Mahesh Srinivasan: Hindu kids more apt to echo propaganda that ‘Indian equals Hindu’ | Berkeley News

Research from Monica E. Ellwood‐Lowe, Catherine Berner, Yarrow Dunham, and Mahesh Srinivasan finds that by age nine, Hindu children have already internalized ‘Indian equals Hindu,’ and that this association predicts children’s support for policies that favor Hindus over Muslims.

“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.”

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