Almost one in three respondents in a survey conducted by Pew Research – a pre-eminent Washington DC based collector of data on public perception – in India either refused to answer or didn’t know what to answer when asked what made them proud of India. With a 31% “non-response” score, India was ranked first on this count among the 25 countries for which this data was collected — a list that includes Australia, Brazil, Germany , the UK, and the US.
To be sure, Indians are not really not proud of their country. Only three percent of them “mentioned something negative” when asked what made them not proud of their country compared to 29% of the respondents in UK and 20% in the US. In fact, India was ranked at the bottom except Indonesia on this count. And politics is hardly a factor when it comes to being proud or not of the country. Compared to the US, where the divide between supporters of the ruling party (8%) its opponents (31%) was a massive 23 percentage points when it came to holding a negative view about their country, India ranked at the bottom of the table with barely any difference between supporters of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its allies (1%) or those not identifying with these parties (4%).
These findings are from a latest Pew Research report on What Makes People Proud of Their Country which was released on Tuesday night. The Survey is based on a sample of 33,486 respondents across 25 countries which does not include China. Responses were collected through a mix of telephone, face-to-face and online interviews. The questions on pride in the interviews were open-ended, with the detailed answers later coded back to key themes.
What makes India a special case in the findings is the slightly counter-intuitive results in what exactly makes them proud of their country. “People” or fellow Indians was the most common theme of Indian response to national pride (10%). Arts and culture, economy and political system (at 8% each) are close seconds with the general identity and political leadership following closely behind at 7% and 6%. What is surprising in the data is that the military was mentioned far less often (3%), and sports (one would have expected cricket) and food were not mentioned at all. Just about 5% of Indians in the Survey citing religion as a source of pride also runs slightly counter-intuitive to the current rhetoric in the country. To be sure, some of the findings such as very few Indians feeling proud about their cities and localities or innovation are not exactly counter-intuitive.
How did other countries do in the Survey? One striking aspect of the other 24 countries is that their top source of pride accounts for at least 20% of responses compared to just 10% in India. This was the case even when the top source accounted for fewer responses than people saying they were not proud when asked about the source of pride, which happened in the UK and Hungary. The top sources of national pride in these countries were people (25%) and history (21%) respectively. This could very well suggest that Indians are as diverse in what they feel proud about their country as they are as a people.
How intuitive are the results for other countries? Numbers suggest a mixed bag. The French (26%) and the Italians, are expectedly most proud of their art and culture, while the Greek are proud of their history (37%) and the Japanese are proud of their people (41%). The Americans are almost equally proud of their freedom (22%) as they are not proud of their country (20%). Indonesia is the proudest when it comes to diversity and multiculturalism (30%).
