While that temporarily shut up the bigot, I now feel the RSS is highly confused about whether to get Hindu women to breed endlessly or restrict the Muslim women from doing so. For now Modi has come up with the exemplary suggestion of the need for population control in the country.

But I think that is directed more at Muslims than at Hindu women who in certain social strata have no choice but to bear children endlessly until they produce the much wanted son.

In the Emergency years Mrs Indira Gandhi's son Sanjay Gandhi tried to enforce population control through forcible sterilisations and we all know how that episode ended. Even China with its one child norm has had an uphill task restricting its population and I wonder if any givernment.will succeed in this exemplary aim unless it undertakes a whole lot of sociological reorientation of the people to begin with.

Quite apart from the desire for sons, in the slums of towns.and cities and the rural areas of the country, poverty is such a major issue that people continue to look upon children as hands to.work rather than mouths to feed.

Unless the government makes it compulsory for every child to be in school until at least matriculation and facilitates that study with economic support, the hands-over-mouth attitude will continue to prevail. Urban Muslim families are already as progressive as urban Hindu families and I have not seen any so far where there might be more than one wife or more than two-three children.

So it is necessary for both the RSS and Modi to divest themselves of the myth that Muslims breed more than Hindus – it is all a question of education, awareness and economic status which is strangely converse to the propensity to breed among both Hindus and Muslims – the wealthier you are, the fewer children you want to have.

With Aadhar cards and other government intrusion, it might be easier for the government to penalise people breaking the two-child norm. However, there were similar suggestions soon after the Emergency. Such tactics didn’t work then and are unlikely to work even today.

Meanwhile, the RSS should make up its mind on whether it wants Hindu women to breed more or Muslim women to breed less. It is not likely to succeed in either target.