Religion for social acceptance

The Pew Research Institute’s Survey of Religion in India throws up interesting results. The Survey interviewed 30,000 adults face-to-face, using a questionnaire with roughly 90 questions. The interviews were conducted between November 2019 and March 2020, ending as the lockdown started.

The respondents included 22,975 who identify as Hindu (76.6 per cent of the sample), 3,336 Muslims (11 per cent), 1,782 Sikhs (5.9 per cent), 1,011 Christians (3.4 per cent), 719 Buddhists (2.4 per cent), 109 Jains (0.4 per cent) and 67 who belong to another religion, or claim no religious affiliation. Smaller minorities are over-represented — comparing this to the 2011 Census data, which estimated Hindus and Muslims together constituted nearly 94 per cent of adults.

The sample is not-quite-random. Pew tried to fairly represent Jains (who constitute 0.4 per cent of the adult population) and it had to “replace” 480 Kashmiri Muslims due to security issues. Instead, it interviewed the same number of Muslims from other regions.

So there could be sampling errors. Also, despite being the largest survey Pew has ever conducted outside the US, 30,000 is a tiny sliver of India’s 1.3 billion. We also don’t know much about income/ caste/ rural/ urban and other possible biases. This means error levels could be quite high.  

Given those caveats, some attitudes seem common across religions. Most respondents believe they have the freedom to practice their respective religion. Most say tolerance for other religions is important. Most oppose marrying outside of their respective religions — this is not gender-specific — most are strongly opposed to either men or women marrying exogamously. Most would prefer to live with only co-religionists as neighbours. Most believe religious ceremonies to mark births, deaths, marriages, etc., are important. A plurality prays regularly.

Also, regardless of religious affiliation, most respondents identify with a specific caste (the Upper Castes have been lumped together as “General Category” in the report although the questionnaire is more nuanced).

Despite all the noise about conversions, and anti-conversion laws in many states, there appears to be very little actual impact. The survey threw up few net conversions. It asked two key questions — which faith were you brought up in, and which religion do you now claim to follow? Insofar as net conversions have happened, these appear to be converts to Christianity in the southern region.

There’s a surprising degree of atheism embedded in the ranks of those who claim religious affiliation. As many as 3 per cent of all respondents claimed not to believe in God at all, and 17 per cent were “less certain” about divinity, while claiming religious affiliations. This included 6 per cent of Muslim respondents, 6 per cent of Sikhs, 2 per cent of Christians and 2 per cent of Hindus. The fact that 33 per cent of Buddhists don’t believe in God is not surprising since many streams of Buddhism are agnostic.

Judging by responses to questions about discrimination, this varies in type and quantum from region to region. In North India, around 40 per cent of Muslims claimed to have faced discrimination in the past 12 months, while southern Dalits claimed to face higher levels of discrimination than in the North.

When we look at regional differences, another finding gels with Hindutva campaign rhetoric and voting patterns: The North Indian Hindu who believes religion is important, also believes speaking Hindi is a mark of “true Indians”, and is also a committed Bharatiya Janata Party voter.

Net-net, the survey throws up mostly unsurprising stuff. Ghettoisation is part of being a true Indian. Villages are organised in clusters of the same castes, and most Indians would prefer that pattern to perpetrate in urban clusters. The fact that people from all religions still retain caste identity shows how deeply that stratification continues.

The combination of atheism plus religious identity shows that, for many people, religion is about social acceptance. Religions are defined by the visible. What are practitioners allowed to eat? Who can they can sleep with? How do they dispose of the dead? What do they celebrate?  What people may actually believe is between them, and the deities they may, or may not believe in.