Milan welcomes Neha Sahgal from the Pew Research Center to discuss the role of religion in Indian society. The two also discuss religious tolerance and segregation, Hindu nationalism, and whether or not India is becoming more secular.
Over the last two-and-a-half years, Milan and his guests have spent a lot of time on the podcast talking about some of the biggest questions facing Indian society. What is driving an increase in religious nationalism? To what extent is religious intolerance on the rise? Is caste morphing from a marker of hierarchy to a marker of difference? And what, if anything, does it mean to be truly Indian?
These are just some of the questions a landmark new study by the Pew Research Center—released today—asks and answers, drawing on an important new survey of religion, identity, and belonging. On the show this week, Milan is joined by Neha Sahgal, associate director of research at Pew and one of the lead investigators of this new work.
Milan and Neha discuss the coexistence of religious tolerance and religious segregation in India, the salience of caste identity and Hindu nationalism, and the evidence for “secularization theory.” Plus, the two discuss why South India is an outlier in many respects and what larger lessons the study holds for Indian democracy.
Milan 00:11
Welcome to Grand Tamasha, a co-production of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Hindustan Times. I'm your host, Milan Vaishnav.
Over the last two and a half years, we have spent a lot of time on this podcast talking about some of the biggest questions facing Indian society. What is driving an increase in religious nationalism? To what extent is religious intolerance on the rise? Is caste morphing from a marker of hierarchy to a marker of difference? And what, if anything, does it mean to be truly Indian?
These are just some of the questions a landmark new study by the Pew Research Center released today asks and answers, drawing on an important new study of religion, identity, and belonging. To talk more about what's in this report, I'm joined today by Neha Sahgal, associate director of research at Pew and one of the lead investigators of this new work. Neha, congratulations on the new report, and thanks for coming on the show.
Neha 01:00
Thank you for having me, Milan.
Milan 01:02
So, before we get into the report – our listeners are scattered all throughout the world. I want to ask you about what Pew does. Here in Washington, D.C., Pew is a household name. We all read your reports; we all go to your website. But people elsewhere might not be as familiar. So, just tell us in your own words, how would you describe what Pew is and what Pew does?
Neha 01:23
Well, thank you for that kind introduction, Milan. Always nice to hear that people are going to our reports. Sometimes, we put them out there and we're like, “Oh, I don't know if anybody's really going to care.”
At the Pew Research Center, we like to refer to ourselves as a “fact tank,” and we say that term differentiate ourselves from the think tank world. We see ourselves as generating data and representing public opinion as best we can, but we do not take any normative positions on the data that we generate. We are nonpartisan, we are non-advocacy. There is one normative position that we take, and that's part of our mission: we believe that knowledge is a public good, and that a good democracy and an informed citizenry deserves good data about the trends shaping their society. But we have no commercial interest in doing this. We are mission-driven. Our polls are not commissioned; we do not have any advertisers. We are funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, and for large projects such as the India project, we also receive funding from the John Templeton Foundation, which has long supported our efforts to try and understand religious change around the world. And the reason we study religion is not because we want to promote religion or any one particular religion. We study religion because we feel that it's an important part of people's lives, and in order to understand our society, it's important to understand how that society understand this religion. So, those are some of the main things regarding our mission and why we do what we do.
Milan 03:06
So, as you point out at the very top of this report, this is Pew's most comprehensive exploration of India to date. You surveyed 30,000 Indians between November of 2019 and March of 2020 on a range of issues: religion, identity, nationalism, politics, caste, food, so on and so forth. Anyone who's ever done surveys knows this is a massive endeavor. In my own experience – I don't know if you feel the same – whenever you do a survey of India, people are dying to know the details of how you did it, how credible the data are, and so on and so forth. So, before we get into the substance, just tell us a little bit about that process. I know from being in contact with you years ago that this was really a process that had dozens of different steps that went into producing this final report.
Neha 03:57
People ask me, “How long does it take to get to India?” and I say three years, because that is how long it took us to do this study from start to finish. We began this endeavor roughly three years ago really not sure what we would be able to do in India, and so our first step was to do some qualitative work. We talked to a number of experts, including yourself; we organized focus groups all around India; and we started to sort of ask these questions about identity, national identity.
And we were trying to gauge two things: How freely do people talk about these kinds of thorny issues, and how do they tell their story? We found Indians quite enthusiastic to talk about politics, to talk about their opinion on these really controversial issues, and we found they had a particular way of telling their story. No matter how many focus groups we did, [no matter] what part of the country, people were telling their story in a particular way. So, we used all that data that we generated to then devise a questionnaire, and then that gets into the more formal process of, what are the answer options going to be? How's the question going to be phrased? How do we prevent people from just giving the answer that's socially desirable or sort of [politically correct]? So, then we get to questionnaire design, and then we did some test interviews. And normally, for other projects, we'll do like a hundred test interviews, but for this one we did one thousand testimonials.
Milan 05:23
I mean, that's basically its own survey on its own.
Neha 05:25
Exactly right, and in a few different states in India. But we wanted to do that for a few reasons. First of all, we want to test all our sampling. There are some challenges with doing fieldwork in India, especially face-to-face, which is how this study was done. We wanted to test out all the translations because equivalence in Asian languages – not just Indian languages, Asian languages writ large – with English can be a bit difficult. So, we tested out translations, we tested out all the fieldwork procedures, we tested out how respondents were being approached by the interviewers, and then once those several thousand interviews were done, we then launched into the main fieldwork of this study, which took approximately four months to complete. 29,999 respondents – we were one short. Drives me crazy. Where's that one person that we missed?
Milan 06:16
So, let me get to the substance now. One of the headline findings of this report – of course, we'll link to the report on the show page, it's hot off the presses – is that Indians see religious tolerance as a central part of who they are as a nation. So, it's not just a religious value: tolerance is actually a deeply held kind of civic virtue, I guess you could say.
Now, we've heard a lot in the press from scholars and from experts about religious intolerance in India in recent years. How do you square these two things together? On the one hand, a finding of a deeply held conviction of religious tolerance, but then a widespread feeling and a sense of anxiety on the part of many that actually religious minorities are under threat.
Neha 07:02
Yeah, your question reminds me of one of those posts that often go viral on social media where you post a picture of a dress, and some people say it's a tan dress, and some people see it as a blue dress, and each side is completely convinced that whatever they're seeing is the objective reality. And of course, this is just for fun, but I do think it sort of underlines the point: what is objective reality, and what are different ways of looking at the same thing?
We find in our work that Indians feel that their society is highly religiously free. So, when we ask people, “How free are you to practice your religion?” the vast majority of people say they are very free. And this is not just true of the Hindu majority – this is also true for minority communities. Majorities of Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists – they all say they're very free. They also say that respecting other religions is a core part of what being truly Indian means to them, and what being Muslim means to them, or what being Sikh or Hindu means to them. So, of course, in the news, media, etc., you might see reports of social hostilities involving religion in India, and that's one way you can be looking at incidents of social hostilities, one way of trying to understand what's happening with religion in India, but what we wanted to do is provide another way of looking at the same thing, and that is, what is people's perception of the kind of society they live in? How do they understand their reality? So, when we asked questions about religious freedom, etc., we actually found that Indians perceived their day-to-day lives to be quite free.
Of course, that isn't the whole story. There's more to it than that. We also find that Indians live highly religiously segregated lives and that the perception of difference among religious groups far outweighs the perception of similarity among religious groups.
Milan 09:01
So, this is actually a great segue to what I wanted to ask you about next, which is that when it comes to social networks, the report finds that Indians generally stick to their own religious groups – in particular, when it comes to the friends that they have, and especially when it comes to who they marry. So, if you kind of want to reframe it, there are both high levels of religious tolerance and, as you said, high levels of religious segregation. Tell us a little bit about, on an everyday basis, how the segregation actually manifests itself.
Neha 09:32
It manifests itself in several ways, and you pointed out a couple of good examples. Who do people want to marry and what kind of marriage do they think is okay and what kind is not? We find that the vast majority of people say it is very important to stop interreligious marriage. So, most Hindus say it is very important to stop Hindu women as well as Hindu men from marrying into other religions, and an even higher share of Muslims share this sentiment.
Milan 10:02
Let me interrupt you for one second, because this is really important, right? Because there has been a lot of focus on anti-conversion laws, on anxieties in the Hindu majority about Hindu women in particular marrying minorities. What you're saying is that you also find that minority groups like Muslims are also anxious about their men and their women marrying people of other faiths.
Neha 10:29
If anything, they seem even more anxious about it. So, we find a higher share of Muslims than Hindus saying that it is very important to stop Muslim women from marrying outside their religion. So, this is a sentiment that's felt widely across India among various religious groups.
We also find that people stick to their own when it comes to their friendship circles. They say that either all of their friends share their same religion or most of their friends share their same religion. And this is not just true for Hindus – Hindus form the majority of the population, so it makes sense that they have more chances to interact with other Hindus and fewer chances to, say, interact with Buddhists. But this is also true of groups that just form a small sliver of the population, like Jains, for example, who are less than half a percent [of India's population]. Even for them, they say “most or all of my friends are also Jain.” So, we find this high level of segregation in people's personal lives.
Another way that we try to measure religious segregation was asking people if they would be willing to accept a person of another religion in their neighborhood. This is commonly asked in sociology – in sociology, it's actually called a measure of social distance, which now means something entirely different than what it was originally meant to be. So, we asked Hindus, “Would you be willing to accept a Muslim in your neighborhood? Would you be willing to accept a Buddhist in your neighborhood?” We find that most people don't go so far as to say they want to live in religiously segregated neighborhoods, but still, a substantial share of people would rather have certain other religions out of their neighborhoods. So, for example, just over a third of Hindus, 36 percent, say they would not be willing to accept a Muslim in their neighborhood, and a majority of Jains say they would not be willing to accept a Muslim in their neighborhood. And even among other religious groups, it's a substantial minority that would rather live in a religiously segregated neighborhood. That's some of the ways in which it manifests itself.
Milan 12:32
And does it work in the reverse? Do Muslims also feel as strongly that they would prefer to live in a neighborhood with other Muslims as opposed to Hindus or Jains or others?
Neha 12:42
So, it's a slightly smaller share of Muslims who say they would rather not have a Hindu in their neighborhood. Among Hindus, about 36 percent say they wouldn't want a Muslim in their neighborhood, and among Muslims, it's 16 percent. However, we find that roughly a quarter of Muslims would rather not have a Sikh or a Christian or a Buddhist in their neighborhood, which is exactly the same share of Hindus who say they would rather not have these groups around them.
Milan 13:07
Interesting. Just to make a connection here – it's a bit of a tangent – as you know, we've been doing this work on Indian Americans with Devesh Kapur and Sumitra Badrinathan, and one of the things we found with the Indian diaspora in the United States is that their social networks, when it comes to their Indian American friends, are dominated by people who are co-religionists. So, Hindus are friends with Hindus, Muslims are friends with Muslims – even more than Indian region of origin, so say Maharashtra or West Bengal, and even more than caste, which I think is a kind of interesting finding to see how this sort of thing maybe travels.
I want to come to the kind of elephant in the room, as it were: the issue of Hindu nationalism. As you know better than I, this is a term that doesn't have a universal definition. It's also a term that's become kind of a shorthand – we say the BJP is the Hindu nationalist party, Narendra Modi is implementing Hindu nationalist policies. In this survey, how do you conceptualize Hindu nationalism? And how do people who have some affinity to that dogma or that worldview differ in terms of their social attitudes?
Neha 14:17
I'm happy to hear you say there's no universally accepted definition of Hindu nationalism, because when we were developing this questionnaire as well as working on this study, we couldn't find what is the accepted way to define Hindu nationalism, and I'm happy to hear you say that because it's not just that we were missing some article published somewhere. We do not, in this study, define – it's not our definitive definition of who is a Hindu nationalist or what is Hindu nationalism.
We do, however, find that certain elements of national identity as well as politics are highly correlated with each other, and there's a certain group of people that chose affinity toward ways of thinking about national identity and politics that differentiates them from other Hindus. Now, whether or not this group can be called Hindu nationalists can be debated, but here's some elements of what we found.
For a majority of Hindus, being a Hindu is crucial to being truly Indian: 64 percent of Hindus say that it is very important to be Hindu to be truly Indian. Closely related is the connection between language and national identity: we also find that for a majority of Hindus, 59 percent, speaking Hindi is crucial to being truly Indian. Now, Hindi is one of dozens of languages spoken in India – of course, it's more commonly spoken than the others, but again, it's just one of several dozens. These two elements of national identity, the religious dimension as well as the linguistic dimension, are highly correlated with each other. Hindus who say being a Hindu is crucial to Indian identity also tend to say that speaking Hindi is important, or it's very important to Indian identity.
And these positions are highly political. So, we find that the BJP's vote share is significantly higher among Hindus who link these two dimensions with national identity – [those that] say being a Hindu is very important [and that] speaking Hindi is very important. A majority of that group says they voted for the BJP. The BJP's vote share falls significantly among those who see a slight connection, but not [one that is] as crucial, and it falls further among people who don't see a connection between religion or language and national identity.
If you look at all three together – what share of Hindus say speaking Hindi is very important, being Hindu is very important, and they voted for the BJP, so what share of Hindus fall into all three dimensions – we find 30 percent of Hindus falling into all three. And this 30 percent differs considerably from other Hindus in various ways. They are different in terms of their regional location, how they're spread out throughout the country. So, huge differences there. They observe religion in a different way than other Hindus.
And one dimension that kind of brings us back to where we started, the story of religious segregation in India – this 30 percent lives a more religiously segregated life than other Hindus. They are more likely to say they wouldn't want a Muslim in their neighborhood. They are also more likely to say they wouldn't want a Christian in their neighborhood, but they are also more likely to say they wouldn't want a Christian or a Sikh or a Buddhist or a Jain in their neighborhood. For this group, the majority of their friends are also Hindu. In fact, they say all their friends are Hindu. And they are much more anxious about interreligious marriage. This sentiment that interreligious marriage of Hindu women should be stopped, that it's very important to stop it, is much more widespread among this group. So, this feeling of religious segregation is considerably higher among this particular group of Hindus when you compare them with other Hindus.
Milan 18:19
So, I just want to complicate the picture that you've laid out – which is incredibly important – a little bit more, which is that you also go on to say in the report that for many Hindus, there's no contradiction between valuing religious diversity in principle and this feeling that Hindus are somehow more “authentically Indian” than those from other faiths. So, have you thought about how people are reconciling these two different things?
Neha 18:47
I think it's a really good question. I'll take your question back a little bit further – that is, we also find that for a lot of Indians, there's no contradiction between saying tolerance is a national value and living a religiously segregated life. So, people who are highly religiously segregated are also just as committed to the principles of tolerance as people who are less religiously segregated. And I think over and over again, the data points to a unique Indian understanding of pluralism, which is in direct contrast to maybe a more Western understanding of pluralism, where many Western societies seem to aspire to a “melting pot” concept of pluralism. Indians overwhelmingly live together separately. They see their society more as a patchwork quilt, with clear lines of separation among religious groups, and that is their concept of pluralism.
Now, to bring it back to the question you just asked, what about diversity and saying that some people are more authentically Indian than others? Why is there some kind of normative valence we're adding to the word diversity which makes seem like these two attitudes are contradicting each other? Could it be here on the one hand that for this group – and it's clear in the data, actually, that for this group, diversity may not mean that everybody is the same. You could live in a diverse society and you could see diversity as a public good, you could see it as good for the country, and at the same time, you could still say that a certain group of people, or their religious group, Hindus, are more authentically Indian than people of other [religions] – [but that nevertheless] it's fine that they live in the country, that's a good thing that people of other religions live in the country.
Milan 20:38
So, it's interesting, because there's this debate in this literature about whether diverse societies are melting pots or salad bowls. I mean, the image that comes to mind from what you're saying is like a thali, where you have a plate with little bowls of different things that are all kind of in the same place and yet they're sort of separate in some ways.
Neha 20:58
Yeah, or “good fences make good neighbors” – there's an old English play about that, I believe. And that is the understanding of pluralism as well as of diversity. Diversity may not mean that everybody is the same or should be treated the same.
Milan 21:15
So, let me come to another hot button issue, which is caste. The report finds – again, I think, somewhat surprisingly – that a relatively small share of Indians believe caste discrimination is a major issue in Indian society. It could exist, but it may not be a major issue. But you do note elsewhere that caste remains a potent factor in Indian society, there's no denying that. So, unpack both of these findings. On the one hand, discrimination on the basis of caste – people don't seem to be up in arms about it to a certain extent, yet caste is still very much there as a basic element of social reality.
Neha 21:55
Most people don't see evidence of widespread caste discrimination in India. Some do – it's a significant minority who do – but for the vast majority of people, there just isn't evidence of widespread caste discrimination in the country.
The share who do see caste discrimination, they vary quite a bit regionally. Perhaps strikingly, folks in the South are more likely to say there's widespread caste discrimination in India than people elsewhere. Now, this is striking because the South has seen a number of anti-caste movements, and in fact, one author, Ashutosh Varshney, has attributed the South's economic growth to the flattening of caste hierarchies. So, how is it that people in the South, they're seeing more evidence of widespread caste discrimination?
Well, it could be a couple of factors. One, they could be saying, “Well, elsewhere in the country, there's widespread caste discrimination.” But the finding could also point to the fact that what you perceive as discrimination could also be contextual. It could depend on what your perception is of what is fair and what is acceptable behavior toward people of different castes.
And that's where we get to the second finding that you pointed to: caste remains a fracturing line in Indian society, and it is a fracturing line and a segregating line in much the same way that religion is a segregating line. People keep their friendship circles confined to their caste, so most people say either all or most of their friends share their same caste. There's also widespread negative sentiment toward inter-caste marriage, much like there is negative sentiment toward interreligious marriage. Most people say that it is very important to stop women and men in their community from marrying into other castes. So, much in the same way that India is a religiously segregated society, it is also a caste segregated society.
Milan 23:49
So, I want to come back to a question about religion, but it's a slightly different frame, which is the issue of religious conversion. This report and the survey measures people's views on whether conversion is desirable, but it also measures the extent of conversion in practice. And if I'm reading the data correctly – and please correct me if I'm wrong – you conclude that just around 2 percent or so of respondents actually experienced a change in their faith. Is that accurate?
Neha 24:20
That's accurate. Let me explain a little bit about how we measure that. Conversion is something we measure around the world – we've done it in the U.S., we've done it in Europe and elsewhere. We ask people, “What is your current religion, if any?” And then later in the survey, we ask people, “And how were you raised? In what religion were you raised?” You compare the two, and you get a sense for the rate of religious switching. In India, we find that the vast majority of people stay in the religion in which they were raised. So, most Hindus that were raised Hindu are also currently Hindu. That stability in the share of religious groups is also matched by very little switching, very little movement in between groups. In particular, we find a small share of people raised Hindu but no longer Hindu: that's less than 1 percent, about 0.7. They round up to 1 percent. But about the same share were raised in another religion but now call themselves Hindu. So, this is striking because theologically, there's no basis for converting into Hinduism, it's a non-proselytizing religion. Still, there are some people who nonetheless weren't raised Hindu and now say that they are Hindu. So, the rate of switching out of Hinduism is matched by the rate of switching into Hinduism, leading to no change overall.
Milan 25:39
Net-net, it's a wash, basically.
Neha 25:40
It's a wash, exactly. To the extent that there is religious switching in India and some net gains for a particular group in India, it is among Christians. Among Christians, we do find that the rate of switching in is somewhat higher than other groups and that fewer people switching out. So, overall, in the adult population in India, we find that 0.4 percent are former Hindus who are now Christian. And there's some interesting things about where this group is regionally located. First of all, it tends to be heavily concentrated in the south of the country. The south of the country already has a larger Christian population than other parts of the country, and as a result of religious switching, we do see that the share of Christians in the south rises from 6 percent to 7 percent. Six percent raised Christian; 7 percent currently Christian. There are also some in the east, where the tribal communities tend to be more prevalent.
If you take a look at the caste breakdown of former Hindus who are now Christian, you also see a pretty interesting pattern: the vast majority of Hindu converts to Christianity are lower caste. Very few of them belong to general caste categories. And this group is also much more likely to perceive widespread caste discrimination in India: about half of them say there is widespread caste discrimination in India, and that compares with just about 20 percent overall among Indians who see widespread caste discrimination.
Milan 27:09
I mean, I think that that tracks a lot with other studies which have talked about a movement out of Hinduism towards Christianity because of caste discrimination and so on and so forth. But just to kind of tie this up before we move on, these findings, while they show a great deal of heterogeneity and internal variation, where I end up is that the numbers, in a population of 1.3 billion people, in terms of religious switching are really, really small.
Neha 27:42
You know, there's a couple ways of looking at this. In absolute terms, it would take somebody who has greater expertise in India to say whether it's a big number or a small number. I can talk in relative terms because we've measured religious switching around the world: Latin America, the U.S., Western and Eastern Europe, everywhere. From what I have seen in other countries, this is a very, very small number. It's really a sliver of the population. What that means for India is not my place to comment.
Milan 28:10
Right, right. This is getting back to the fact tank part of putting it out there for other people to fight over.
Let me come back to something that is much debated in the social sciences, which is that there's this idea – it's called secularization theory – that as countries get richer and more developed, their people tend to become less religious. Not everyone agrees about this. There is a fierce debate in the scholarship, but generally, this seems to be the prevailing notion. We know, of course, particularly since the mid-1980s and then after liberalization in the early 1990s, India has grown economically really rapidly. Yet this report doesn't seem to find much evidence that the importance of religion is declining. Tell us a little bit about what the numbers show. Is there important variation across different subgroups?
Neha 29:07
So, of course, secularization theory is based largely on the experience of Western European countries. Now, the big question is, as the rest of the world industrializes and achieves rapid economic growth, do they go the same direction as Western European countries or not? In India, we find several indications that India is nowhere close to losing its religion – Indian people continue to be quite religious.
There are a few different ways we can measure this. First of all, we take a look at the census: the share of people who say they have no religion is miniscule, and it shows no change over time. A pretty stable, very, very small group.
Another way we try to measure any kind of secularization in India or people losing their religion is by asking people, “How important is religion to you currently? Is it very important, somewhat important...?” And then we ask people, “How important was it to your family growing up?” The vast majority of people say that religion is important in their life right now, and that it was important to them and to their family growing up. There's very little movement – about a 4-percentage point movement between the two. That 4-percentage point movement is concentrated among Hindus. It's a slight downward, but still, the vast majority of people “both/and,” saying religion continues to be very important.
Another way we can also get at this is by taking a look at more educated people, comparing them with less educated people, and people living in urban areas to rural areas, just to see, does greater economic development or having more education or more income, etc., does that impact how religious you are? And we don't find that connection. More and less well-educated people are just as religious. Urban people and people living in rural areas are also just as religious. So far, we see very little evidence, if any, of India moving in a direction where people are losing their religion. I hesitate sometimes to use the word secular in the Indian context, just because it means something so different – the political ideology.
Milan 31:15
It's become kind of a charged term.
Neha 31:17
Exactly. So, you're trying to find other ways of saying it. But there's very little evidence that Indians are moving in a direction where they are giving less importance to religion.
Milan 31:27
So, anyhow, I want to end this conversation by asking you about two big themes, or two big questions, and the first again comes back to something that we discussed earlier. Many scholars, many op-ed writers, many analysts take the fact that the south of India is different as a given. The South can be different in many ways from the North, but in this particular report, you find that South India differs from the rest of the country in terms of their views on religion, in terms of their views on national identity, and frankly, several other metrics. Now, without asking you to read a laundry list of all the ways the South is different, tell us a little bit about what you found some of the most striking differences are.
Neha 32:15
Let me point to a couple that I think will help color this picture in a little bit. One is attitudes toward beef and Hindu identity. In this study, we got into, what does Hindu identity mean to people? And we asked several questions about, can a person who, say, never goes to temple – could such a person be Hindu? How about a person who doesn't believe in God – could such a person be Hindu? We asked a whole series of items like this.
Milan 32:42
Kind of, what are the requirements of being part of this affinity group?
Neha 32:47
Exactly. What disqualifies you from being a Hindu? Overall, we find that for a majority of Hindus, eating beef disqualifies a person from being a Hindu. And in fact, beef was the one thing that really stood out above all others. Hindu public opinion is divided on whether belief in God is essential, with 50 percent saying an atheist could be a Hindu and 50 percent saying an atheist can't be a Hindu. Temple was crucial for half of the public; for the other half, it doesn't matter. Praying, again – not crucial. But beef was the one thing for the majority of Indians, with 72 percent saying a person who eats beef cannot be a Hindu.
But there was considerable regional variation on this attitude. In the central and the north part of the country, which includes Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Himachal, this is a prevalent attitude – a widespread perception that eating beef disqualifies a person from being a Hindu. Less so in the South. In the South, you get half of people saying it's disqualifying, the other half saying it's not disqualifying. And even fewer people in the south say that believing in God is essential. There, we drop into 30 percent – 30 percent think if you don't believe in God, you can't be a Hindu, whereas the majority says believing in God is not crucial to being a Hindu. So, you just see this huge variation within the same religious group in what Hindu identity means to people and how crucial our religious beliefs as well as diet are to religious identity, and that attitude we find carries over into a number of other facets: politics, national identity, and so on.
Milan 34:34
Now, let me conclude with the following question, which might push you out of your comfort zone a little bit and edge into the normative, which is: your survey is a cross-section. It provides a snapshot in time. To the extent that you've surveyed the Indian public before, you can establish some longitudinal assessments. But as you think about what some of the key takeaways are from this really vast, really impressive, really painstakingly researched and detailed work – what are some final thoughts you might offer in terms of what this survey tells us about the kind of grand Indian democratic experiment circa 2021? I mean, next year, we'll be celebrating India's 75th anniversary of Independence. If you could just reflect and distill one or maybe two or three big-picture takeaways that you as somebody who has studied this stuff for a long time have internalized.
Neha 35:37
The data makes it quite clear that Indians perceive themselves to be a religiously divided society. They see themselves as a free society religiously, but they don't see much similarity with each other. So, when we ask Hindus, “How much do you have in common with Muslims in India?” They say not much. And Muslims return that sentiment, with the majority of Muslims saying that they're very different from the country's Hindus. The same perception is shared among other religious groups: Christians seeing themselves as very different from Sikhs, Sikhs seeing themselves as very different from Muslims. The perception of difference far outweighs in India today the perception of similarity.
But strikingly, when you take a look at people's attitudes toward religion, their religious beliefs, you actually find that they tend to agree with each other quite a bit. So, one good example is people's faith in aspects of religion that theologically don't neatly fit into their religion. So, belief in karma is a good example. The majority of Hindus believe in karma, but an identical share of Muslims also believe in karma. So, 77 percent among both groups believe in karma.
You might say, “Well, karma is kind of an Asian belief, and so that's really not a big deal.” But let's take a look alike at a really solidly Hindu belief: the Ganges has the power to purify. A majority of Hindus in India say the Ganges has the power to purify, but so do over a third of Christians and about a quarter of Muslims. And you find this evidence over and over again, that the way religion is practiced in India, people's religious beliefs, has a lot of carry-over beyond theological lines. Similarly, for Muslims in India – we've done surveys of Muslims in many other countries: Pakistan, Bangladesh, etc. When it comes to Muslims' religious attitudes, their belief in things like heaven or angels or so on, they resemble Indian Hindus more so than they resemble Pakistani Muslims or Bangladeshi Muslims.
So, in many ways, we find considerable evidence that people's attitudes across religious groups in India are quite similar on a range of issues. That is not to say that there aren't fault lines when it comes to questions of national identity and politics – I don't want to whitewash those fault lines. We've been very clear about them in the report. But in many ways, you see striking similarities. So, it's sort of like the juxtaposition of not seeing much in common, living a highly religiously segregated life, perceiving things to be highly divided – and at the same time, sharing things in common or sharing beliefs that cross over religious lines.
Milan 38:42
My guest on the show this week is Neha Sahgal. She is the Associate Director of Research at Pew and one of the lead authors of a brand-new Pew Research Center report entitled Religion in India: Tolerance and Segregation. It is out today. Neha, congratulations to you and your colleagues. This is a team effort on a massive new report. It is not only going to get a lot of attention in headlines in India, I predict, but it's also going to be the foundation for a lot of new scholarship and research. As you mentioned, Pew provides public goods. Eventually, this data will become publicly available for other analysts to look at. So, thank you to you and your team for doing this, and thanks for coming on the show.
Neha 39:22
Thank you for having me.