by Mural Vallipuranathan, ‘Colombo Telegraph,’ August 15, 2014
I write with reference to an article written by Mr.Rajan Philips in two parts under the titles of “Politics getting nuttier: Muslim Fertility Myths And Misplaced Polygamy Advocacy” (1) and “Politics Getting Nuttier – II: The Impact Of War On Demography And The Implications For Women” (2) …
2. With the values provided on Sri Lanka, I will now examine in detail the “methodologically rigorous report” of the Pew Forum (6) as described by Mr. Philips and used as cornerstone for his arguments to refute the Youtube clip.
The values in Table 1 proves that the estimates provided by the Pew forum underestimated the Muslim population growth in Sri Lanka. I will now examine the percentage values of Muslim population to the total population of Sri Lanka provided by the Pew Forum.
The values in Table 2 proves beyond doubt that the percentage estimates of Muslims in Sri Lanka provided by the Pew Forum is an underestimation and completely erroneous because the 2012 Census confirmed that the percentage of Muslims had already reached 9.2% of the total population whereas Pew forum report estimated the maximum percentage of Muslims in Sri Lanka to be 8.5% even in 2030. Unfortunately Mr. Philips without knowledge on the intricacies of the demography unable to critically examine the validity of the report of the PEW Forum but just repeating what was reported by other lay writers as “methodologically rigorous report”. I will also add a slide from my presentation where the government statistics prove that the percentages of Sinhalese and Muslims in Sri Lanka have been increasing since 1911 while percentages of Tamils have been decreasing continuously (Table 3).
3. Despite the underestimations of the growth of Muslims by the Pew Forum Mr. Philips reluctantly accepted their conclusion “The 2030 projections show that the Muslim component could grow from 1.6 billion to 2.2 billion, from a share of 23.4% to 26.4% of the total world population” though he call “It would be nutty for anyone to think of projecting beyond 2030 or 2040, to a hypothetical long term when the Muslims may overtake the Christians in the world population”. The true fact is that in 2008 Vatican first time openly acknowledged that Islam had surpassed Roman Catholicism based on 2006 data and elaborated that Muslims accounted for 19.2% of the world population whereas Catholics were only 17.4% of the world population (7). Vatican further explained that high fertility of Muslims was the reason for overtaking by Islam leaving aside the religious conversion campaigns used by both religions. Vatican estimated total Christians account for 33% of the world population in 2008. Mr.Philips who did not want to accept the true fact that the projection beyond 2030 would prove the overtaking of Muslims continue with his bluffing English phrase on the old wisdom of Keynes which is technically nonsense in the field of demography because demography is a science developed by the techniques of extrapolation or long term projections (8). If Mr.Philips thinks it would be nutty to project beyond 2030 or 2040 do he assume that the UN and other governments are nutty to spend lot of funds and employ several demographers to project beyond 2050 even up to 2300 (9) (10).
4. Though I did not pronounce polygamy as a solution to the post war scenario marital squeeze and the large number of war widows in my presentation in Jaffna, I believe that the merits of polygyny (a man having more than one wife) proposed by Tamil scholar Dr. J. Arankaraj following my presentation need to be considered for the reasons given below. First of all historically Tamils had practiced polygyny especially by marrying war widows and had children to recover the population lost in war. Even modern times Polygyny has been the solution in several communities when the sex ratio falls with large number of war widows (11). In 2011 two years after the war when already the systematic colonization procedures commenced in Northern Province, Sex ratio was reported as 92.9 and particularly the marriageable age group of females were seriously affected by the post war marital squeeze (12). Polygyny is found to improve the fertility of communities by several mechanisms such as increasing the remarriage of widows and bringing down the age at marriage (13). Government statistics reported 89,000 war widows in the North and East and considerable proportion of them are in the marriageable age (14). On one hand their reproductive needs have to be considered without allowing exploitation. On the other hand restoring their fertility is vital to recover the Tamil population which already encountered serious losses due to the war. Further it is found that in communities practicing polygyny dowry falls (15). Currently a rise in dowry values among Tamils is observed as a consequence of the existing marital squeeze and that impede marriages. Polygyny would help to overcome this problem and enable more females to get married. In the Sri Lankan context when already one community (Muslims) is practicing polygyny I see no reason why Tamils should not practice it to face the current crisis. Because in 1907 our leaders who were brought up in Anglican culture similar to present day Mr.Philips, without knowledge of the original Tamil culture and not anticipating a holocaust after a century agreed for a law legalizing monogamy at that time does not mean we should stick to it in a time when Tamils face systematic demographic changes (16) and their very existence is at stake…
References:
- https://www.colombotelegraph.com/index.php/politics-getting-nuttier-muslim-fertility-myths-and-misplaced-polygamy-advocacy/
- https://www.colombotelegraph.com/index.php/politics-getting-nuttier-ii-the-impact-of-war-on-demography-and-the-implications-for-women/
- https://www.colombotelegraph.com/index.php/gender-rights-and-tamil-genocide-a-response-to-nirmala-rajasingam/
- https://www.soa.org/WorkArea/DownloadAsset.aspx?id=4408
- http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2011/jan/28/muslim-population-country-projection-2030
- http://features.pewforum.org/FutureGlobalMuslimPopulation-WebPDF.pdf
- http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/03/080331-AP-islam-largest.html
- http://www.demographic-research.org/volumes/vol4/8/4-8.pdf
- http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=45165#.U-zdU_mSyBo
- http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/longrange2/WorldPop2300final.pdf
- http://www.lse.ac.uk/economichistory/seminars/modernandcomparative/papers2011-12/fenske.pdf
- http://www.statistics.gov.lk/PopHouSat/VitalStatistics/EVE2011_FinalReport.pdf
- http://congres.afse.fr/docs/2011/410307demographictransitionpolygamy.pdf
- http://www.dailymirror.lk/news/6838-89000-war-widows.html
- https://pcwta.sdsu.edu/faculty/sgs/documents/econ_poly_1980.pdf
- https://www.colombotelegraph.com/index.php/on-illegal-possession-of-land-by-the-military-and-demographic-change-in-north-east/
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