Last month, FBI Director Kash Patel wished his followers on X a cheerful Diwali. It didn’t go over nicely.
Far-right Christian nationalist and white nationalist accounts flooded his publish with bigoted memes and rhetoric. “Go back home and worship your sand demons,” a far-right pastor wrote. “Get the f**k out of my country,” learn one other reply. Said one other, “This is America. We don’t do this.” These responses, some of which have been seen thousands and thousands of occasions, have been on the tamer finish of the spectrum.
Similar hostility adopted Diwali greetings on X from former UN ambassador Nikki Haley, former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy and Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon, in addition to posts about the vacation from the White House, the State Department, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
Some Indian American conservatives appear shocked that segments of the political proper are now taking purpose at them. When Democrats received large on election night time, Ramaswamy advised Republicans to “cut out the identity politics,” saying “we don’t care about the color of your skin or your religion. We care about the content of your character.” After one X consumer mentioned that the existence of Indians disgusted them, Dinesh D’Souza, the right-wing commentator who has peddled racism in opposition to Black Americans for many years, mused: “In a career spanning 40 years, I have never encountered this type of rhetoric. The Right never used to talk like this. So who on our side has legitimized this type of vile degradation?”
This kind of degrading rhetoric is not new, but it surely’s more and more outstanding from the political right. With the rise of once-fringe figures, and with President Donald Trump aggressively cracking down on nearly every type of immigration, some members of the MAGA coalition are overtly suggesting that solely white Christians belong in America.
“The call is coming from inside the house,” mentioned Siddharth Venkataramakrishnan, an editorial supervisor and analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue who has examined anti-Indian hate speech and the far proper on-line.
Indian immigrants and Indian Americans — or anybody perceived as Indian — are the newest goal of a rising anti-migrant motion in the US and around the world. Over the previous yr, researchers at the Center for the Study of Organized Hate have documented a surge of anti-Indian sentiment on X that’s exhibiting no indicators of abating. Raqib Naik, the middle’s founder and government director, mentioned that his crew recorded almost 2,700 posts selling racism and xenophobia in opposition to Indians and Indian Americans in October alone. At least some of that could be defined by Elon Musk’s transformation of the platform: Since he took over, racist content material that might beforehand have been policed by content material moderators is now amplified and inspired. (X didn’t reply to a request for remark.)
As with the Diwali outrage, these attitudes flare up at occasions when India or Indians are in the information: Trump’s appointment of Sriram Krishnan as senior adviser on synthetic intelligence, Ramaswamy criticizing American tradition as mediocre in a social media post, escalations in the US-India trade war and a fatal accident in Florida involving a Sikh truck driver.
But the most constant anti-Indian bigotry on-line focuses on the H-1B visa program, of which Indian nationals are the biggest beneficiaries, Naik and different researchers mentioned. The program, which admits extremely expert foreigners into the US to work in specialised fields, has sparked infighting among Trump supporters, with visa opponents reminiscent of deputy chief of employees Stephen Miller accusing India of “a lot of cheating on immigration policies.” While the president’s stance on the situation has fluctuated, he lately restricted entry to H-1B visas by imposing a $100,000 application fee.
Far-right accounts and actors now routinely body Indian immigrants as scammers who are depriving Americans of high-paying jobs and name to deport them. They accuse Indians of hiring solely inside their caste or ethnicity, invoke stereotypes about Indians being soiled or smelly, and spotlight behaviors like consuming with one’s palms as cultural backwardness. It isn’t simply far-right trolls who invoke these tropes — throughout the current New York City mayoral race, the impartial marketing campaign of former Democratic governor Andrew Cuomo launched (then shortly deleted) an AI-generated attack ad depicting Zohran Mamdani sloppily consuming rice together with his palms.
Slurs directed at South Asians, some of which originated on the largely unmoderated on-line discussion board 4chan, are surging and getting into the lexicon, each on-line and offline. Photos and movies selectively exhibiting Indian-origin individuals in public locations are held up as proof of an “invasion,” one other iteration of white “replacement theory.” These attitudes didn’t emerge in a vacuum. Even earlier than Trump was first elected, highly effective figures in his motion together with Steve Bannon and Miller have been referencing the Seventies novel “The Camp of the Saints” as a cautionary story — in the e book, a favourite of white supremacists, a fleet of Indian migrants led by a feces-eating farmer invades France and overthrows the Western world.
Against this backdrop of racist and economic grievance, the success and prominence of Indian Americans make them a straightforward goal, mentioned Rohit Chopra, a professor at Santa Clara University who research far-right on-line communities and who co-authored the stories for the Center for the Study of Organized Hate with Naik. Indian immigrants and Indian Americans are amongst the highest-earning ethnic teams in the US, in line with a Pew Research Center evaluation of census knowledge. They’ve ascended to prime authorities posts and are CEOs of billion-dollar corporations. They’re represented at the highest ranges of media, leisure, expertise, enterprise, medication and academia.
“The public image of the Indian community has been that of these basically successful tech professionals and CEOs,” Chopra mentioned. “And the Indian community and Indian American community significantly plays up that image too.”
This picture actually doesn’t mirror all Indian Americans, a religiously and ethnically numerous group that features US residents, legally approved visa staff, worldwide college students and undocumented migrants. But as long-simmering resentment in opposition to prosperous Indian Americans metastasizes right into a demonization of the complete neighborhood, Chopra mentioned there’s a hazard that this might encourage real-world violence.
Already, anti-Indian attitudes on-line are spilling over into on a regular basis life.
In current weeks, a metropolis councilmember in Palm Bay, Florida, repeatedly denigrated Indians and known as for his or her mass deportation on social media, resulting in censure and requires his elimination. In Irving, Texas, a Dallas suburb residence to hundreds of Indian tech professionals, three masked males staged a roadside protest carrying indicators that learn “Don’t India My Texas,” “Deport H-1B Visa Scammers” and “Reject Foreign Demons.”
Stephanie Chan, Stop AAPI Hate’s director of knowledge and analysis, recounted a current dialog with a South Asian neighborhood chief in Texas who informed her white supremacist teams have been harassing individuals exterior Hindu temples. Stop AAPI Hate co-founder Manjusha Kulkarni mentioned she overheard individuals at a Diwali celebration speaking about readying their OCI playing cards — which permit international residents of Indian origin to stay and work in India indefinitely — simply in case.
Racist incidents reported to Stop AAPI Hate this yr and shared with NCS additionally counsel that anti-immigrant rhetoric from Trump and components of his coalition is inspiring hostility. One girl in Georgia shared {that a} fellow buyer at a quick meals restaurant threatened to name ICE to get her deported again to India. Another girl in Texas reported {that a} man who got here into her office yelled profanities at her and a coworker, saying “I am glad Trump is deporting you b*tches. I hope you have a green card.”
Salil Maniktahla, an Indian American who lives in Springfield, Virginia, mentioned he was equally accosted whereas eating at a restaurant with a good friend earlier this yr. A person hurled slurs at him, mentioned Trump was president and informed him to “go home” and “do Bharatanatyam,” referring to a South Indian classical dance. The man additionally threatened them with violence and waited for them exterior, ensuing in Maniktahla’s good friend calling the police.
“What I see now is that a lot of people are mouthing off in ways that they felt they were prevented from doing prior to 2016,” Maniktahla mentioned.
When requested about backlash to officers’ Diwali posts on-line, White House spokesman Kush Desai mentioned, “The President is a fierce defender of religious liberty and cherishes his deep and longstanding relationship with this patriotic community.” As racist, nativist and anti-immigrant rhetoric continues to proliferate on the proper, Trump and Vice President JD Vance have performed little to quell it.
Vance, whose spouse Usha Vance is Indian American, dismissed remarks from a authorities staffer reminiscent of “normalize Indian hate” as youthful indiscretion.
Vance has additionally furthered concepts underlying such bigotry, although with extra delicate language. In a speech at the Claremont Institute in July, he ruminated on what it meant to be an American. Merely embracing the nation’s foundational ideas was not sufficient, he mentioned, as a result of it could probably open the nation to thousands and thousands of foreigners and exclude some on the proper who reject those self same beliefs. A greater criterion could be one’s heritage, he added: “I think the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don’t belong.”
In the speech, Vance conceded that there was room in the US for some immigrants, as long as they demonstrated enough gratitude. Too many, although, would threaten the cloth of the nation, he argued. “And what we’re doing is recognizing that if you stop importing millions of foreigners into the country, you allow that social cohesion to form naturally,” he mentioned. “It’s hard to become neighbors with your fellow citizens when your own government keeps on importing new neighbors every single year at a record number.”
At this yr’s White House Diwali celebration, Kash Patel used a conspicuous flip of phrase — one seemingly meant to tell apart himself from one other sort of immigrant.
“It’s an honor to be a first-generation Indian American whose parents lawfully immigrated to this country,” he said.
To some Trump supporters responding on-line to his remarks, it didn’t appear to matter that Patel’s dad and mom entered the US legally or that he was a dutiful member of the Trump administration. “Go celebrate your foreign gods back home in India. America is a Christian nation,” one consumer wrote. Said one other, “Hard to think of something less American. This is an abomination.”
“I think that sections of the Indian American community have been living in this fool’s paradise,” Chopra mentioned.
He continued, “This should serve as a kind of wake-up call — that racism that’s directed at people of color and minority groups, you are not exempt from. And maybe that should spark some kind of reflection about questions of solidarity with other vulnerable groups.”