Inside the campaign to malign India in the West

Prof. Dr Salvatore Babones is an American sociologist, and an Associate Professor at the University of Sydney. His book ‘Methods for Quantitative Macro-Comparative Research’ is a standard source for the statistical analysis of international comparisons.

He is the Author or Editor of fourteen books and several dozen academic research articles.

The Pew Research Center is neither anti-Semitic nor anti-Hindu, but precisely because of its perceived objectivity, it has become an institutional target for the opponents of both Israel and India. … Pew’s stellar reputation has made it a particularly valuable asset for both anti-India and anti-Israel activists.

On December 6, 2022, a 45-year-old woman was arrested in Birmingham, England – on suspicion of praying. She was silently standing on a public footpath in the vicinity of a provider of abortion services. The Police asked her if she was ‘part of a protest’, to which she answered ‘no’. They then asked her – ‘are you praying ?’, to which she answered ‘I might be praying in my head’. That was enough to provoke her arrest. Nine days later she was charged with ‘protesting and engaging in an act that is intimidating to service users’. This, despite the fact that at the time of her putative silent prayer, the facility was closed (i.e., there were no patients present to be intimidated by her silent reflections).

If any country could be suspected of harbouring a social hostility to religion, it might be today’s largely atheistic United Kingdom. Or militantly secular France. Or social democratic Sweden. Or postmodern Australia, where a bill to prohibit ‘discrimination on the basis of a person’s religious belief or activity’ was withdrawn in the face of determined resistance. Or thinking instead of countries where anti-religious sentiment is targeted toward specific religious minorities, we might think of Myanmar (where more than a million Rohingya Muslims have been forced to flee the country), Saudi Arabia (where Christian guest workers are not allowed to worship publicly), or Argentina (where feminist activists vandalise churches every year on International Women’s Day).

According to Pew – India, the worst in the world for Social Hostility to religion

But according to the highly-respected Pew Research Center, the worst country in the world for social hostility to religion is … India. Notwithstanding their own surveys showing that ‘the vast majority of Indians say they are very free today to practice their religion’ and ‘relatively few Muslims say their community faces ‘a lot’ of discrimination’ in the Hindu-majority country, Pew rated India the worst country in the world for ‘acts of religious hostility by private individuals, organizations or groups in society’. India is joined in the bottom five by Nigeria (where Christian churches regularly come under attack from Islamist militants), Afghanistan (where the Taliban Government runs a regime of state-sponsored terror against any religious nonconformity), Israel (inevitably), and Mali (where Sunni Muslim fundamentalists are waging aggressive terror campaign against Sufi practices).

Israel has long been demonised by international human rights organisations, so much so that it has become difficult for non-specialists to distinguish between legitimate criticism of the country and modern anti-Semitism masquerading as objective analysis. Well-informed readers instinctively discount shrill reporting about Israel, knowing that nearly all accounts of human rights abuses in Israel are thoroughly politicised. Most are unaware, that the same is now true of India. The longstanding anti-Israel coalition of university academics, international human rights organisations, and Islamist media now targets India using the same toolkit it developed a generation ago for its attacks on Israel. Thinly disguised anti-Hinduism has become the new anti-Semitism.

Of the eleven countries identified by Pew as having ‘very high’ levels of social hostility to religion, eight are officially Islamic Republics, one (Nigeria) is a highly fractious Muslim-majority quasi-Democracy, and the other two are India and Israel. An active constellation of pro-Israel civil society groups in the United States secures Israel from defamation by US Government and Government-sponsored organisations (OIRF, USCIRF, Freedom House) and ensures US support for Israel at the United Nations, but India has no such protection. As a result, India has come to be vilified by both American and United Nations organisations. Not only has India been rated the worst country in the world on Pew’s religious Social Hostilities Index (SHI) for five years running, but it also has long rap sheets at the OIRF, the USCIRF, Freedom House, and the OHCHR.

India is the world’s largest Democracy, accounting for roughly half of the world’s people who are able to voice their opinions in free and fair elections. It is also the only well-institutionalised Democracy on the Eurasian mainland between Israel in the far west and South Korea in the far east. It is the main democratic bulwark against expanding Chinese influence in the region. Unfortunately, attacks on India’s human rights record have the potential to drive a wedge between India and the United States, a possibility that carries with it major implications for the future shape of Eurasian geopolitics. In freedom of religion, India’s enemies seem to believe that they have found a fault line that can be prised open through the strategic application of political pressure.

In a bizarre case of strange bedfellows, it seems that Islamist activist groups are attempting to exploit the lobbying power of American Christian missionaries to have India named a ‘Country of Particular Concern’ under the US International Religious Freedom Act, an action that could lead to American economic sanctions on India and a serious deterioration in US-India relations. If India really were hostile to the free practice of religion, it would of course raise legitimate concerns, even if those concerns carried with them unfortunate geopolitical implications. But democratic countries should not allow themselves to be set against each other by spurious allegations feeding on mutual ignorance. Western democracies owe it not only to India, but to their own self-interest, to get the record straight.

Dogma without data

The Pew Research Center in Washington, DC, is the world’s premier non-Governmental survey research organisation. Studiously non-partisan, Pew is one of the few think tanks to retain a high reputation for political neutrality even in the hyper-partisan environment of twenty-first century America.

Between November 2019 and March 2020, just before the coronavirus pandemic made face-to-face interviews impossible, Pew commissioned a major survey on religion in India.

The research was carried out by RTI International, a not-for-profit contract research organisation based in North Carolina. The sample was nationally representative with the exception of four small States and Union Territories (collectively comprising less than 0.5% of India’s population) and a few insurgency-affected Districts. A total of 29,999 households were surveyed in 17 different languages. Incredibly, the survey achieved a response rate of 84% in urban areas and 86% in rural areas. This, in an age when the response rates achieved by commercial polling firms rarely break above 5%.

The Pew team’s headline takeaway from this mammoth survey effort was that :

More than 70 years after India became free from colonial rule, Indians generally feel their country has lived up to one of its post-Independence ideals : A society where followers of many religions can live and practice freely.Indians of all these religious backgrounds overwhelmingly say they are very free to practice their faiths. Indians see religious tolerance as a central part of who they are as a Nation. Across the major religious groups, most people say it is very important to respect all religions to be ‘truly Indian’. And tolerance is a religious as well as civic value: Indians 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.

These are not a sampling of rosy sentences cherry-picked from the body of Pew’s 233-page report. They are the main conclusions summarised on the first page of the text. Looking at the specific results for adherents of minority religions, 89% of Indian Muslims and 89% of Indian Christians say they are ‘very free’ to practice their own religions. Only 2% of each group claims that it is ‘not free’ to practice its own religion. If survey research really is a social science and hard numbers mean anything at all, these results offer seemingly conclusive evidence that religious minorities in India do not face systematic social hostility or government restrictions.

Digging deeper into the survey, 24% of Indian Muslims believe there is ‘a lot of discrimination’ against Muslims in Indian society, compared to 72% who believe there is ‘not a lot of discrimination’, with the remainder on the fence. The figures for Christians are similar : 18% believe there is a lot of discrimination while 77% believe there is not. For comparison, India’s Hindus feel almost exactly the same way about discrimination against their own community : 21% believe there is a lot of discrimination while 75% believe there is not. Although adherents of every major religion in India consider intercommunal violence a major problem in the country, the adherents of all major religions rate unemployment, corruption, and crime as bigger problems. More than 90% of Indians in every major religious community believe that to be truly Indian, it is important to respect all religions. There is simply no social scientific support for the widely-disseminated thesis that India is a country riven by religious divides.

And yet … another group within the very same Pew Research Center has published 14 consecutive annual reports claiming that India had among the highest levels of social hostility to religion in the world. Notably, these claims long predate the controversial Prime Ministership of Narendra Modi, which began in mid-2014.

In its first international religious freedom report (published in 2009, based on data for 2007), Pew had already ranked India second-worst in the world on its Social Hostilities Index, trailing only Iraq.

India has remained (along with Israel) a democratic outlier among countries identified as having ‘very high’ social hostility to religion ever since.

These damning evaluations are based primarily on the Pew team’s analysis of incidents recorded in the annual US State Department OIRF reports, supplemented by incidents highlighted in the US Government-sponsored USCIRF reports and a smattering of other sources. Pew reviews these incident reports and codes those involving social hostility to religion, looking for answers to a series of yes/no questions about religiously-motivated harassment and violence. In general, all it takes is for one incident of recorded harassment or violence for a country to receive a 100% negative score on the relevant dimension.

Unsurprisingly, Pew found that in India, every form of social hostility has been recorded to occur at least once in every calendar year. The population size bias of such an index is obvious : Everything that can happen is likely to happen somewhere in a country of 1.4 billion people. More subtle is the potential for information-availability bias. For example, Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States all received (along with India and Israel) the worst possible marks for ‘harassment or intimidation motivated by religious hatred or bias’ in both 2019 and 2020, but 25 other countries recorded not a single incident of religious hatred in either year. For religious vandalism, it was the same pattern : Perfect bad marks for India, Israel, and the Anglosphere, but not a single recorded incident in 93 other countries. Ditto physical assaults (this time, with 118 perfectly peaceful countries).

Australians in particular might be interested to learn that in every year from 2015 through 2020 ‘organized groups use[d] force or coercion in an attempt to dominate public life with their perspective on religion, including preventing some religious groups from operating’ in their country. It is not clear exactly what groups these were. More broadly, it should not take more than 14 years for such a technically competent social scientific organisation as the Pew Research Center to ascertain that its international religious freedom reports are plagued by blatant methodological shortcomings and ridiculous results.

The poorly constructed methodology of Pew’s Social Hostilities Index all but ensures that India will perform badly on the metric, so much so that it cannot be ruled out that the methodology may have been designed to achieve this result.

Moreover, by the very act of turning the US State Department’s International Religious Freedom reports into a quantitative index, Pew all but ensured that politically-motivated groups would attempt to game those reports in order to discredit specific target countries. It seems reasonable to assume that activist groups are not out to get Albania, Eritrea, or Guyana, all highly troubled countries that received perfect scores on the Social Hostilities Index in 2020. However India, like Israel, is much more likely to be the target of politically-motivated information warfare.

(Courtesy : Excerpts from an Article under the same title on voiceofindia.me, 6th June 2023)

The poorly constructed methodology of Pew’s Social Hostilities Index all but ensures that India will perform badly on the metric !

Pew rated India the worst in the world for ‘acts of religious hostility by private individuals, organizations or groups in society !