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A study released on Monday by the American think tank Pew Research Centre states that the majority of migrants residing in India are Hindus. According to the study The Religious Composition of the World's Migrants, 61% of all migrants who reside in India are Hindus. The community makes up around 79% of the country’s population.
On the other hand, Muslims make up 19% of immigrants in India. The community accounts for about 15% of India’s population.
Pew Research indicates that Pakistan and Bangladesh account for the majority of the foreign-born residents in India.
Additionally, the study found that Muslims and Christians were the groups most likely to have migrated from India. Pew Research estimates that 41% of Indian migrants to foreign nations in 2020 were Hindus. This number was notably less than the nation's total Hindu population.
On the other hand, Muslims made up 33% of Indians who left the nation in 2020, while Christians made up 16%. The numbers for both communities were much greater than their respective shares of the total population of the nation, Scroll.in reported.
In India, 2.3% of people were Christians and 14.2% of people were Muslims, according to the 2011 Census.
According to a Pew Research study, there has been a "rising tide of Hindu nationalism in India" in recent decades, which has been linked to violent attacks against religious minorities such as Muslims and Christians.
‘Migration to US most popular pathway for Hindus’
The most “popular pathway” for Hindu migrants from around the globe was to shift from India to the US, the report stated. “About 1.8 million Hindus have taken this route, making up 61% of all Indian immigrants in the US as of 2020,” it said.
According to the think tank, Hindus would most frequently relocate from India to the Gulf Cooperation Council members—Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates—if they were viewed as a single destination.
“Roughly 3 million Hindus from India live in GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] countries, where foreign workers comprise half or more of the area’s workforce,” it said.
Most Muslim migrants from India lived in Muslim-majority countries with job opportunities, including the United Arab Emirates with 1.8 million persons from India, Saudi Arabia with 1.3 million and Oman with 7,20,000, the report said.
India was the second-most common country of origin for Muslim migrants, Pew Research said.
The think tank said that migrants from India most commonly lived in the United Arab Emirates with 3.6 million residing there from the country, followed by the United States with 3 million, Saudi Arabia with 2.6 million, Pakistan with 1.6 million and Oman with 1.4 million.