Nearly eight decades after the partition of British India, Indians and Pakistanis still view one another with deep suspicion—and their perceptions of the wider world are increasingly divergent as well. 

New data collected by the Pew Research Center offer a revealing snapshot of how people across South Asia view their neighbors, major powers like the United States and China, and India’s growing global role. To unpack what these findings tell us about global public opinion, Milan is joined on the podcast this week by Jacob Poushter. 

Jacob is the lead author of recent Pew report titled, “India and Pakistan: Rivals with Divergent Views of the Global Order.”

He is an associate director at Pew Research Center and an expert in international survey research. He writes about international public opinion on a variety of topics—including the international image of the United States and perceptions of global threats. He is also responsible for designing survey questionnaires, managing survey projects, analyzing data and developing topics for the annual Global Attitudes Survey.

Milan and Jacob discuss the work of the Pew Research Center, the hardened views of India and Pakistan towards one another, and the two neighbors’ views of the great powers. Plus, the two discuss how India is viewed by other countries in the neighborhood and the places where India’s standing has experienced a significant decline.

Episode notes:

1.        Jacob Poushter, Sneha Gubbala, and William Miner, “How do South Asians view other countries in the region?” Pew Research Center, August 13, 2026.

2.        Sneha Gubbala, “Public opinion of India is mixed across 36 countries,” Pew Research Center, August 13, 2026.

3.        “Neha Sahgal on Religion and Identity in Contemporary India,” Grand Tamasha, June 30, 2021.

Transcript

Note: this is an AI-generated transcript and may contain errors

Milan Vaishnav Welcome to Grand Tamasha, a co-production of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in the Hindustan Times. I'm your host, Milan Vaishnav. Nearly eight decades after the partition of British India, Indians and Pakistanis still view one another with deep suspicion. And their perceptions of the wider world are increasingly divergent as well. New data collected by the Pew Research Center offer a revealing snapshot of how people across South Asia view their neighbors, major powers like the United States and China, and India's growing global role. To unpack what these findings tell us about global public opinion, I'm joined on the podcast today by Jacob Poster. Jacob is the lead author of the recent Pew report titled, “India and Pakistan Rivals with Divergent Views of the Global Order.” He's an associate director at Pew and an expert in international survey research. He writes about international public opinion on a variety of subjects, including the international image of the United States and perceptions of global threats. He is also responsible for designing survey questionnaires, managing survey projects, analyzing data, and developing topics for the annual Global Attitude Survey. I am pleased to welcome Jacob to the show for the very first time. Jacob, thanks so much for taking the time.

Jacob Poushter Thanks for having me, very excited.

Milan Vaishnav So this was a really interesting survey. There's a lot to talk about in the nuts and bolts, but before we get there, I want to just ask you to step back and tell us a little bit about Pew. I think in the United States, Pew is kind of a household name, but maybe not so much in some parts of the world. Tell us a bit about what Pew Research Center does and where the global attitude survey fits into the broader portfolio.

Jacob Poushter Right, so the Pew Research Center looks at facts, figures around the world. We mostly focus on public opinion, but we also do computational data science and we do it in a variety of topics, including international affairs, domestic politics, US domestic politics, religion, both in the US and around the globe. News and information, science, views towards the internet. You know, a lot of fun topics that we know are driving public opinion around the world. So, we're non-partisan, non-advocacy. We don't get any government funding. We're mostly funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, which is our parent organization, which we're a subsidiary of. So that kind of encompasses what the Pew Research Center does overall. But the Global Attitudes Project within the Pew Research Center looks at attitudes around the world. So, in each year, we survey anywhere from 15 to as many as 40 countries around the world and we tried to look at a diverse set of countries, that are in more developed areas, less developed areas. All regions of the world, including Europe, Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, Middle East, South, Southeast Asia, North America. And the goal of that project is to really look at the comparative lens of what people think about, you know, a variety of topics that are of interest to people and politicians. So, attitudes towards the United States, views towards China, the balance of power between those countries, attitudes towards Russia, views of other global leaders, and other kind of questions about how the world is run, operated, those kinds of things. But in addition to that, we also look at topics such as AI, what do people around the world think about AI, what do they think about social media, democracy, which has been a big focus of our work over the last 10 years. Attitudes towards democracy, what people think can be done to improve democracy, those kinds of things. And then we also sometimes look at individual countries, whether it's perceptions of those countries from others around the world, such as views of India, views of Russia, but also within the countries. What do they think of their own politics? How do they see themselves in the world? What do you think about their foreign affairs or even their economic conditions? So, cross-national comparative research is really the name of the game. It's a very complex project. It takes a lot of time to develop questionnaires, to make sure that we're fielding correctly in each of the survey countries in which we do our work and that the data is of the highest quality because we really do care that we are giving a voice to the people in places that people don't always get a voice. So, the methods that underlie our work are very important to us to make sure that it's a representative national sample in all the countries that we are surveying. And that the data can be tracked over time. The trends really do become critical when you're looking at these types of questions because any one year won't necessarily tell you the whole story. But when you have up to decades of data, you can really see the ebbs and flows of foreign affairs, but also on how people view their own lives.

Milan Vaishnav One of the things that we've done here at Carnegie in our program, starting in 2020, we've been doing repeated waves of nationally representative surveys of Indians living in America. And the model for this really was Pew in terms of, you know, how you conduct a survey like this and try to adhere to the highest standards of rigor, which Pew has always done. And now the other thing about Pew that I find so impressive is all of this is open source. I mean, you put the data online, you put the top lines online, people can go, if they don't believe your numbers, they can try to replicate them and recreate them. And I think that's something that's not always possible, because it's either behind a paywall, or people just don't bother to kind of post that on their website.

Jacob Poushter Yeah, we're very proud of making all this data free and open to society in whatever way is possible. So, we release the full data sets eventually. It does take some time to collate all that information and get it out to the public, but we're always going to release the data. We're always going to tell you exactly the questions we asked, the order in which we asked them. We're going to tell you about the methods, whether we used online, whether we used face-to-face or telephone, which is the three major modes that we use for our international work. And we're also going to communicate the data as clearly as we can. You know, it's hard to sometimes pull back and not put your own thoughts and your own experiences in the data, but we do our best to try to tell the story as cleanly as possible and, you know, adhere to what the data is telling us and not ask questions of why that might be. That's for journalists, that's for others to kind of interpret. We want to just get the data in front of as many people as we possibly can so that they understand more about what people think about these various topics.

Milan Vaishnav So let me ask you about that, because I think, you know, the entire edifice of survey research has been kind of under scrutiny. I mean, because of what's happened in our own country about polling around presidential elections, but I think it's a similar story in many other places. So, I think people would be interested who are listening to the show to understand: how do you conduct the survey that you… that went into this report. And in particular, how should we think about the kind of representativeness of the samples? What are some of the particular idiosyncrasies or complexities of trying to do public opinion research in a region like South Asia?

Jacob Poushter Yeah, I mean, to start off broadly, we used a mixed-mode method. So, in some countries, such as the United States and Australia, we're online, use nationally representative online panels. And by nationally representative, it means that anyone who's selected for the survey, in total, should be representative of the entire population in those countries. In Western Europe, East Asia, Canada, we do phone surveys, which have some benefits in terms of there's an interviewer on one end who can interpret people's responses. The other, the downside of that though is response rates for telephone surveys have been going pretty far down, which makes the costs associated with doing these surveys a little higher than it would be if it was an online either probability or non-probability panel. But those are also, they have the luxury of being representative of the entire population because we use, we gather samples through those phone numbers. In a place like India and the other countries in South and Southeast Asia, we actually do face-to-face interviewing, which means that we have interviewers go to certain areas of the country. There are sampling units in different areas where interviewers go to and conduct up to 45 minutes to an hour interviews with a person in their home. This is a tried-and-true method of survey research. It's been around for a long time. It has a lot of advantages to telephone. You see the person in front of you. You can talk to them. You know where you're sampling. You know for sure that this is a real person. A lot of times in online paneling that aren't probability based, you're not sure whether the people are real. Here we know they're real. Some of the downsides are though expenses is one issue. It's a little harder to get to certain areas, especially if there's instability, whether it's environmental or political. And there are areas in Southeast Asia where we cannot go to. So there might be, you know, for example, in Northeast India is a difficult area for us to go to certain areas in the Pakistan-India border region for these particular countries. You know, it can be a little harder to get to but we're confident that these samples are nationally representative. And that's just the end of it the actual survey taking. There's also the months of development of the questions themselves to make sure that they're balanced. You're not, you know, going to one side or another when you ask a question, that the response options make sense, that they're understandable for people of all educational levels, because we don't exclude people from the survey if they don't have higher education versus have only a secondary or primary education. So, we have to make sure that our questions make sense to people. And some of the topics that we talk about are a little higher end when it comes to education. So we have to make sure that the questions we're asking work, that they work in all the languages that we're deploying them in. I believe there's over a dozen languages that we conduct the survey in India alone, which means that across the entirety of the survey, it's dozens, I think maybe it's around 50 or more, languages that we have to translate to make sure that the translation is equivalent to the English questionnaire which we develop, and that is all properly done, that the interviewers are doing their job correctly, that they're not. You know, they're not taking people's answers and just marking down with them.

Milan Vaishnav Answers that they want or freelancing on the question.

Jacob Poushter Exactly. That they're really interpreting it the way we want. So, we work with our coordinating vendors really closely to make sure that's the case. And we do have both coordinating vendors that help us with the entire survey and then country-specific vendors that know the language, know the region, know how to do these surveys within the country that they're surveying. And then finally, we get the data back; we get to look at it. We get to explore how things have changed. We got to do cross tabulations, which we can look at by different demographics, men, women. In India, a lot of the differences are by religion. In some other countries, it's all politics. You know, ideology is the driving factor between differences of opinions. So that's the fun part, too, and get to write up the results and come on a show like this to kind of talk about the findings. So that the end product that we all like to do. But there's a lot to build up. It takes over a year of planning and development for one of these global attitudes surveying. We've been able to do them, outside of the two years of the pandemic, pretty much every year for the last 20, 25 years.

Milan Vaishnav That's amazing, and I just want to reiterate and emphasize to our listeners or viewers that again, you can go to the Pew website and download data, look at it over time. If you don't have the statistical sophistication to do it yourself, there are also tools online that will allow you to visualize this, which is just a great kind of resource for people. Let's shift now to kind the substance of the report, and I want to start with where the report begins, which I thought is a pretty…I just want to quote the survey, where you say “nearly 80 years after the dissolution of British India led to the formation of an independent India and Pakistan, a new survey finds that most people in each other, each country,” excuse me, “view the other as their greatest geopolitical threat.” Give us a sense of the numbers that led you to make that broad conclusion.

Jacob Poushter Right, so, I mean, that basically comes from a couple standard questions that we ask on our survey. One, we ask, which country is the greatest threat to your own country? And in this case, in both Pakistan and India, they named each other as a top threat. This is not a question that has any, you know, preordained categories, except that it has to be basically a country. And so, this is just a response that people gave out of the blue, an open-ended response. That points to the fact that when you ask them this pretty direct question, the country that comes to the top of their mind is the other.

Milan Vaishnav So they were not primed in any way to give a response. They could literally name any country.

Jacob Poushter They could name any country and the countries that they named were each other. In India, it was 54% said Pakistan, and in Pakistan, it was 43% who said India. So, it's majority/ plurality of people said this. And then when you look into more of the data, we also asked whether the countries have a favorable view of each other? So, do you have a favorable or an unfavorable opinion of Pakistan or India, depending on which country you're talking about? And on each of those measures, only around 8% or 7% in each country said they had a favorable opinion of the other country. That's pretty low. In public opinion, when you get below like the 10% level, you're talking about pretty…

Milan Vaishnav These are single-digit approvals, essentially.

Jacob Poushter Right, right. And pretty high disapprovals in both countries of the other country. So that's like the second piece of evidence that you get to say that these geopolitical rivals still feel that way. We also have the trends on that question which have generally showed, you know, never in like the 20 years or so that we surveyed had more than a third or quarter, depending on the country, have had favorable opinions of the other. So, this is long-standing…this is not something that just came out of the blue. That's the second part. The third part, we actually asked whether each of their own governments or even people are committed to better relations with the other.

Milan Vaishnav Yeah, and this was interesting because there's a kind of a weird symmetry going on, right?

Jacob Poushter Right, and so most in those countries said that the other country was not committed to it and we differentiated between government and people to try to kind of draw that line: is this about the people who live in the country or is this about your current government?

Milan Vaishnav Like regime-specific, yeah.

Jacob Poushter Right. And in both countries, it was both. You know, both said that the other side was not committed to better relations. So, we know that not only is favorability kind of low, it hasn't changed much in recent years, and there's not a strong commitment from each of the publics to make relations better. So that's how it all comes together. And to kind of a first sentence, as you just said. It's also it was around the 79th anniversary of that partition. So, we're getting close to the 80 years [mark]. And as I said earlier, this is the first time we've been able to survey Pakistan for about a decade. So, we wanted to see again if things had changed since we last asked this question.

Milan Vaishnav So could I just follow up on that for a second, because I think in the report you say, you know, Indians views on Pakistan have been overwhelmingly negative in over, I think, a decade of a few polls. Has there been any variation? Because there have been moments over the past, say, 10 years when geopolitical tensions have been greater or lesser between these two. So like, has it just like kind of consistently been uniformly bad or are there big peaks?

Jacob Poushter There's been ups and downs to some extent, but never to a point where the people in one country were favorable towards the other. I think, again, the highest I saw was a third in Pakistan towards India and two in 10 of Indians towards Pakistan. I would characterize it as consistently low. There are other examples of countries that don't have favorable views of other countries that have, you know, aren't necessarily in as close quarters, you know, [who] have the history that India and Pakistan have. But it is interesting to see that that is so consistent. And I mean, we can get into more too. There's also kind of a sense that they also look to different geopolitical, both allies and threats, other geopolitical allies and threats that also differentiate the two countries in a way that I think is quite interesting and telling towards that long-term division.

Milan Vaishnav Yeah, I want to come back to that a little bit later, but before we get there, let me just ask you about sources of internal variation. So, one of the things that our point points to is that, you know, you kind of have this negative opinion, but there is some heterogeneity depending on, say, religion, for instance, right? So Indian Muslims are more likely than Indian Hindus to express favorable views of Pakistan. How significant are those differences? Is it still kind of everybody's looking at it unfavorably, but it's just degrees of disfavor?

Jacob Poushter It's more the latter. There are significant differences. In other words, yes, Muslims in India are more positive towards both Pakistan and Bangladesh in terms of their attitudes. But in the same way, it's still majorities, even among Indian Muslims, are negative towards those countries. So, you do get this variation that's important to note because there's a very large Muslim population in India. In fact, you know, it's such that we actually have to do an oversample of Muslims in India to get enough Muslims in our sample to look at them, but that difference by that subgroup is notable, but it's not enough to tip the scales into favorability. It's not like it's like a huge number of Indian Muslims have a favorable view of Pakistan. It's just more do than Hindus in India.

Milan Vaishnav When you ask respondents to identify the country's greatest geopolitical threat, you know, you mentioned at the start that Indians and Pakistanis kind of agree with each other that they both point to each other. But I wonder if you leave that kind of dyad aside, what caught your eye about respective threat assessments on both sides, right, or what other countries are coming up in terms of being, you know potential threats, rivals, so on and so forth, how does that differ?

Jacob Poushter It's actually super interesting. This survey was done right as the Iran War kicked off. In fact, in Pakistan, it's one of the few countries where we actually saw a slight increase in positive attitudes towards the US during the field period, which was rare for the rest of the survey. Most other countries' views of the US actually declined. But they hosted the peace talks. There was a lot of discussion about their role in this conflict.

Milan Vaishnav And there's been a warmer, you could say, US administration view towards Pakistan than maybe we've had since the Afghan war, right?

Jacob Poushter Yeah. So, I mean, and overall, you definitely see this divergence when it comes to attitudes towards other major powers. India, you know, they say their most important ally is Russia. This might be surprising to a lot of people, but there's a lot of strong connections between Russia and India from the past. And it's not an overwhelming number. 36% say that Russia is their most important ally. The next highest number for Indians is actually the US. It's 16%. And last year, I actually dug into this data after the report was done, but last year we asked a similar question in India, and actually US was seen as the most important ally. So, there was actually a reversal where this year, they named Russia and last year they named India [sic], which might speak to some of those tensions that there has been between India and the US. But on the other side, Pakistan is very pro-China. Across our 37 countries, I believe they are among the most positive towards China. So, they see China as like an ally, and they see the US as not an ally. And in fact, the two greatest threats to Pakistan are the US and Israel. Those are the countries about a quarter in Pakistan, meaning the US in Israel as their greatest threat. So, this divergence between India and Pakistan is just huge when it comes to views of in the US, Pakistan being pretty anti-US in terms of their sentiment among general public, very pro-China. And then in India, even though attitudes towards the US aren't as high as they've been in the past, they're still much higher than they are of China. Only about, I think it's about 23% have a favorable view of China in India, where it's about 40% have a favorable of the US. And again, I only think it is one of maybe three or four countries in our entire survey had a more positive view of the US than did China, which is a big story this year. We saw across, in terms of attitudes towards China and the US, where a lot of the world has become more positive towards China than they are the US. And this is a real big change than it had been in prior years. As it relates to India, I think that's a long-standing kind of distrust China and a little more positivity towards India… I'm sorry, towards the US, but it's still a decline than it had been in previous years.

[…]

Milan Vaishnav Just to go back to what you said about Pakistan and China, you said from the report, Pakistan is the country in the 36-country global altitude survey with the largest favorability gap between China and the United States. So, you talked a little bit about how warm Pakistanis feel about China. How cool is the current sentiment in India towards China? Like, do we have good grasp of that? Because obviously, there have been significant geopolitical tensions between the two, their 2020 massive border crisis, but continuing tensions on the border and in other fora between the two. Do we have a sense of where Indian public opinion is on China today?

Jacob Poushter Yeah, it's still relatively negative. As I said, it is about 25% have a positive view of China. A similar number have confidence in President Xi to handle international affairs. So, the views are negative. And in the past, we did ask specifically about some of the border conflicts. And there was a lot of concern in India about those conflicts. We did not ask that this year. You know, there's other questions that we asked on our survey, how reliable a partner, both the US and China are, does the US or China take into account the interests of our country? Does the US or China kind of promote peace and stability around the world? And on those questions, we got about what we would expect from Pakistan and India, with Pakistanis being very positive on the reliability of China, saying they respect our country and that they're the, you know, they push peace and stability around the world and Indians being less so on China for those aspects, but more likely to say that the US does those things. So again, when you look at the gaps between how Pakistanis and Indians look at the US and China, you see these, you know, these huge gaps on every single question we ask. Not necessarily, again, that India is the most pro-US country in our survey. They are not. It just happens to be that they're more against China and the difference there shows up as being more pro-US overall. On those questions that we ask about. And that's an interesting, again, trend that we've seen. And we also have data from the US about Indians, and I'm sure we'll get to that as well. But generally, our data from this year did show a steep decline in US image around the world and India, even though they're more positive on the US than Pakistanis, you still saw that decline.

Milan Vaishnav And this is a bit outside of this report, but maybe I'll just ask you if you happen to know, which is, you know, clearly Indians feel much more favorably towards the US than Pakistanis do. And as you mentioned, kind of comparatively speaking, India is one of the more pro-US countries. What are the other countries out there in the world who rate very highly on their views of the US?

Jacob Poushter Israel is a clear standout in terms of positive attitudes towards the US in this year's survey. There were not many, I have to say, from the collection of countries that we had. Colombia is also relatively pro-US; you get numbers that are pretty high. In some of the traditional allies, like Japan, Korea, where it's still about 50-55%, but those numbers have fallen rapidly.

Milan Vaishnav Way down from the baseline.

Jacob Poushter And then you also have, at the same time, a kind of warming towards China. I wouldn't call it an overwhelming one in like Western Europe, but generally, an uptick in those who have a positive view of China. At the same time, reviews of the US are declining pretty rapidly. In South/Southeast Asia and Muslim majority countries, there's generally not been a lot of positivity towards the US in the decades that we've been surveying. When you look at like Turkey, Indonesia, you don't see a lot of positivity towards the US, but that's also kind of down. And the views towards China have also shifted a little in some of these countries. So again, what happened this year was maybe surprising in some ways in that in a lot of these [places], Chinese favorability was higher than US favorability. And that's where the real interest lies. But yeah, places like Israel still have a very positive view of the US. They don't have as positive a view of other countries and that's the case. And in India, you know, it's also a country, I probably should have mentioned this earlier on, we get a high number of don't know, refused responses, people who don't answer the question or can't answer to the question. So, some of those attitudes are not as formed as they are in other countries where there's a more clear one side or another, you know up to about a third or even more often don't answers some of these questions. But You can still see from the balance of opinions where those lie, and it's not too hard to kind of interpret what they're trying to say. It's just, it's something to note that the numbers don't always line up as you would expect because of the high “don't know, refused” responses in India.

Milan Vaishnav Yeah, we did a show, actually, there's a great book that was published earlier this year by political scientists Paul Staniland and Aidan Milliff, which I don't know if you've seen, but it basically is looking historically post-independence in India, starting in like the 50s, 60s, at how India views the major powers of China, Russia, and the United States. And one of the, I think they devote an entire section of the small book to the don't-knows because they are quite large, right, to try to understand both who the don’t knows are and what that means about the place of foreign policy and Indian discourse.

Jacob Poushter Yeah, especially as it comes to international affairs, there's a good chunk of people who I think are not, again, are not comfortable answering the question or don't know enough about a particular topic to answer it. But that doesn't negate the other data points. And as you said, too, yeah, the positivity towards Russia does stand out, not just among India, but also in the whole region, in the South-Southeast region. They are more favorable towards Russia than a lot of other regions in the world, especially in Europe.

Milan Vaishnav I want to turn now to asking you about how India is viewed by other countries in the neighborhood. I mean, that was, I think, also a fairly interesting dimension of this report. And I wonder if you could just kind of give us some broad kind of headline findings about how people in neighboring South Asian countries, how they view India, and whether or not some of those views have kind of evolved over time.

Jacob Poushter Sure. Yeah. I mean, generally, there is a spread. So, when you look at Southeast Asia, in this report that we did, we looked specifically at Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh. And views in Sri Lanka are especially high. 79% of Sri Lankans have a positive view of India. So that's among the highest that we see overall. When you look the overall number, I believe it's 45% have a—no sorry, it's 51% have a favorable view of India versus 45% have a negative view. That's pretty good. I mean, it it's higher than the US, higher than Russia, not necessarily as high as China, but it does vary depending on what countries you're asking about. So, like, you know, much more positive in UK, Kenya, in Sub-Saharan Africa. Much more negative, especially in a lot of the Muslim majority countries, Turkey, Pakistan, Indonesia. So, you do get a lot variety. I would say one thing about attitudes towards India overall, and of course you can find the full data set on the website, is that it's not as maybe formed as some other countries that we ask about. There's... The variation year to year isn't as stark. Now it did go down in a couple of nations that we looked at over the past couple of years, went up in a couple as well, but overall it's, it's been pretty steady the last three years in terms of public opinion. And I, you know India is maybe not always in the news. It's hard to know where people get all their sources from when they're talking about a whole country, but I don't know how kind of like movable the data is. And it'll be interesting to see in future years, you know, if India changes its stance, there's a new leader, whatever it might be, how those attitudes might change. I mean, there could have been some effect in terms of, you know, a long-standing prime minister before there wasn't as maybe well-known a person as Modi. It might have also changed public opinions. We have other data that kind of shows in a lot of these great powers, correlations that people were actually thinking more about these countries as the leader rather than like the country itself. When it comes to like Putin, when it comes to Trump, when comes to Xi, you kind of see this connection between the leader and the country's image. I don't know how that will look in the future, but I think it will be interesting to know what people think about the Prime Minister and how that might change as we get into future years.

Milan Vaishnav So I want to get into something that you alluded to earlier, which is how public opinion of India fares across a range of countries, but it will focus on the United States. And I think I have the data here, which says the Pew report finds that 45% of Americans view India favorably, 50% view it unfavorably. So, it's about half and half, give or take. But you add this note, which I found very interesting, which is that these ratings are some of the lowest since 2008, when we began asking this question. And I wonder if you could just tell us a little bit about the trajectory of US views on India.

Jacob Poushter Yeah, it's an interesting question because there's just two things going on. One, as I said earlier, it does seem to kind of be in a middling range, you know, about half and half. It's been that way for a couple of years since we've used our Americans Trends panel, which is the way that we do surveys in the US. It is a probability-based panel. Before that, we had some phone surveys in the US where favorability of India was comparatively higher than it is now. You know, more the fifties to the lower sixties as it is like mid-forties to fifty now. There could have been a mode difference there. The way in which we conduct the survey affects how people respond to recruiter questions. So, it's hard to know, but in other ways, you can see that as a potential decline in favorable views of India. And there's certainly been a decline in the last year. And the politics and the demographics of it are that younger people are more unfavorable towards India, older people are more favorable in the US. And then Republicans are more unfavorable towards India and Democrats are more favorable towards India in the US. So, you have a bit of a divergence there. It's not the biggest partisan divide that I've seen on our surveys. Those are often can be pretty big, but it does drive some of that more negative opinion with, again, younger Americans and Republicans being less positive on India than Democrats and older Americans. There weren't many other demographic differences. And in fact, for India overall, there weren't huge differences around the world in terms of attitudes towards India, some ideological differences in terms to be on the left or right, the US being one example of that. But overall, there weren't huge divisions when it came to that concept. And again, it's very interesting to look at it in totality when you look at like attitudes towards India compared to other countries, It's more people have don't know, but it's also more positive right now than the US and Russia. So comparatively, it will be interesting to see how that goes going forward. But a lot of differences of opinion in the US is certainly as a place where a lot of, you know, a lot of Indians live is an interesting test case there. A couple years back, we were able to do a survey of Indians as part of a broader Asian American package. And, you know, we did kind of look at how each individual group, what their partisan affiliation was. And I think that's interesting too, like the subsample of Indians within the US, how they feel. But overall, this is of all Americans. It doesn't, it's not just one group. It's all Americans from all, you know, walks of life from all regions of the country. And yeah, their attitudes are pretty mixed right now.

Milan Vaishnav I mean, I won't ask you to editorialize on this because I know that's not really Pew's mandate, so I will editorialize. But I think this isn't that surprising, the findings on Asian partisanship, right? Because I do think we have an administration that in some ways has been much more critical of India and the relationship has been more turbulent than say it was during the Biden administration. Or even frankly, during the Trump 1.0 administration, right? So, there are major bilateral disputes with India on immigration, on trade, some questioning about whether or not we still have a shared convergence on how we think about China and the threat that China might pose. So that could help explain some of the decline in how Republicans view India. And I think with young people, I mean, this is something. I don't want to extrapolate too much, but what we find from surveys of Indian Americans who are a tiny percentage of the US population granted, but there is a big generational divide where younger Indian Americans, I think, hold a slightly less positive view because they're concerned about domestic trends in India. They worry about the rise of illiberalism and majoritarianism and kind of the way that Modi has governed. And so, you know, some of that may also be just an age cohort effect, right? For younger people who tend to be more progressive on some of these issues and more concerned about democracy as opposed to kind of what the trade relationship is or the geopolitical relationship it is, could just weigh these things differently.

Jacob Poushter Yeah, I mean, and as I said earlier, there's also just a lot of non-opinion. I mean in the US, 40% said they were not sure when asked about confidence in Prime Minister Modi. So that's a large chunk of the American public who don't really know who that person is, what he represents. And that also is kind of like a counterpoint in that I think American opinions are maybe a little less formed on this, but those who do know and the groups that are invested in it might have more thoughts about, you know, why or how the attitudes have changed over time. But all we do is kind of track the overall big picture stuff, kind of see how that's changed, and who knows what it might look like next year. I mean, we typically ask this question each year, typically in the US as well. And it'll be interesting to see if anything changes over the last year as there's been a lot of geopolitical upheaval. And alliances honestly are changing in terms of attitudes, both in the US and abroad and how they see, you know, the, the other major powers or even, you know, middle powers around the world. And it will be interesting to see how that changes over time.

Milan Vaishnav So Jacob, let me just ask you one last thing, and maybe we can kind of bring this conversation to an end, which is in most countries you look at, you find that opinions on India have remained relatively stable, not a lot of variation. But I think you mentioned in the report that there have been 10 countries where there's been statistically significant changes, and the ratings of India have fallen in seven out of the 10. And I wonder if you could just tell us a little bit about that set of countries where we've seen the most change.

Jacob Poushter Yeah. So, I was just pulling up some data because it's hard to remember exactly where things have fallen. But yeah, the 10 countries where it fell were of varying degrees where the US, Mexico, Indonesia, South Africa, Nigeria, Turkey, and Bangladesh. So, as I said, some variation there, the numbers are the highest fall was in Bangladesh and that could have been for other political reasons. And then those are the countries where there was a decline. Also, three countries with an increase and that was the UK, Germany and Sri Lanka. So, you do see these kinds of divergences and in terms of attitudes, especially the…it's probably pretty interesting that, you know, Sri Lankans are much more positive on India in this over this past year and Bangladeshis are much less positive. Again, I think it speaks to some of the specific geopolitics of the region. You probably know better than me about those issues, but those are where things have changed. Over time, it's been a little more consistent when you look back to like 2023, there's not as much movement over many of these countries. But again, I do feel like this is one area where we'll have to keep on taking the temperature and see if anything changes based on, you know, what's going on in the world, or if there's changes in how people think about the region or India in particular, and it’s kind of relationship with the Gulf, relationship with China, relationship with other Southeast Asian countries to see if there's a change over time. But yeah, that's where we've seen change. Again, when you look in comparison to how US images change over the last year, it's not as major, but we'll see if things change over now.

Milan Vaishnav And I think the real payoff, and again, you already said this, but I think it's worth emphasizing at the end, it comes in creating a time series where longitudinally you can study these trends over time, right? Because in any given year, there may be a geopolitical shock or statistical noise that moves things up and down, but if you're able to assess this over kind of a longer sweep, you get a better sense of kind of where the trajectory is headed.

Jacob Poushter Yeah, I mean, we've been tracking US presidents since Bush, actually, we even have a data point from 1999 that was that we got from the State Department, which looks at like attitudes in Western Europe over time. And you see these huge, you know, up and down, up, and down up and down. And, you, know, we like to see that in one way, because it shows that the public opinion is based off of something that they're seeing changes in the world and society that they're reacting to things. Now the direction is, we're obviously neutral to that. It's just, we know that people have opinions. We know that they like to express their opinions and we want to try to bring those opinions to a broader public. And especially when it comes to international affairs, we often don't think about, you know, what does an Indian think? What does a Kenyan think? What does South Korean think about these attitudes? And it's nice to see the data go out to the public and people react to it and kind of say, oh, that makes sense. Or, oh what, why was that the case and kind of dig deeper, , you know, look at the data, use the data for whatever purposes and, you know, help, help you know elucidate the world around them. And it's a big world. There's a lot of people, there's a lot of opinions. And you know, what we try to do is try to bring, bring that data, in a more direct way, unbiased way, so that people can make, especially policymakers, can make decisions that best benefit people.

Milan Vaishnav My guest on the show this week is Jacob Poushter. He is an associate director at Pew Research Center and the lead author of a recent report titled “India and Pakistan Rivals with Divergent Views of the Global Order.” Jacob, thank you so much for joining us. It's a fascinating report. We're in the studio here. Some of your colleagues have joined us. Thank you to you all as well for this great resource and look forward to talking when the next survey comes out.

Jacob Poushter Great, thanks so much for having me, really appreciate it.