Have Hindus been reduced to minority in 200 districts? No, it’s a false claim!
Claim
Rating
Explanation
The viral image shows a news article. We can see that the headline ‘Hindus have been reduced to a minority in 200 districts’ is highlighted in the newspaper. This post is shared stating, “This is the real alarm bell for all the Hindus of India.” You can view similar posts here and here. This same claim, which went viral earlier in 2023, is seen here.
Dear Hindus,
If this doesn’t Wake you Up then nothing can
Identify yourself as Hindus and not by your caste,creed,language and Region
Jayatu Sanatan pic.twitter.com/OKF2ZRgI1l
— Sheetal Chopra (@SheetalPronamo) April 12, 2024
What’s the truth?
We began our analysis by conducting a pertinent Google keyword search on India’s religious makeup. We acquired a 2021 report from the Pew Research Centre.
According to the report, “Hindus make up 79.8% of India’s population and Muslims account for 14.2%; Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists and Jains account for most of the remaining 6%. The number of Hindus grew to 966 million from 304 million, Muslims to 172 million from 35 million, and Christians to 28 million from 8 million.”
However, the article went on to add that the proportion of Muslims in India increased slightly, by roughly 4 percentage points, between 1951 and 2011, while the proportion of Hindus decreased by roughly the same amount. Indians’ percentages in other religions remained largely unchanged. Due to their propensity for having more children than other groups, Muslims are expanding at a somewhat faster rate.
Also, the article included that, “Hindus are the majority in 28 of India’s 35 states, including the most populous ones: Uttar Pradesh (total population 200 million), Maharashtra (112 million) and Bihar (104 million). Muslims are a majority in the small western archipelago of Lakshadweep (<100,000) and Jammu and Kashmir (13 million), on the border with Pakistan. But only 5% of Muslims live in these two places; 95% live in states where they are a religious minority.”
The report also stated that the majority of people living in the small, sparsely populated states of Nagaland (2 million), Mizoram (1 million), and Meghalaya (3 million) in northeastern India—which borders Bangladesh, China, Myanmar, Bhutan, and Nepal—are Christians. Punjab is the only state where the majority is not Hindu, Muslim, or Christian. Most Sikhs worldwide reside in Punjab, where 16 million people declared themselves to be Sikhs in the 2011 census.
Taking this as a cue we found the census data from 2011 about the Muslim population. According to the report, “The Muslim population in India is approximately 14.2%. This makes Islam the second-largest religion in India, after Hinduism, which comprises about 79.8% of the population. Other religions, including Sikhism, Buddhism, and Jainism, make up less than 1% of the population each.”
Likewise, we also compared the 2011 data with the census of the Christian population. Here report says, “The Christian population in India is estimated to be around 28 million, or 2.3% of the total population. This makes Christianity a minority religion in India, which is primarily Hindu (79.8%) and Muslim (14.2%). However, Christianity has a long history in India and there are many ancient Christian communities in the country, particularly in the southern states of Kerala and Goa. The religion has also a good hold over the northeast states of India.”
From the census data of both Muslim and Christian populations, we understand that Hindus still form the majority of the Indian population.
Furthermore, we got a report from Dainik Bhaskar stating that the population of Hindus is less in 7 states of India, but the number of Hindus is more in all the districts of 15 states. An infographic poster featuring an Indian map was added to the report.
Finally, we found an article by Scroll based on Pew Research stating that “Migration and religious conversion have had very little effect in altering the country’s religious composition. The study found out that migrants leaving India outnumber immigrants three-to-one, and that religious minorities were more likely to leave than Hindus.”
As a result of our more thorough investigation, we discovered that Ashwini Upadhyay, a Supreme Court advocate and former Delhi BJP spokesman, was the one who initially made this claim about India’s declining Hindu population. Although the Supreme Court rejected the advocate’s repeated attempts, this widely circulated claim nonetheless appeared in social media occasionally.
The aforementioned details make it clear that the widely circulated picture asserting that the number of Hindus in India is dropping is untrue and misleading.
Conclusion:
In light of this, we conclude that the widely circulated rumor that Hindus have become a minority in 200 districts is false.
