Malthusian and Neo-Malthusian
Malthusianism is a political thought put forward by Thomas Robert Malthus who stated that the idea of growth is exponential while that of the food supply is linear. He started two important checks which limit the population growth— preventive checks which include abstinence and delay of marriage until the individuals become financially stable and also restricting legal marriage and parenting rights for people deemed “deficient” (economically, physically) by the state, and positive checks such as war, diseases, starvation and so on. In a way, he either preferred a complete dictatorship over individual rights or supported the state fallacies which he termed as “positive”. He was against contraceptives and this is where he differs from the Neo-Malthusians. However, besides, contraceptives a Neo-Malthusian state often resorts to forced sterilisation, weighing of productive and unproductive death whereby during a national emergency, the state saves the ones it considers “productive” or efficient and lets the inefficient ones perish— Indian government’s disownment of the inter-state migrant labourers (a large chunk of the working-class population) who are left to die while doing its possible bit to bring the Non-Resident Indians (NRIs) from upper-middle-class backgrounds, back to the country, safe and sound.
