Hindu kids more apt to echo propaganda that ’Indian equals Hindu’

Muslim and Hindu students at Zenith School in Vadodara in India. (Photo courtesy of Mahesh Srinivasan) With a multi-faith population of some 1.3 billion, India claims to be the world's largest secular democracy. But when it comes to the question of who is a true Indian, the country's Hindu children are more likely than their Muslim peers to connect their faith to their national identity, according to new research from UC Berkeley. The findings, published in the journal Child Development , are particularly timely in the face of the Indian government's recent annexation of Muslim-majority Kashmir and the removal of nearly 2 million Muslims from Assam's citizenship rolls. Researchers at UC Berkeley and Yale University sought to understand how rising Hindu nationalism under Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his ruling Bharatiya Janata Party might be internalized by both Hindu and Muslim children. "Our results indicate that by age 9, Hindu children have already internalized an 'Indian equals Hindu' association, and we show that this association predicts children's support for policies that favor Hindus over Muslims," said study senior author Mahesh Srinivasan, an associate professor of psychology at UC Berkeley. On a more hopeful note, the study also suggests that Muslim children feel no less Indian because of their faith, indicating they are shielded from religious nationalist messaging and able to identify both as Indian and as Muslim, added Srinivasan, a California native who is of South Indian Hindu descent.