What other people are thinking?

LAST WORD

By Patrick French

Story Dated: Tuesday, July 3, 2012 11:37 hrs IST

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Illustration: Bhaskaran

It is sometimes claimed by righteous folk in India that people who have migrated to rich countries are bigoted. Social theorist Ashis Nandy has written that, “Among NRIs in the First World, I shall not be surprised if some survey finds that the support base of Hindu nationalism is more than 90 per cent.” In Martha Nussbaum’s view, the anti-Muslim pogroms in Gujarat in 2002 were encouraged from America: private donations gathered in the United States by groups like the Vishwa Hindu Parishad were “highly significant in the funding of the Gujarat violence".But is this true?People have always, throughout history, migrated between countries. A recent survey in the United States shows that Asians are now the fastest-growing (and highest-earning) minority ethnic group in the country. Devesh Kapur, a political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania, investigated the implications of this global migration in his 2010 book Diaspora, Development and Democracy.As part of his research, Kapur focused on people who, like himself, came originally from India. In 1960, the Indian-born population of the US was tiny—just over 12,000. Today, it is closer to three million. Many migrants to the US are professionals who left India because of a lack of opportunities during the quasi-socialist era.More than one in three have a post-bachelor’s degree, such as a master’s or a doctorate.One of Kapur’s ambitions was to look more closely at the position of this large ethnic minority in America. But how should he best locate its members? Rather than going to self-selecting immigrant organisations, or to religious outfits, or to a location like San Francisco which has a large Indian-born population, he had a brainwave.“Names,” he said to me. “Think of Indian surnames.” Kapur has wild hair and a tendency to do five things at once. His supposition was that since Indian names are distinctive, it should be possible to identify them. In a piece of academic ingenuity, he merged the phone directories of four large Indian cities with a list of more than 100 million US households. After a bit of technical tweaking to ensure that he had included different Indian groups and traditions, he had a database of 4,10,000 homes which, in theory, covered around 75 per cent of the ‘Asian Indians’ living in the US.
Now came the fun part. Using a call centre in India, he ran a sample survey, collecting data on people’s attitudes and attainments. Once the caller had got over the opening question it became possible to build up a broad picture. Remarkably, less than two per cent of those who answered the phone said they were not of Indian origin, proving the veracity of Kapur’s hunch about the usefulness of surnames.One of the revealing questions in the phone survey was about attitudes towards Muslims. It showed that respondents who spoke Gujarati were, in fact, less likely than those who could speak Hindi or Punjabi to express anti-Muslim prejudice. The highest levels of bias against Muslims in this survey were found among Sikhs—and the Sikh community was not connected to the 2002 violence in Gujarat.Kapur’s conclusion was that “domestic political variables” in India have historically been much more important in explaining the occasional eruptions of religious violence than the support of those living outside India, in countries like the US.So Gujarati expats have been tarred with an extremist point of view that they do not—in general—hold. If there is a lesson in this, it may be that our common ideas about migrants and what they believe are often grounded in misconceptions, rumours and false assumptions. The opinions of a few have been taken to represent the outlook of the many. NRIs come in many different shapes and sizes, and a community should not be tainted by the views of the noisiest.Follow Patrick French on Twitter: @PatrickFrench2