A leading Hindu hard-liner has angered women and Muslims by pressing Hindus to have as many children as they can to avoid being swamped by Muslims. K.S. Sudarshan, who heads the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS), the ideological parent of the Bharatiya Janata Party which led India until last year, said a higher Hindu birth rate was vital to check a “population imbalance”.
“Whenever new people come to me for blessings, I tell them: ‘Not less than three (children)’. The more you can, the better,” he said at a function broadcast on television recently.
Women’s groups in Asia’s third-largest economy, with a billion-plus people, said they were insulted and one group labeled the Sudarshan’s stand an “agenda of hatred”.
“It is implied in his statement that a woman’s reproductive faculties are to be employed solely to fulfil the agenda of a Hindu nationalist state — like a reproductive machine,” said Malini Bhattacharya, a leading activist. “As if the question of a woman’s right does not even arise — her right over her own body and health.”
The RSS holds considerable sway among the large, conservative Hindu population, especially in impoverished northern India.
It’s intriguing to see how women’s groups in India are every bit as stupid, short-sighted and demographically-challenged as they are here in the West. Math is hard! Only three generations removed from setting themselves on fire as their first act of widowhood and already there’s a female leadership bent on cultural suicide. Apparently Miz Bhattacharya hasn’t read up on what life was like for women back when her part of Dodge was known as the Moghul empire.
Cluelessness knows no cultural bounds.