WITH EYES WIDE OPEN
D. N. Bezboruah
Democracies all over the world have extended to their citizens all kinds of reasoble freedoms and rights and watched how well these freedoms and rights have been used. There have been rare occasions of certain freedoms and rights being withdrawn later whenever these have been misused to the detriment of the tions concerned. One such freedom was the freedom given to a family to have any number of children. For years before India became free and then became a democratic republic, people in the country were free to have as many children as they wanted. One of my aunts had a dozen children. But apart from snide comments within the family about the problems of bringing up so many children or finding suitable bridegrooms for the daughters, there were no indications that anyone regarded having such a large number of children as being undesirable or irresponsible. All the five sons of my aunt succeeded in their chosen careers and vocations, and all the seven daughters were married into good families despite their lack of higher formal education. I know of many other families that had several children. I am sure it meant some hardship for them as they grew up, but I have rarely seen any family actually suffer for being very large. But those were less crowded and less critical times. Today, no one can even dream of having and raising a family of a dozen children.
As expected, not many democracies in the world were able to allow citizens to enjoy this particular freedom for very long. One by one, they began to look for ways of restricting this freedom of letting citizens have as many children as they wanted. After all, this was a freedom that played havoc with the demography and the economy of countries. The two countries that were a source of constant worry to the rest of the world were Chi and India. Chi, with the largest population in the world, soon put in place effective population control measures that swiftly brought down the growth rate to reasoble limits. India is still trying very hard, though not very effectively, to lower the population growth rate. The result is that there are fears of India exceeding the population of Chi by 2025. This is a scerio that needs to be prevented at all costs, because we have neither the means nor the justification for creating the infrastructure for supporting such an abnormal growth rate of our population.
At the same time, one cannot ignore the fact that once a family has let itself grow beyond reasoble limits, there is nothing that can be done to correct a situation created due to irresponsible family planning. All the children beyond ratiol limits are, after all, human beings. And they are beloved and cherished members of the family. They cannot be wished away. Nor can they be parted with, as one might part with domestic animals or pets. So the obvious course of action for any government is to appeal to all citizens to have small families with not more than two children. There can be no punishment beyond disincentives if the government’s injunctions are not heeded. And that is precisely what our government is doing by way of creating disincentives. Even a cursory look at the government’s latest population policy reveals how disincentives are being made to exert pressure on citizens to accept the two-children family as the desired norm. On Friday, the Assam Assembly approved the BJP-led government’s Population and Women Empowerment Policy primarily aimed at preventing the alarming population growth in the State. The population policy is reported to have been drafted after several rounds of brainstorming sessions and public suggestions, including experts from different areas of specialization after the present government came to power last year. The policy primarily aims at ensuring balanced growth and development of all people living in the State by controlling population and empowering women. One interesting aspect of the new policy is that though it has not immediately made the two-child norm mandatory for all except government employees, it has created several provisions and promised incentives to promote such a norm among different sections of people (including the lawmakers) in a phased manner. As things are now, only candidates with no more than two children will be eligible for government jobs. Government employees with more than two children will be deprived of various benefits. Persons having more than two children will henceforth be barred from contesting polls to panchayat and local bodies. The policy also plans to bar persons having more than two children from becoming MLAs and MPs. And since all such plans can achieve the desired success only with the help of women, the new population policy seeks to provide 100 per cent coverage of education for all girls and to strictly prohibit all child marriages. The policy also works towards encouraging the enhancement of the marriageable age for girls. There is also the proposal to include some form of punishment to parents who encourage child marriage or permit marriages below the legal age. This is perhaps the only provision for any kind of punishment envisaged in the new population policy.
What is most remarkable about the population growth of Assam is that it is much higher in most parts of lower Assam than in the districts of upper Assam. The population growth rate for the districts of Dhubri, Morigain, Goalpara, gaon and Barpeta has been of the order of 20 to 28 per cent every 10 years, compared to the tiol average of 17 per cent every ten years. However, in the districts of upper Assam the population growth rate has been of the order of nine to 10 per cent every 10 years. This is because the concentration of illegal migrants from Bangladesh has been in the districts of lower Assam, and in ten districts of Assam they have turned the indigenous population into a minority, thus radically affecting the demographic character of Assam. Regardless of all protestations to the contrary, there are very concerted moves to turn Assam into a Bangladeshi majority State. What has happened is largely because of the irony that a so-called secular republic should have failed to do what even Islamic states have maged to ensure. India has Islamic states as neighbours both on its west and east. While Islam permits the marriage of up to four wives, neither Pakistan nor Bangladesh is willing to permit this without the person planning to commit bigamy or polygamy seeking the permission of the appropriate authorities to marry more than one wife. It is only in India—a so-called secular republic—that a Muslim can marry up to four wives without the need to seek anyone’s permission to do so. And in India, polygamy is a privilege reserved exclusively for Muslims! None of us will ever be able to discover what is secular about such a retrograde provision. It is, therefore, hardly surprising that India should fail to achieve what even quite a few progressive Islamic countries have maged to do by way of population control. And it is quite unlikely that the situation will change for the better in any way in the days to come, unless our much-amended Constitution is amended yet again to ensure equal rights to all citizens in such matters—as behoves a genuine secular republic.