Days after PM Modi said that if Congress comes to power, it will snatch away the wealth of people, including the Mangalsutra and gold possessions of India’s women, and hand it over to “people with more children”, an apparent reference to Muslims, Chennai-based media house The Hindu came up with a “fact-check” to check the veracity of the claims made by PM Modi.
However, merely claiming to “fact-check” does not make an article fact-check, as The Hindu would have us believe. Nowadays, the left-leaning media houses and journalists, spurred by the shady ‘fact-checks’ carried out by the likes of Pratik Sinha and Mohammed Zubair of Alt News, have begun peddling propaganda dressed as ‘fact-check’, hoping it would help them hoodwink their readers into believing their assumptions and prejudice.
A similar attempt to mislead readers was made by The Hindu with its recently published piece titled—’A fact-check on Modi’s speech in Rajasthan about Muslims and Manmohan Singh’—authored by Vignesh Radhakrishnan and Rebecca Rose Verghese, which presented strawman arguments, presumably with the hopes of discrediting PM Modi’s pithy statements referring to the fertility rates among Muslims.
In its ‘fact-check’, The Hindu cited fertility rates among various religious groups over the years to cleverly conclude that the gap between the fertility rates of Muslims and other groups is rapidly narrowing.
The data shows the fertility rate among Hindus dropped from 2.78 in 1998-99 to 1.94 in 2019-21, whereas it dropped from 3.59 to 2.36 for Muslims in the same period. Needless to mention, Muslims had the highest fertility rate among all religious groups.
The data shows the fertility rate among Hindus dropped from 2.78 in 1998-99 to 1.94 in 2019-21, whereas it dropped from 3.59 to 2.36 for Muslims in the same period. Needless to mention, Muslims had the highest fertility rate among all religious groups. But instead of concluding that Muslims had the highest fertility rates among all religious groups, which would have vindicated PM Modi’s remarks, the authors of the article claimed the gap in fertility rates between Muslims and that of other religions is narrowing.
However, this wasn’t the premise on which PM Modi made the remarks. He alluded that Muslims have more number of children than others, which the data validates.
Next, the article introduces another set of data about the total fertility rates (TFR) of Hindu and Muslim women for the five most populous States in two periods.
The five states were UP, Bihar, Maharashtra, West Bengal, and MP. Barring MP in 2005-2006, the TFR for Muslims had consistently been higher than their Hindu counterparts. However, this data again doesn’t concern with the remarks made by PM Modi.
It then includes two extraneous data sets, which the academics often resort to to confuse readers and buttress their ‘confirmation bias’, in this case, the preconceived notion that PM Modi was factually wrong in his remarks during a rally in Rajasthan.
One data set shows the share of females and males across religious groups who did not attend school/complete 12 years of schooling. In contrast, the other table shows the neonatal mortality rate (NMR) and under-five mortality rate (U5MR) among Hindus and Muslims in 1998-99, 2005-06 and 2019-21.
The inclusion of these data sets, nevertheless, is an attempt to rationalise why the fertility rate is high among Muslims. They don’t refute PM Modi’s statements or the truth that Muslims have the highest fertility rate among all religious groups. These data sets only seek to contextualise why the fertility rate among Muslims is high. As evident from the data sets themselves, the Muslim community severely lags on both parameters, the literacy and mortality rates, which the authors use to imply the cause for the high fertility rate among Muslim women.
But it nonetheless doesn’t discredit PM Modi’s remarks and only reinforces his stand referring to Muslims as the community with more number of children.
Fact-checking, these days, has become an occupation that is susceptible to personal bias and selective quoting of facts. The Hindu’s ‘fact-check’ on PM Modi’s remarks in Rajasthan is one such attempt, albeit a poor one at that, to refute a reality: that Muslims indeed have the highest fertility rates among all religious groups in India.