Religion, Fertility and'Common Sense': Making Sense of Demography in India

[...]authors own "everyday world and daily experiences" with these popular perceptions such as being born and brought up in Uttar Pradesh, which was at the centre of the Ram Mandir movement, during the concluding decade of 20th century. [...]the population of Muslims will supersede the population of Hindus (the dying Hindu race or minority taking over majority)! "Thus a whole new 'common sense' develops, relating to the marital and sexual practices of 'the Muslims' (here, as elsewhere, referring only to Muslim men), to their perverse character and their violent temperament" (Pandey 2006: 35). [...]if there is tremendous intra-state and even intra-district variation in reproductive behaviour among different religious cohorts, one can assume that any one of the above factors was behind the decline or increase in population, least of all exhortations to produce more children, which was superficial in the least (Rajalakshmi and Ramakrishnan 2015: 5). [...]the data illustrates that in the case of both rural and urban females, the highest number of "non-literate" were among the Muslim population and they also had the lowest monthly per capita consumption expenditure (GOI 2013). The manner in which the media badly responded to the religion-wise population figures of the 2011 Census resulted in further strengthening the negative popular perceptions of Muslims. [...]the demographic debate in India has to contest this systematically created popular perception on the population growth of Muslims, or for that matter of any community's demographic evolution. [...]the agencies responsible for administrating and disseminating national level data sets and various scholars working on the same, have to ensure that demographic data is easily available and comprehensible to a larger audience, so that the hegemonic constructions and sectarian demography could be comprehended and contested.