The results of a survey of social attitudes of Indian-Americans is making headlines for its findings about caste identities, marriage preferences and experiences of discrimination among its respondents.
The results of the Social Realities of Indian Americans: Results From the 2020 Indian American Attitudes Survey were released on Wednesday. The survey was conducted jointly by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Johns Hopkins-SAIS and the University of Pennsylvania.
It was conducted between September 1 and September 20 last year and covered 1,200 respondents.
One of the interesting aspects of the survey was examining how domestic political affiliations in India affected Indian-Americans.
The survey found, "Thirty per cent of Congress supporters are not comfortable having close friends who support the BJP; this is double the share of BJP supporters who are uncomfortable having close friends who are Congress supporters. Thirty-seven per cent of Congress supporters are somewhat comfortable having friends who support the BJP (identical to the share of BJP supporters who are somewhat comfortable having Congress friends), but just 23 per cent say they are very comfortable having BJP supporters as friends (for BJP supporters, the analogous share is 35 per cent).”
The survey noted respondents who were marked as 'other' (who did not support either Congress or BJP) were more favourably inclined towards the Congress. The survey noted "Nineteen per cent of them are not comfortable having close friends associated with the BJP. Just 9 per cent of them hold the same views vis-à-vis the Congress. This too mirrors the American political context, where supporters of smaller parties or those who are unaffiliated hold more favorable views toward Democrats."
View of state of affairs in India
As much as 28 per cent of the survey respondents agreed that political divisions in India were "infecting dynamics" within the Indian-American community in the US. "But this remains a minority view: 40 per cent of Indian-Americans do not believe that domestic politics are dividing the Indian diaspora in the United States," the survey found.
Interestingly, the 28 per cent who believed that political divisions in India were affecting the diaspora blamed religion as the main factor for the schisms. "… 59 per cent of Indian-Americans believe it is responsible for creating internal divisions in the community. But religion only narrowly edges out the role of India’s political leadership (56 per cent) for the top spot, and political parties (47 per cent) are not far behind. Rounding out the list are caste (35 per cent), economic policy (29 per cent), and language (24 per cent)," the survey noted.
The survey also noted the religious affiliations also correlated to the respondents' feeling towards their sense of Indian identity. The survey found, "Eighty-eight per cent of Hindus say being Indian is very or somewhat important to them, compared to 79 per cent of Christians and 66 per cent of Muslims. This is possibly a reflection of India’s current political climate. The February 2021 IAAS paper found that almost seven in ten Hindus approve of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s performance, while just one in five Muslims feel the same."
