In less than three weeks, “Ramayana” — the latest movie adaptation of the famous Hindu epic — will be on theater screens across the world. Los Angeles is deciding whether to elect Nithya Raman, a woman born into a Hindu family, as mayor of the United States’ second-largest city. Hindu Americans around the country are currently celebrating the festive Navaratri season, and Diwali is just a few weeks away.
So it felt especially jarring to hear that a self-proclaimed “white supremacist Neo Nazi filled with hatred” was planning a mass shooting at a Hindu temple in Illinois. His gun reportedly jammed before he could open fire on a recent Sunday. Police said last week that they thwarted the 19-year-old man’s plot, which allegedly included a manifesto that said he wanted to kill Indian, Jewish, and African Americans.
It’s easy to write this off as yet another unhinged mass shooting plot in contemporary America. But this incident emerges as we see a documented rise in hate and xenophobic rhetoric against South Asian communities across the United States:
- Online slurs about South Asians rose 109% from 2023 to 2025, according to the nonprofit Stop AAPI Hate, and 71% of all anti-Asian online threats of violence were targeted at South Asians.
- A Center for the Study of Organized Hate (CSOH) report found South Asian American politicians — across party lines — have “faced racist and xenophobic attacks that framed their political participation as a ‘takeover.’” The same report cites “racist policies and incendiary rhetoric, xenophobic nationalism, racial hostility, growing South Asian political visibility, economic resentment, and digital amplification” as reasons why the hate has been growing.
- The vice president, who is married to an Indian American, recently called those on temporary H-1B visas “foreign indentured servants.” (Overall visas for immigrants from South Asia have dropped 63% under recent policies.)
- A candidate running for elected office in Texas recently posted racist statements about young UT Austin college students, who are Brown, at a football game.
- The CSOH study cited X, the Elon Musk-owned social platform formerly known as Twitter, as having its monthly volume of anti-South Asian hate grow by 75% from January 2025 to June 2026:
- In early September, the official Department of Homeland Security account on X posted an image of a Transformers character facing a Sikh man with the text “self-deport or find out.” In mid-September, a Sikh truck driver was stabbed at a rest stop in Wyoming.
My email inbox has been full of statements condemning recent hate incidents and the Hindu temple plot from several Asian American, South Asian, Hindu and Sikh community organizations.
My email inbox has been full of statements condemning recent hate incidents and the Hindu temple plot from several Asian American, South Asian, Hindu, and Sikh community organizations.
People are taking greater notice.
“It’s not just anti-Indian, but it’s anti-every other immigrant culture, anti-Hispanic, anti-Jewish, anti-Islam. We’re seeing it across the board,” Rep. Suhas Subramanyam, who represents Virginia’s 10th District in Congress, told Firstpost. “That’s not what our country is. We’re a country of immigrants.”
How conveniently some ignore that.
This article was first published in redwhiteandbrown.com.
