THE Union government has announced the setting up of a High-Level Committee (HLC) ostensibly to examine “unnatural” demographic changes arising from illegal immigration, abnormal settlement patterns, etc. The PIB release says that the “Committee will analyse the patterns of abnormal population changes at the level of religious and social communities and will present a well-planned and time-bound solution to address the issue”.

Headed by Justice Prakash Prabhakar Navlekar (Retired) the five member committee is tasked to submit its report within one year. That the Modi government did not wait for the completion of the census exercise which would have come out with data on demographics and instead rushed to constitute the HLC, may seem intriguing.

For years, the RSS-BJP combine has attempted to project that India faces an internal demographic threat. And this has been scaled up since its ascendancy to power at the centre in 2014. From “termites” to “ghuspetiya”, the terminology may vary but the target is the same — mainly Muslims — accused of being destabilising forces allegedly altering the “demographic balance” of the nation.

The new committee will institutionalise this. It is not surprising that none of the members of the committee are even remotely connected to demography.  In fact the Committee Chairman Prakash Prabhakar Navlekar was candid that he was “surprised” that he has been named to head the committee and that demography and illegal migration were new subjects for him.

The significance that the RSS attaches to this gets underlined again from the June 14 issue of the Organiser which has devoted 27 pages to this subject, plus another four pages to the “Siliguri Corridor”, again from the standpoint of security and infiltration.

ANTI-MUSLIM GOAL

RSS Sarsangchalak Mohan Bhagwat had earlier this year said “The government has a lot to do regarding infiltration. They have to detect and deport. This wasn’t happening until now. But it has started little by little, and it will gradually increase. When the census or the SIR is conducted, many people come to light who are not citizens of this country; they are automatically excluded from the process. But we can do one thing: we can work on detection. We should detect them and report them to the appropriate authorities. We should inform the police that we suspect these people are foreigners…..”

It needs mention that one of the first decisions that the BJP government took after assuming office in West Bengal in May 2026 was to hand over 142.79 acres of land across nine districts to the Border Security Force. Transfer of 600 acres is what the BJP had promised in its manifesto for construction of barbed-wire fencing and new border outposts along the sensitive India-Bangladesh border.

The constitution of the HLC fits squarely within the broader trajectory of Hindutva politics. The Citizenship Amendment Act, the National Register of Citizens, anti-conversion laws, attacks on interfaith relationships, uniform civil codes in various states and repeated rhetoric around “population imbalance” all form part of a common ideological framework. The most damning of them is the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls. Each of these projects attempts to redefine citizenship and belonging in majoritarian terms. The secular Indian republic is gradually being recast as a Hindu State in which minorities exist conditionally and under suspicion.

The terms of reference of the HLC make it abundantly clear that it seeks to provide institutional legitimacy to a narrative that has long been central to Hindutva mobilisation i.e. the Hindu majority is under threat in its own homeland. This narrative persists despite the complete absence of demographic evidence supporting such fears. Fertility rates among all religious communities in India have been steadily declining. Differences between communities have narrowed significantly over the years.

As per data from the National Family Health Survey the fertility gap between Hindus and Muslims was just 0.42 children per woman in 2019–21, down from 1.1 in 1992. The fertility rate has declined by 46.5 per cent among Muslims since 1992–93, compared to 41.2 per cent among Hindus — meaning Muslim fertility has been falling faster. In the last 20 years, fertility among Hindus has dropped by 30 per cent, while the decline among Muslims has been 35 per cent.

POPULATION POLITICS

The politics of demographic fear serves several purposes simultaneously. First, it creates a permanent internal enemy. Instead of questioning the failures of neoliberal governance or corporate concentration of wealth, sections of the public are led to believe that the nation’s problems arise from infiltrators, demographic conspiracies, or cultural outsiders.

Second, demographic politics assists in consolidating a unified Hindu political identity across caste divisions. Hindutva has sought to subordinate contradictions within Hindu society by creating an overarching majoritarian consciousness. The invocation of an external or internal threat enables precisely such consolidation. Social anxieties are redirected away from caste oppression, unemployment, or class exploitation toward religious polarisation.

Third, demographic fear strengthens the expansion of state surveillance and documentation regimes. Once migration and population change are securitised, extraordinary measures become easier to justify. Citizenship verification exercises, detention systems, policing of borders, data collection, and selective scrutiny of vulnerable populations can all be normalised in the name of protecting national integrity. The poor, landless, migrant, and undocumented inevitably bear the heaviest burden of such policies. SIR is a case in point where over a crore not just stand disenfranchised but have become “doubtful” citizens deprived of rights and entitlements.

NAZI PARALLEL

The 24th Congress of the CPI(M) held in Madurai had characterised the current dispensation at the Centre as displaying “neo-fascist characteristics”.  Fascism, as was practiced in Germany teaches us that democratic societies can gradually normalise exclusionary politics through fear, propaganda, and bureaucratic legitimacy. Authoritarianism advances step by step through institutions, laws, committees, administrative language, and manufactured public anxieties.

Adolf Hitler repeatedly argued that Germany faced demographic and civilisational destruction from supposedly alien populations, especially Jews. Nazi propaganda transformed minorities into existential threats to the nation’s purity, security, and future. Economic suffering and political instability were redirected into hatred against internal enemies. Citizenship itself was racially redefined under the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, excluding Jews from equal civic membership.

American journalist and historian William Shirer, in his seminal work The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, says that fascism flourished not simply because of one leader’s ambitions, but because democratic institutions weakened internally while elites believed they could accommodate and control authoritarian forces. Propaganda, nationalism, and the creation of permanent enemies slowly transformed public consciousness.

Shirer writes, “The so-called Nuremberg Laws of September 15, 1935, deprived the Jews of German citizenship, confining them to the status of ‘subjects.’ It also forbade marriage between Jews and Aryans as well as extramarital relations between them, and it prohibited Jews from employing female Aryan servants under thirty-five years of age. In the next few years some thirteen decrees supplementing the Nuremberg Laws would outlaw the Jew completely. ...the Jews had been excluded either by law or Nazi terror—the latter often preceded the former—from public and private employment to such an extent that almost one half of them were without means of livelihood. In the first year of the Third Reich, 1933, they had been excluded from public office, the civil service, journalism, radio, farming, teaching, the theater, the films; in 1934 they were kicked out of the stock exchanges, and though the ban on their practicing the professions of law and medicine or engaging in business did not come legally until 1938 they were in practice removed from these fields by the time the first four-year period of Nazi rule had come to an end.”

INSPIRATION FOR RSS

This hatred for the ‘other’ is reflected in the teachings of Hindutva icon, M.S. Golwalkar. In We or Our Nationhood Defined, published just a few months before Hitler launched his disastrous war in 1939, he says: “They (Muslims and Christians) are born in this land, no doubt. But are they true to its salt? . . . No. Together with the change in their faith, gone are the spirit of love and devotion for the nation.”

It is no secret that Golwalkar was unabashed in his admiration for Hitler. In We or Our Nationhood Defined, published just a few months before Hitler launched his disastrous war in 1939, he wrote: “To keep up the purity of the “Race pride at its highest has been manifested here. Germany has also shown how well-nigh impossible it is for Races and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindusthan to learn and profit by.”

Golwalkar underlined the exclusive claim of Hindus over the country vis-à-vis  Muslims by arguing that “the foreign races in Hindusthan must either adopt the Hindu culture and language, must learn to respect and hold in reverence Hindu religion, must entertain no idea but those of the glorification of the Hindu race and culture, i.e. of the Hindu nation and must lose their separate existence to merge in the Hindu race, or may stay in the country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment not even citizen’s rights.”

Further, “They have no place in national life, unless they abandon their differences, adopt the religion, culture and language of the nation, and completely merge themselves in the national race. So long, however, as they maintain their racial and cultural differences, they cannot but be only foreigners”.

This continues to remain the blueprint of the Hindutva project and the bedrock of the RSS thought. Golwalkar’s second book Bunch of Thoughts compiling his writings and speeches which was published two-and-half decades later also retained the essence of what he had written in 1939.

For years, Hindutva propaganda has attempted to portray Muslims simultaneously as hyper-visible and politically suspect: too fertile, too disloyal, too organised, and too foreign. Such narratives reduce an entire community of over 20 crore citizens into a demographic threat category.

The formation of the demographic committee is yet another instrument in furtherance of the Hindutva project. Citizens will become demographic subjects whose legitimacy will increasingly depend upon identity, documentation, and political conformity.