Indians committed to religious tolerance but prefer segregated communities: Report

Indians’ commitment to tolerance is accompanied by a strong preference for keeping religious communities segregated, a survey by US-based think-tank Pew said.

According to the report, Indians generally say they don't have much in common with members of other religious groups, and in most cases, their close friends come mainly or entirely from the same religious groups as them.

The survey collated information from 29,999 Indians via face-to-face interviews, in 17 languages, with adults living in 26 states and three union territories. The sample size included interviews with 22,975 Hindus, 3,336 Muslims, 1,782 Sikhs, 1,011 Christians, 719 Buddhists and 109 Jains. An additional 67 respondents belong to other religions or are religiously unaffiliated. Interviews for this nationally representative survey were conducted from November 2019 to March 2020.

According to the report, 84 per cent of the people said that to be “truly Indian,” it is very important to respect all religions. Indians also are united in the view that respecting other religions is a very important part of what it means to be a member of their own religious community.

People in all six major religious groups said they are very free to practice their faiths, and most say that people of other faiths also are very free to practice their own religion. However, roughly two-thirds of Hindus said it is very important to stop Hindu women or Hindu men from marrying into other religious communities. Interestingly, Muslims were more opposed to inter-religious marriage, with 80 per cent of respondents saying it is very important to stop Muslim women from marrying outside their religion, and 76 per cent of respondents saying it is very important to stop Muslim men from doing so, according to the report.

Another key revelation from the survey was that Hindus closely associated their religious and linguistic identity with national identity, with two-thirds of respondents saying it is very important to be Hindu to be truly Indian, and a majority of those saying it is very important to speak Hindi to be truly Indian.

Hindus who strongly link Hindu and Indian identities also expressed a keen desire for religious segregation. For instance, 76 per cent of Hindus who say being Hindu is very important to being truly Indian felt it is very important to stop Hindu women from marrying into another religion. By comparison, 52 per cent of Hindus who place less importance on Hinduism’s role in Indian identity hold this view about inter-religious marriage, the report said.

The report also said that among Hindus, their national identity goes hand-in-hand with politics, with the ruling party at the Centre, the BJP, enjoying greater support among Hindus who closely associated their religious identity and the Hindi language with being truly Indian. According to the report, in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, 60 per cent 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 per cent among Hindu voters who feel less strongly about both these aspects of national identity.

The report also said that Muslims are more likely than Hindus to say the 1947 partition establishing the separate nations of India and Pakistan harmed Hindu-Muslim relations, with the predominant view among Indian Muslims being that the partition of the subcontinent was a bad thing for Hindu-Muslim relations, and only three-in-ten Muslims said it was a good thing.