Varanasi: The majority of Indians express respect for the ideals of religious and social diversity but find little in common with each other and insist upon keeping religious communities segregated, said a new survey.

While 91% of Indians say they enjoy religious freedom and 84% say that respecting other religions is very important to being Indian, the majority of Hindus and Muslims see themselves as very different from one other and believe stopping inter-religious marriages is very important, according to a new survey of nearly 30,000 Indians by the Pew Research Center, a global think tank.

Among the other highlights:

• A little over half the respondents (53%) said that India’s religious diversity was a benefit for the country, while roughly a quarter (24%) see diversity as being harmful, with similar figures among both Hindus (24%) and Muslims (22%).

• While 45% of Hindus said that they were fine with having neighbours that practiced any other religion—Muslim, Christian, Sikh, Buddhist, or Jain—an identical share (45%) said that they would not be willing to accept followers of at least one of these religious groups. More than a third of Hindus (36%) said that they did not want a Muslim as a neighbour. 

• Of those surveyed, 64% said that it was very important to stop women from their community from inter-caste marriages, and 62% said that stopping men from their community from marrying into other castes was very important. 

• About two-thirds of Hindus surveyed (64%) said that it was very important to be Hindu to be “truly” Indian. Over half of them (59%) also linked Indian identity with the ability to speak Hindi.

• Among those surveyed, 72% of Hindus said that a person who ate beef could not be considered a Hindu. This percentage was higher than the percentage of Hindus who said that a person could not be considered Hindu if he or she rejected belief in God (49%), never went to a temple (48%), or never prayed (48%).

• Over three-fourths of Indian Muslims (77%) said that a person could not be a Muslim if they ate pork. This percentage was higher than that of those who said that a person could not be a Muslim if they did not believe in God (60%) or never went to a mosque (61%).

The study by the Pew Research Center is the latest to lay bare the schisms in Indian society. 

In April 2021, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, which monitors international religious freedom, designated India as a “country of particular concern” for the second consecutive year. The data are also in line with research conducted by the Housing Discrimination Project, published on  on 11 February 2021 by Article 14, which reported that exclusion of Muslim tenants is still common practice even in India's supposedly cosmopolitan cities, such as Delhi and Mumbai, limiting Muslims to Muslim-only localities.

“Historically speaking, segregation of living spaces has always been a fact of life in India. It is not an entirely bad thing—it helps further the ‘live and let live’ approach that has maintained harmony in India for much of its multicultural past,” said Ghazala Wahab, author of the 2021 book Born A Muslim. “But the kind of discrimination that we are seeing in the open now is problematic, because group identity grants people impunity and so direct and indirect forms of prejudice become normalised.”

The new Pew findings cast light on how religious groups perceive each other, how it affects prevalent practices of segregated living and its impact upon nationalism and politics.

For the report, 29,999 Indian adults were surveyed over a period of four months, between November 2019 and March 2020. Those surveyed included 22,975 who identified as Hindu, 3,336 who identified as Muslim, 1,782 who identified as Sikh, 1,011 who identified as Christian, 719 who identified as Buddhist, 109 who identified as Jain and 67 who identified as belonging to another religion or religiously unaffiliated.

Living Together Separately

About 66% of Hindus see themselves as very different from Muslims; 64% of Muslims say they are very different from Hindus, said the Pew Report.

An overwhelming majority (91%) of Indians said that they have religious freedom, and 80% said respect for all religions as a core value of their religious identity. 

A little over half the respondents (53%) said that India’s religious diversity was a benefit for the country, while roughly a quarter (24%) see diversity as being harmful, with similar figures among both Hindus (24%) and Muslims (22%).

Among the prominent religious minorities, almost all Muslims and Sikhs (95%) said that they were very proud to be Indian.

Despite the enthusiasm for religious pluralism as a value, most Indians preferred keeping their social lives restricted to their own religious communities. 

Roughly two-thirds of Hindus said it was very important to stop inter-religious marriages of Hindu women (67%) or Hindu men (65%). As many as 80% of Muslims said it was very important to stop Muslim women from marrying outside their religion, and 76% said that it was very important to stop Muslim men from doing so. 

Of those surveyed, 64% said that it was very important to stop women in their community from entering inter-caste marriages, and a similar share (62%) said that stopping men in their community from marrying into other castes was very important. The shares of Dalits and members of general category castes responded in equal numbers in emphasising their view that inter-caste marriages should be stopped.

Even within the most highly educated groups, roughly half said that preventing such marriages was very important. 

While 72% of Indians from other castes said that they would be willing to have someone belonging to a scheduled caste as a neighbour, 70% of them also said that most or all of their close friends belonged to their own caste.

While 45% of Hindus said that they were fine with having neighbours that practiced any other religion–be they Muslim, Christian, Sikh, Buddhist, or Jain–an identical share (45%) said that they would not be willing to accept as neighbours anyone from at least one of these religious groups. More than a third of Hindus (36%) said that they did not want a Muslim as a neighbour. 

Among those expressing the strongest preferences were Jains, 61% of whom said they were unwilling to have neighbours from at least one of these religious groups. Among these, 54% said that they would not accept a Muslim neighbour, in contrast to an overwhelming majority of Jains (92%) who said that they would be willing to accept a Hindu neighbour.

Surveys confirm that amid the threat of communal violence, residential decisions are made keeping security in mind, and many communities, especially minorities, tend to huddle together.

In research conducted by the Housing Discrimination Project over two-and-a-half years, brokers active in Delhi and Mumbai said that incidents of religious discrimination were class agnostic. More affluent areas such as Nizamuddin East and West neighbourhoods with richer, more educated populations on average often reported a higher number of instances of religious prejudice.

Being Hindu = Being Indian = Speaking Hindi

About two-thirds of Hindus surveyed (64%) said that it was very important to be Hindu to be “truly” Indian. Over half of them (59%) also linked Indian identity with the ability to speak Hindi.

Close to 60% of Hindu voters who thought that being Hindu and able to speak Hindi were very important for a person to be truly Indian voted for India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the 2019 general elections. By comparison, only a third of Hindu voters (33%) who felt less strongly about both these aspects of national identity showed the same voting pattern.

This trend varied by region: in North and Central India, where the population is largely Hindi speaking, roughly half of all Hindu voters met all three criteria: they believed in the importance of being Hindu for being truly Indian, maintained the same position about speaking Hindi, and voted for the BJP. Compared to this, the figure was just 5% in the South.

“The conflation of Hinduism with national identity is the calculated outcome of present-day politics. The present dispensation cannot plainly say that they support the Hindutva agenda, so they try to champion nationalism as their cause instead,” said Wahab. “In this way, anyone who falls out of line, either in conforming to the image of the ideal Hindu, or voices opposition despite being in the religious majority, is framed as anti-Indian. Questioning their allegiance has become a way to punish minorities indirectly.”

Hindu BJP voters who linked national identity with both religion and language also showed strong preferences in matters of marriage: 83% said that it was very important to stop Hindu women from marrying into another religion, relative to 61% for other Hindu voters.

About 95% of Hindu BJP voters reported that religion was a very important part of their lives, and close to three-quarters (73%) reported praying daily.

While Hindu BJP voters who linked national identity with religion and language were relatively more likely to support a religiously segregated India, they were also more inclined than non-BJP voting Hindu voters to express respect for India’s religious diversity and think of it as a valuable asset.

For a large section of Hindus, there appeared to be no contradiction between valuing the principle of religious diversity and believing that those who belong to the Hindu community were more authentically Indian than fellow citizens from other religious faiths.

“What has changed in the last couple of years is that there is now collective support under the perception of the religious identity of the majority being under siege,” said Pavan Varma, a former Indian Foreign Service officer and a former adviser to chief minister of Bihar, Nitish Kumar. “This causes ghettoisation—both physical and mental. Not only are they much more unwilling to share physical space with people from other religious groups, but this kind of insecurity also makes them much more evangelical in their religious views than they would usually be.”

Hindus Report Feeling As Discriminated As Muslims

About 24% of Muslims said that their community faced “a lot” of discrimination in India. The share of Muslims who reported widespread discrimination against their community was very close to the percentage of Hindus who said that they faced widespread religious discrimination in India (21%). 

Among Sikhs, 14% said that they had faced a lot of discrimination in India, and 18% reported personally having faced religious discrimination in the twelve months before the survey.

This statistic also showed regional variation. In North India, 40% of Muslims said that that had personally faced some kind of religious discrimination in the 12 months before the survey, compared to 36% in the North East, 19% in the South, 18% in Central India, 17% in the East, and 15% in the West.

Experiences of religious discrimination were found to be more common among Muslims who were more religious and those who had recently faced financial hardship. In the case of Hindus, those with less education or those who had recently experienced poverty were more likely to say that they had faced religious discrimination.

Close to half of Muslims said that the partition of India in 1947 had hurt communal relations with Hindus (48%). About 30% of them perceived it as a good thing for Hindu-Muslim relations.

While Sikhs and Muslims were much more likely to think of partition as a bad event than a good event, Hindus were found to have the opposite perception: about 43% of Hindus said that the partition of India was beneficial for Hindu-Muslim relations, compared to 37% who saw it as a bad thing.

Across all the major faiths practiced in the country, a majority of Indians said that religion was a very important aspect of their lives. This trend held among both younger and older Indians, as well as among those with different educational backgrounds; men and women were also found to be similar in their levels of religious observance.

An identical share of Hindus and Muslims across the country (65%) saw communal violence as a very big national problem, while the number was 78% for Sikhs.

In contradiction with the secularisation theory, India’s population also showed few, if any, signs of losing its religious faith despite rapid economic growth. Religious conversions also have had minimal impact on the overall size of religious groups in India.

Eating Beef, Eating Pork

Among those surveyed, 72% of Hindus said that a person who ate beef could not be considered a Hindu. This proportion was found to be higher than the percentage of Hindus who said that a person could not be considered Hindu if he or she rejected belief in God (49%), never went to a temple (48%), or never performed prayers (48%).

The attitude towards beef, however, was not uniform and appeared to be divided on regional and cultural lines. Hindus in Southern India were considerably less likely than those in other parts of the country to disqualify beef eaters from being Hindu:  50% of those in South India thought this way compared to about 83% in northern and central India.

Hindus who took a strong position against the practice of eating beef were more likely than others to report that they were opposed to accepting the followers of other religions as their neighbours (49% vs 30%). They were also more likely to say that it is very important to be Hindu to be truly Indian (68% vs 51%).

Among those surveyed, 82% of Sikhs and 85% of Jains said that a person who ate beef could not be a member of their respective religious groups.

Exclusion based on food habits was also found to be prevalent among Muslims. 

Over three-quarters of Indian Muslims (77%) said a person could not be a Muslim if she or he ate pork. This percentage was higher than that of those who said that a person could not be a Muslim if he or she did not believe in God (60%) or never went to a mosque (61%).