Redefining we the people — that’s the task of a new Demography Committee without demographers

Demos, the ancient Greek term, originally meant “people”. The meaning was almost identical to that in the Constitution’s “We, the people”. Several English terms flow from demos, including “democracy”, “demotic”, “demagogy” and even “epidemic” and “endemic”. During the 19th century, the term was combined with another ancient Greek term, graphia, by the French scholar Achille Guillard and “demography” as a branch of population study was created. Demography has since then vastly developed as a social science.

During the 20th century, several Indian demographers such as S Chandrasekhar, Ashish Bose and P N Mari Bhat built global reputations in the field. Distinguished institutions like the International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS) in Mumbai, and several university-based population study centres came up. National policy and planning benefited from the techniques developed by these scholars and institutions to arrive at figures for mortality, fertility, and gender ratio, as well as the National Family Health Survey (NFHS). The IIPS has long been associated with the UNESCO’s Asia-Pacific initiative (ESCAP) in mapping populations for social development, resource management and energy distribution. The databases accumulated through the work of decades are developed on a total of 370 indicators and 1,500 data series, providing a robust synthesis of the census data, vital statistics and various studies undertaken by the UN as well as by Indian social scientists.

It was therefore surprising that the Prime Minister announced in his August 15 exhortation in 2025 government plans to set up yet another demography committee. It was also odd that it was constituted on May 26, a date with particular symbolic significance in the RSS’s post-2014 history. What’s stranger is that not one of the members has any grounding in demography. The chairperson is a retired judge, Prabhakar Naolekar, who was part of the bench that upheld the death sentence of Afzal Guru. One member is an economist from the PM’s Economic Advisory Council, another is a former R&AW officer, and a third is a former bureaucrat with housing as his domain. The Registrar General of India and a Home Ministry joint secretary dealing with foreigners are ex-officio members. There is not a single demographer on the Committee, though it is called the “High-Level Committee on Demographic Change”.

The Committee has reportedly been asked to do a religion-wise comparative study of birth registration, school enrolment, vehicle registrations, property transactions, ration cards and voter registration for the last 15 years. The stated purpose of the study is to find out “imbalances arising out of illegal immigration”. In the simplest words, this is a ghuspaithiya-impact study. Towards that end, the Committee is expected to study any unusual spike in Aadhaar enrolment, ration cards or any other forged documents. It is also expected to look at voter registration without established lineage. More importantly, it is to study religious educational institutions, particularly the minority institutions. One special task given to it is to check religious conversion figures for the last 15 years.

Since the established science of demography places population, and not religion, at the centre of any study, the Committee is going to break new ground by paving the way for a “theo-ethnography”. There are problems, though. One, other similar counting processes are underway. The much-debated and much more controversial Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls (SIR) is already on. Its central purpose, stated in many ways, is to identify the ghuspaithiya voters and to disenfranchise them. The Registrar General & Census Commissioner of India (RGI) is already halfway through the Census. And among the questions to be asked are many that can yield data that the Demography Committee is purposed to seek. Besides, there is also some talk of reviving the National Register of Citizens. If that is the case, the High Level Committee has to have a rather special objective that neither the SIR nor the Census, and not even the existing and refined databases in the country, can fulfil. What could that objective be? It is to identify, in GPS parameters, orchestrated migration and abnormal settlements, and to develop legislative, administrative and technological measures to “manage” infiltrators and execute permanent deportation frameworks.

In the context of these aims, the Akhil Bharatiya Prant Pracharak baithak of the RSS held in Belagavi in July assumes a curious significance. The media reports on the conclave mentioned that the only agenda for the three-day discussion and training was the Census. By the way, the timeline for the Demography Committee to complete its task coincides with the declared timeline for Census data publication, which is December 2027. The Census of 2026-27 itself is a striking deviation from the practice established since 1871. The Census is carried out normally in the first year of the decade. Although the Covid pandemic made that impossible, all other countries that follow the UN Principles and Recommendations for Population and Housing Census completed it in 2023. India postponed it, without providing any specific reasons, to 2026-27 — quite obviously to redeem the provision for the Census in the 2003 Amendment. What other use could there be for Census data that cannot be gainfully compared with data from 2011 or 2041?

The Census has added new questions, one of which is the name of the spouse. Together, the SIR, the Census and the Demography Committee will have gathered information on alleged infiltrators, their religious affiliations, land or property transactions these individuals have acquired, interfaith couples across India and their economic status (vehicles, employment, etc.). “Ghar wapsi” and “love jihad” are terms made familiar in India through speech and action during the past 12 years. There is now talk of “land jihad” as well. If the Committee’s work results in amplifying the fear of infiltration and the task of “executing the mechanism of expelling” is passed on to vigilantes, one knows what can be expected.