Demography is a bigger concern today because Islam is fighting for its survi­val, if not for world supremacy. Muhammad Samiullah is explicit about th… - Koenraad Elst

The very first day a genuine scholar sits down to check Nehruvian history-writing against the facts, the empire of the JNU professors is finished. Because you see, facts are more eminent than even Jawaharlal Nehru and his university historians.

One such secularist, a modern man ready to deal with the matter pragmatically, was Rajiv Gandhi. He allowed the Hindus to prepare for the construction of a new temple with the ceremonial laying of a foundation stone (shilanyas) on November 9, 1989. He pressured the Chandra Shekhar government, which was dependent on Congress support, into organizing the scholars’ debate about the historical evidence, in the full knowledge that the temple party would win such a debate hands down. The thrust of his Ayodhya policy was to buy off Muslim acquiescence with some of the usual currency of the Congress culture: maybe nominating a few more Mians as ministers, banning a few Islam-unfriendly books (hence the Satanic Verses affair), raising the Hajj subsidy, providing cheap loans to the Shahi Imam’s constituency, donating government land for some Islamic purpose, things like that. Meanwhile, Hindus would get their temple. Muslims would have scolded their leaders for selling out, Hindus would have lambasted theirs for cheapening a noble cause with such horse-trading, but in the end, everybody would have accepted it....Whatever may be said about and against Rajiv Gandhi, he had the calibre and the cool secular distance from religious passions to see such a policy through....But in 1991 India’s top pilot was killed, and worse, in his years as India’s most important politician, dark forces had started fighting his reasonable and pragmatic policy tooth and nail. The problem was not with the obscurantist Mullahs, because in those days, a seasoned Congress leader knew how to strike win-win deals with them. The poison issued from the secularist intellectuals who raised a media storm against the historical consensus, the one factual certainty underlying all the political confusion. Their stance hardened Muslim intransigence, emboldened the Left in its anti-Hindu strategy and created international public opinion against the temple plan...

The implication of these data is that the Muslim rate of growth in percentage of the Indian population will go on incre­asing. Instead of extrapolating across cen­turies, we may make a safer prognosis for the next few decades. It is safe to pred­ict that the 2001 census will show another sharp increase in the rate at which Muslims are demograph­ically catching up with the Hindu majority. It is then that the full effect of the birth control cam­paigns of the 1960s and 70s will become visible. Given the higher Hindu participation in the birth control effort of the 1960s and 70s, we must now be witnes­sing a cumulative effect, of a proportionately smaller number of Hindu moth­ers (born in that period) having in their turn each a smaller number of children than the propor­tiona­tely larger number of Muslim mothers, on average.