The “God Gap?” Public Perception on Religion-Politics Mix in South Asia

Abstract

Several surveys and polls have confirmed increasing religiosity among South Asian people; however, hardly any studies have examined and analyzed the people’s perspectives on the religion-politics relationship in South Asian nations. This chapter addresses this gap by analyzing public perception on the conflation of religion and politics in South Asian countries, namely, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, representing three major religions – Hinduism, Islam, and Buddhism. It offers two interrelated but divergent arguments. First, increasing religiosity leads to an increasing tendency among the populations to support “political parties with religious beliefs.” Second, despite such a tendency, the South Asian populations do not necessarily hail “religious political parties” with significant electoral support. It concludes that the people of South Asia tend to support religious values in public life and practice faith in their personal lives but avoid giving their electoral support to religious parties. The chapter uses key insights from theoretical literature and empirical findings from waves of public perception surveys conducted by World Values Survey (WVS) 1995-2014, Pew Research Center 2011-2012, and Asian Foundation 2011, as well as electoral performance statistics of political parties from respective election commissions, which help make sense of this conclusion.