Bizarre to not include India in global study on Muslims
By Sujeet Rajan
NEW YORK: Americans love to be world champions, sometimes even when it’s not quite warranted or substantiated: baseball being a case in point, where domestic teams compete to win the World Series. That concept seems to have caught up with the Washington-DC-based think tank Pew Research Center, who recently released what it claimed was a global survey of Muslims, titled ‘The World’s Muslims: Religion, Politics and Society’.
However, the glaring exceptions to the global list include India, with more than 177 million Muslims comprising 10.9 percent of the global community’s population residing there, and the most populous non-Muslim country globally. Its Muslim population is only surpassed by the largest Muslim-majority country in the world, Indonesia, with around 205 million comprising 12.7 percent of the global total, and by Pakistan with 178 million Muslims.
Also excluded is China with 23 million Muslims, from whom the world is curious to know more about how the fastest developing country is treating its minorities; and a country that is a beacon for the conservative Muslims of the world, the land of the holy Mecca: Saudi Arabia, comprising of more than 25 million Muslims.
These country figures itself are from a separate Pew report released in 2011, which also estimated that there are 1.62 billion Muslims around the world, the largest religious group after Christianity.
Also excluded from the global survey are Muslims from the Western European countries – a hotbed of growing fanatical religious groups, especially in the UK and France – because it didn’t qualify the criteria of countries to have a minimum of 10 million Muslims, for it to be in the reckoning.
Pew’s answer to why it excluded India from the survey – which encompassed a total of 39 countries comprising 67 percent of the world’s Muslim population – doesn’t make sense.
According to a report on their website, Pew explains India, China and Saudi Arabia were excluded because they “could not safely and reliably conduct face-to-face interviews on religion.”
Pew says countries were excluded “primarily due to cultural and political sensitivities associated with the topics of religious identity and belief. In such environments, the quality of data may be undermined if respondents do not feel free to express their true opinions. In addition, the safety of interviewers may be at risk if the survey meets objections from local residents or authorities. Based on a careful assessment of the conditions under which face-to-face surveys could be conducted, we judged that we could not meet our high standards for the safety of interviewers and data quality in some countries. We hope that circumstances will change and that in the future we will be able to conduct surveys on religion in all the places excluded from the current study.”
If India, the most secular country in the world, a progressive democracy and developing economic powerhouse, is considered a problem for a Pew questioner from favorably viewed ally America, who, if they had indeed surveyed India, would have used most likely a local surveyor, who would most likely be a Muslim himself or herself, then how come they determined that the likes of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and Syria is less dangerous for their employees to conduct face-to-face survey questions on religion, politics and society?
What circumstances does Pew expect Indian Muslims to change, to include them in a survey? What safety measures are they talking about to conduct a survey where elections are held every year in the country, in some state or province, that beats any small survey in comparison ever undertaken by a think tank?
The larger question to be asked is, did Pew lack the resources to undertake the massive scale of operations required? Were they inadequately prepared for gauging the ramifications that came up with a diverse country like India, where the opinion of Muslims from the North to the South, from the East to the West may differ vastly and is likely to be a capsule of the entire survey of the global Muslims? Or is to do something with not getting approval from the Indian government, which would be wary of negative perception, create unnecessary religious tension.
Pew contradicts itself in a response on why weren’t all the same questions asked in every country included in ‘The World’s Muslims’?
According to them “conducting opinion polls in diverse societies requires adapting the questionnaire to local sensitivities and conditions. The survey was pre-tested in each country in order to assess whether respondents would understand and be comfortable answering the questions. In some countries, the pre-test results indicated that to avoid offending respondents or placing interviewers at risk, it was best to modify or remove certain questions. Thus, not all survey questions were asked, or identically phrased, in all countries.”
So, was India pre-tested for the survey? And even if it was, why was not the provision of modifying a question or removing certain questions used? Which were the areas and states in India that Pew felt intimidated by, the local bodies who did not give permission?
Pew even gives an example of their pre-tests: interviewers in Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Morocco indicated that certain questions related to sexual conduct were too sensitive to be asked. Questions on this topic were either eliminated or modified in these countries.
India is far more advanced in every aspect than the countries exemplified. It’s a country which has condemned and made an international pariah of Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi for persecution of Muslims, where the Muslim Personal Law prevails in areas like marriage, inheritance and certain properties known as wakf, and courts have ruled that Sharia holds precedence for Muslims over Indian civil law. They have also had a Muslim as President. Issues related to religion and injustice to minorities are part of the national debate. The insinuation by Pew that India is not a country worthy enough for its Muslims to be interviewed, is almost akin to a blasphemy.
Also pertinent to note is Pew’s goal of the global study: a much stronger focus on religious beliefs and practices and related attitudes, including how Muslims interpret Sharia and how they apply sharia in their daily lives.
In India, where some Taliban groups based in Pakistan have ‘declared war’ on India, and they have called for Sharia law – the moral code and religious law of Islam – to be imposed in Muslim-dominated Kashmir, Pew’s explanation gains importance. India is wary of any survey or independent study coming out of Kashmir, and as insignificant as a Pew survey might be, the government wouldn’t want to answer any controversy in the aftermath of the survey.
Whether it is the Indian government which stopped Pew from conducting a survey, or Pew’s own lack of resources or inability to handle a complicated country like India, the fact remains that to call such a survey ‘The World’s Muslims’ is a fallacy, a study that deserves to be ignored.
For Pew, it would be advisable to take up the role model of the World Cup (of soccer or football as it’s called elsewhere globally), where 204 countries entered qualification for the 2010 Cup, rather than the World Series where 30 teams compete, for a global perspective.
(Sujeet Rajan is Editor-in-Chief of The American Bazaar)
To contact the editor, e-mail: sujeetrajan@americanbazaaronline.com