What does the Pew Research survey on Religion in India tell us?
Indians are ‘living together separately’
On 29th June 2021 the Pew Research Foundation published the results of their survey on Religion in India. For people like me who for years have been referencing their data on religious attitudes across the world, a comprehensive survey for India was long awaited.
The study took Pew Research almost three years to complete. It covers all States and UTs of India except Sikkim and Manipur (pending at the time COVID hit), some districts of J&K (due to military lockdown), and Andaman/Lakshadweep (due to remoteness). 30,000 adults were interviewed face-to-face between November 2019 and March 2020. Interviews were conducted in 17 different Indian languages. The sample of respondents is stratified according to the representation of each major religious group in India’s adult population which, according to the 2011 census, looks like this:
Tolerance and Segregation
The overall picture that emerges for India is one of tolerance and segregation. There are two aspects of tolerance revealed by the survey:
- Every individual is free to practice their own religion
- Respecting all religions is a core value of one’s own religion and what it means to be ‘truly Indian’
Members of all religious groups are in near-unanimous agreement (80–90%) on both of these.
This is pretty much the only finding from the survey that inspires optimism. It’s all downhill from this point on. The message of religious groups in India wanting to live separately, and to avoid mixing as much as possible, is repeated throughout the survey.
On average only about 20% of Hindus, Muslims, and Christians say they have a lot in common with the other religious groups. However, the majority of Sikhs and Jains say they have a lot in common with Hindus, as can be expected. About one-third of Hindus, one-fourth of Muslims and one-fifth of Christians would not like to have any of the others as neighbours.
Endogamy is an unwritten law
Interfaith marriage is a strict no-no for the majority of Indians (2 out of 3). With the exception of Christians, most communities are opposed to men and women marrying someone outside their religion.
When it comes to marriage and relationships, popular sentiment tends to focus on women, with families imposing various restrictions on daughters. However, the data show that across all communities the desire to prevent men marrying out is nearly as strong as preventing women. In other words, the data do not support conspiracy theories like “love jihad”.
This becomes even more apparent when we look at religious conversion — less than 1% of respondents follow a different religion from the one they were born into. Also, inward and outward conversions more or less balance each other for most religions (except “Others” converting to Christianity) —
75 years after Independence, endogamy along caste lines continues to remain strict. Note that not just Hindus but all religious groups in India have castes.
Religion and Nationalism
Despite stating that respecting all religions is part of what makes one ‘truly’ Indian, a surprisingly high proportion of Hindus equate being Indian with being Hindu. Many Hindus also equate being able to speak Hindi with being ‘truly’ Indian.
As one can expect, there is a political side to this identification of nationalism with Hindu religion and Hindi language. Quoting from the report:
In the 2019 national elections, 60% of Hindu voters who think it is very important to be Hindu and to speak Hindi to be truly Indian cast their vote for the BJP, compared with 33% among Hindu voters who feel less strongly about both these aspects of national identity. These views also map onto regional support for the BJP, which tends to be much higher in the Northern and Central parts of the country than in the South.
Together the responses to these questions reveal the profile of a certain type of BJP voter who lives in the ‘Hindi Belt’.
Atheism is rare in India
A mere 3% of respondents expressed a complete lack of belief in God(s). Interestingly the proportion is highest for Muslims and Sikhs (there are no Gods in Buddhism so the 33% figure cannot be said to represent atheists).
Further, 80–90% of Indians across religions, even those who do not regularly read their religious texts, believe the scriptures to be the word of God.
A belief in various aspects of supernatural agency is widespread. However, the pattern of belief is not quite as expected. For instance, a lot of people may have assumed that most Buddhists and Jains believe in reincarnation but the data show otherwise. A surprisingly high percentage of Muslims believe in karma, a concept which comes from Hinduism.
Finally, it turns out that food taboos are more important for deciding who is ‘truly’ Hindu or Muslim than actually believing in or praying to a God!
72% of Hindus say a person cannot be Hindu if they eat beef. That is larger than the shares of Hindus who say a person cannot be Hindu if they do not believe in God (49%) or never go to a temple (48%). Similarly, 77% of Muslims say that a person cannot be Muslim if they eat pork, which is greater than the share who say a person cannot be Muslim if they do not believe in God (60%) or never attend mosque (61%).
One way to interpret this is that in India there is high tolerance for being agnostic towards Gods. An alternative interpretation is that religion in India is more about group identity (conforming to the habits and customs of the community) than about personal belief in Gods.
Conclusion
In this post I have been able to capture only the highlights of the Pew Research survey on Religion in India. The survey captures a lot more. Some of the topics I did not touch upon relate to the memory of Partition, attitudes towards caste, uniform civil code, and many others.
When I posted on this topic on other social platforms like Quora, readers reported mixed reactions. Some felt the findings to only confirm what they already knew, some shared my own pessimism, while others felt optimistic.
How do the results of the survey make you feel? Please respond in comments.
