Until five months ago, the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh had a law that barred people with more than two children from contesting elections in local rural and urban bodies. Now, the state may have a policy barring people with fewer than two children from contesting such elections.
From “you can’t have more than two children” to “you must have more than two children” is a policy swing not peculiar to Andhra Pradesh. Two days after Andhra Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu first argued for changing the population policy on October 19, 2024, M. K. Stalin, the chief minister of Tamil Nadu, southern India’s largest state, went one step further. He jokingly asked, “Why can’t we aim for 16 children?”
Underlying Naidu’s argument is the successful implementation of family planning measures in southern India, which has led to an alarming drop in the total fertility rate (TFR) and is expected to result in an increasingly aged population in the coming decades. He pointed out that countries like Japan and South Korea that incentivized family planning are facing a fast-aging population. “Some years down the line, India too will face aging population concerns, and we will be left with very little to do at that stage,” Naidu said.
Stalin, while addressing a wedding ceremony in Tamil Nadu, linked the possible redrawing of India’s parliamentary constituency boundaries with his argument for more children.
He said that people in earlier days used to bless the newlyweds to have 16 kinds of wealth. Now, a situation has arisen when the state may have to lose some of its seats in the Indian Parliament, and “people think they should literally raise 16 children and not a small and prosperous family,” Stalin remarked.
The two’s comments were seen in the Indian media as reflecting India’s southern states’ concerns over the prospect of a current-population-based delimitation of parliamentary constituencies.
In 1976, the Indian government froze the parliamentary seat share of every state based on their 1971 population, so that states would not shy away from implementing population control policies over fears of losing parliamentary representation due to dwindling population.
That bar on changing a state’s share of parliamentary seats is to be reviewed every 25 years. In 2001, the bar was re-imposed for another 25 years. The policy is scheduled to be reviewed in 2026. Many believe that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s federal government wants to remove the bar to allow a fresh redrawing of parliamentary boundaries based on the current population.
Should this happen, southern states will see their parliamentary shares cut down significantly, as they have fared pretty well in implementing the population control policy. Northern Indian states, which are heavily populated, have been the traditional bases of the Hindu nationalist forces.
Naidu, whose Telugu Desam Party (TDP) is part of the Modi-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government at the federal level, did not mention delimitation as the trigger for his call. However, other leaders of his party have expressed their concerns.
In December, a TDP parliamentarian told the Lok Sabha, the lower house of the Indian Parliament, that the latest population-based delimitation would result in the northern states of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, and Rajasthan having their share of Lok Sabha seats increase from 169 to 324. In contrast, those of Andhra, Telangana, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and Karnataka will increase marginally from the present strength of 129 to 164 seats. This would harm India’s federalism, he argued.
Over the past five decades, the southern states and some eastern states have fared better in implementing India’s population control policy than most of the northern or central Indian states. For example, between 1971 and 2011, Tamil Nadu’s population increased by 1.75 times, much lower than the national average of 2.2 times, whereas the population increased in northwestern India’s Rajasthan, central India’s Madhya Pradesh, and northern India’s Uttar Pradesh by 2.66 times, 2.41 times, and 2.38 times, respectively.
However, southern leaders are not alone in calling for more children.
In December 2024, Mohan Bhagwat, the helmsman of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological-organizational parent of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), urged Indians to have at least three children.
Bhagwat argued that a community faces the threat of extinction when its TFR falls below 2.1. India’s latest TFR of 2 puts it on the verge of facing that threat. Since one couldn’t have a fractional child, meeting the 2.1 benchmark means three children, he argued.
Bhagwat’s stance reflected the contradictions and confusion that India’s Hindu nationalists have long been through over the population growth rate. Sometimes they blame Muslims for having higher fertility rates and call for population control policies. Sometimes they blame infiltration from Bangladesh for the rise in the Muslim population. And sometimes they urge Hindus to have more children.
In 2020-21, at least seven BJP-ruled states — Karnataka, Tripura, Madhya Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Gujarat, Assam and Uttar Pradesh — initiated population control policies All these efforts had a two-child policy in mind.
Their confusion over population policy is also reflected in the fact that less than six months before Bhagwat’s three-children call, senior RSS ideologue Surendra Jain, who heads the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, called for a two-child policy.
After Bhagwat’s December 2024 remark, Mrityunjay Tiwari, a spokesperson of the Bihar-based opposition party, Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), said, “Leaders of the BJP often speak about population control, and now the RSS chief is advocating for more children. The BJP and RSS should first resolve their own contradictions.”
The main concern for the Hindu nationalists is that Hindus, who comprised 84.1 percent of the population in 1951, when the first census of independent India was conducted, declined to 79.8 percent in 2011, while the Muslim share has risen from 9.8 percent to 14.2 percent during the same period. Checking the growth of the Muslim population share topped their concerns – an issue they describe as “demographic imbalance.”
However, as data shows, the regional imbalance – the north-south divide – reflects no lesser demographic imbalance.
“Since Hindus form fourth-fifth of the country’s population, encouraging Hindus to have more children would be more effective than restricting the number of children in Muslim families if Hindus are to maintain their demographic superiority of 1947,” a BJP parliamentarian told The Diplomat, requesting anonymity.