991 census the Muslim majority State of Jammu and Kashmir had been skipped because of the prevailing militancy.

This time, since the Jammu and Kashmir population had been enumerated the figure for the total number of Muslims in the country had gone up, showing a 1.5 percentage points increase in the growth rate over the previous decade.

`Mischief '

Mr. Singh said he did not know whether the "mischief" done was deliberate or accidental, but in either case the person should be held accountable.

He indicated that on such "sensitive subjects" one could not allow people in responsible positions to create totally false impressions.

Apparently, if the religion data of the census 2001 was compared with the 1991 data minus Jammu and Kashmir, which did not figure in the 1991 census, the growth rate of Muslims worked out to about 30 per cent compared to a 34.5 per cent growth in the previous decade, a fall of 4.5 percentage points.

If the Jammu and Kashmir data gathered in the 2001 census was ignored (in order to compare the figures with the 1991 census) the assertion by the census report that Muslims had registered an increase of 1.3 percentage points in relation to their total strength in the population would also have to be corrected.

Mr. Singh strongly criticised those trying to use the data to further "their communal politics" instead of putting the data to proper use to find out how and why certain communities were backward and what could be done to remedy this.

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