A recent ‘working paper’ titled the ‘Share of Religious Minorities: a Cross-Country Analysis (1950-2015)’, by Shamika Ravi, a credentialed economist and member of the Economic Advisory Council (EAC) to the Prime Minister, and two co-authors, has sparked a political firestorm, dredging familiar anxieties of a decline in the proportion of Hindus in India’s population. Freely accessible, the paper draws on a dataset, Religious Characteristics of States Dataset, 2017 (RCS-Dem), where two U.S.-affiliated researchers have compiled an extensive dataset of religio-demographic changes in 167 countries. By defining ‘majority’ and ‘minority’ religions based on countries’ official census data, the RCS-Dem quantifies changes in the population of those professing a country’s major religion. There is ...
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