South Asia - Religions
Monsoon and regional disparities
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Overview
With around 1.1 billion believers, Hinduism in South Asia has about twice as many followers as all other religions combined. Islam follows in second place: South Asia is home to more than a third of the world's Muslim population. Other faith communities in South Asia with roughly equal representation are Buddhists, Christians, and Sikhs.
Religions in India and Pakistan
In absolute figures for the subcontinent, the conditions in India have the greatest impact. More than 1 billion Hindus live there, about 95 per cent of the world's Hindu population. At the same time, the country is home to about 90 per cent of the Christians living in South Asia and the two religious communities of the Sikhs and Jainas, which are exclusively resident here. The largest religious minority are the Muslims, who make up 13 percent of the population, 163 million Indians in absolute numbers.
Pakistan, which emerged from the Islamic regions of India in 1947 and where Islam is the state religion, shows a completely different religious distribution. About 95 per cent of the population, around 175 million people, profess the Muslim faith. The religious minorities in the country include about 5 million Christians and about 2.5 million followers each of Hinduism and Buddhism. Islam is also the state religion in Bangladesh, which has been independent of Pakistan since 1972. About 90 percent of the 157 million inhabitants are Muslims.
The dominance of Hinduism in India and Islam in Pakistan and Bangladesh was largely caused by refugee movements after the partition of the originally unified territory of British India. A more recent development is migration for economic reasons, which brings people mainly from Bangladesh to India.
