Curious timing of draft law on Uttar Pradesh population control
Months before the election season begins, the Uttar Pradesh Law Commission released a draft population control Bill that seeks to incentivise families with a maximum of two children. By implication, it intends to penalise couples with more than two children by barring them from applying for government jobs as also contesting local body elections and restricting their eligibility for state-run welfare schemes. Though the draft immediately ran into a fusillade of protests from the opposition, there was nothing wrong with the proposal per se. UP is the most populous state in the country with a gross fertility rate of 2.7, according to the National Family Health Survey 4, so it makes good sense to proactively control its population growth. As Prime Minister Narendra Modi said in his Red Fort address in 2019, raising small families is itself a form of patriotism. However, the timing of the draft made the intention obvious.
That the priorities of a party in a state preparing to go to polls in eight months will be different as compared to those in another state where elections ended a few months ago is a given. It explains why Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma wants a gradual rollout of the two-child policy in his state, while his UP counterpart Yogi Adityanath appears to be in a hurry to push it through. The draft UP law is open for public comment only till July 19, and Minister Mohsin Raza said on record that it will subsequently be passed by the Assembly. Remember both states have sizable Muslim populations. Parallelly, Adityanath announced a new population policy to cut the fertility rate to 1.9 by 2030.
Given his government’s sense of urgency, the population law in the making can be expected to become an important talking point for the BJP during the UP Assembly polls, just as the triple talaq Bill was a much debated legislation in the run-up to the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. Taken together with the love jihad law that is already in place in UP, the political discourse could get toxic. It’s up to the BJP to convince people that the new law would be religion agnostic and applied evenly. Then alone would its slogan of sabka saath, sabka vikas, sabka vishwas carry conviction.