The “World Values Survey” carried out by US newspaper Washington Post and British newspaper Daily Mail has lead to a surprising result. The survey done on 80 countries to estimate the level of tolerance for racial others claims that Pakistanis, often labelled as ‘extremists’ by international media, are in fact way more tolerant than most nations of the world.
According to details, Pakistan has a number of factors that coincide with racial intolerance i.e. sectarian violence, its location in the least-tolerant region of the world, low economic and human development indices etc. Yet only 6.5 percent of Pakistanis objected to a neighbour of a different race. This would appear to suggest Pakistanis are more racially tolerant than even the Germans or the Dutch.
Pakistan’s tolerance levels are in sharp contrast to that of its neighbors as India, Bangladesh, Jordan and Hong Kong have been declared as the least tolerant countries in the world. This was because 43.5 percent of Indians, 51.4 percent of Jordanians, 71.8 percent of Hong Kong people and 71.7 percent of Bangladeshis interviews stated that they did not wish to live next to someone from a different race.
The data indicates that Anglo and Latin countries are most tolerant. People in the survey were most likely to embrace a racially diverse neighbour in the United Kingdom and its former colonies (the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) and in Latin America. The only real exceptions were oil-rich Venezuela, where income inequality sometimes breaks along racial lines, and the Dominican Republic, perhaps because of its adjacency to troubled Haiti. Scandinavian countries also scored high.
However, a serious flaw in the methodology of the survey could be the fact that in most Western countries racism is so taboo that many people will hide their intolerant views and lie to the questioners.
Max Fisher of the Washington Post suggested that maybe ‘Americans are conditioned by their education and media to keep these sorts of racial preferences private i.e. to lie about them on surveys, in a way that Indians might not be’.
For the full report, please see http://www.thenews.com.pk/Todays-News-2-178154-Survey-finds-Pakistanis-highly-tolerant-people
