Indian Politics & Policy Volume 3, Number 1, Spring 2020 | Page 66

Indian Politics & Policy
Up to 76 percent, with an inter-class
spread of only 4 percent, felt
that India belongs to citizens of all religions
equally, while only 15 percent (5
percent spread between classes) felt that
India belongs to only Hindus.
On the question of whether the
“government should treat minorities
in the same way as it treats the majority,”
39 percent fully agreed (with an 8
percent inter-class spread between Rich
42 percent and Poor 34 percent) and
24 percent somewhat agreed with this
position, with only 6 percent fully disagreeing.
This would seem to indicate
egalitarian attitudes toward minorities,
but this can be tricky to interpret. If respondents
start with a conscious or unconscious
prejudice that minorities are
being pandered to, then seemingly egalitarian
attitudes could conceal anti-minority
attitudes (in that respondents
who are for egalitarian treatment of minorities
could actually be expecting the
government to correct, from their point
of view, a bias toward minorities).
However, on the question, “giving
equal treatment to minorities is not
enough, the government should give
special treatment to minorities,” 27
percent fully and 25 percent somewhat
agreed and only 12 percent fully disagreed,
with small inter-class spreads in
each category of response.
On the question, “Even if it is not
liked by the majority, the government
must protect the interests of the minorities,”
37 percent (40–41 percent of
the Rich and Middle class) fully agreed,
28 percent somewhat agreed, and only
6 percent fully disagreed, indicating a
largely accommodative attitude to minorities,
more so among the Rich and
Middle class than the Lower and Poor.
On whether “minorities must
adopt the customs of the majority community,”
only 13 percent, with little inter-class
difference, fully agreed, while
27 percent (Rich 32 percent, Poor 24
percent) fully disagreed.
An important question is whether
there are significant differences in
responses to these questions across regions
given the actual result in which
the BJP swept most of the North (Hindi-speaking
states plus Punjab and Jammu
& Kashmir) and West, doing less
well in the South and East.
The findings from regional disaggregation
of the response are that accommodative
and pluralist attitudes to
minorities largely prevail in all regions,
with the South being more accommodative/less
majoritarian on most
questions, but counter-intuitively less so
on some. Only 15 percent in the South
justified the demolition of the Babri
Mosque, while 39 percent (West, comprising
Gujarat, Maharashtra, and
Goa), 37 percent (East, comprising
West Bengal, Odisha, Bihar, Jharkhand,
and Northeast), and 35 percent (North,
comprising the Hindi-belt except Bihar
and Jharkhand, plus Punjab and Jammu
& Kashmir) did so. Only 20 percent in
the South thought that only a temple
should be built on the site, whereas 41–
43 percent in the other three regions
thought so. The South (21 percent) fully
agreed with the statement that Muslims
had been victimized by the Modi government,
while 10–15 percent in other
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