Pew Study Puts Religious Conversion Conspiracy Theories To Rest, 98% Of Indians Still Identify With The Religion They Were Raised

At a time when the Hindutva brigade is crying “forced conversions”, “Ghar Wapsi” and “love jihad” and the state is jailing scholars and ordinary men of the Muslim community in false cases, a new study by the influential Pew Research Forum has found that religious conversion has a negligible impact on the overall population composition of India.

“Religious switching, or conversion – when an individual leaves one religion for another or stops affiliating with any religion – also appears to have had a relatively small impact on India’s overall composition, with 98% of Indian adults still identifying with the religion in which they were raised”, the  Washington based centre said.

Hindus, the majority, and Muslims, the largest minority make up around 94% of the total population of the second-most populous country. As of 2011, when the last census was conducted,  80 % of Indians were Hindu while Muslims constituted 14% of the population 

Since 1947, when the Subcontinent saw partition into two countries— India and Pakistan, the population of the country grew threefold (from 361 million to 1.2 billion). 

Hindus increased from 304 million (30.4 crores) to 966 million (96.6 crores), Muslims grew from 35 million (3.5 crores) to 172 million (17.2 crores), and Christians rose from 8 million (0.8 crores) to 28 million (2.8 crores)”, the study revealed.

Even though the fertility rates have gone down, the population increase rate is still high and the country is slated to overcome China by 2030.  Muslims still have the highest fertility rate of 2.6 followed by Hindus at 2.1. 

But the Pew study says the general pattern has not changed as observed in 1992 when in Muslims the fertility rate was 4.4 and for Hindus, it was 3.2. Remarkably, within a span of just 25 years the fertility rate among Muslims declined by almost 2 children. 

“But the gaps in childbearing between India’s religious groups are generally much smaller than they used to be,” the study said.

As of 2020 the median age for Hindus is 29, and for Muslims, it is 24, the study says, adding that the median age for Christians is 31.