The open targeting of Indian Americans has moved from whispers to headlines, from fringe message boards to public replies under official government posts. A recent report by Harmeet Kaur for CNN has brought into sharp focus a reality many South Asian communities have long understood: anti-Indian and anti–South Asian hate in the United States is no longer sporadic or accidental. It is organized, ideological, and increasingly unapologetic.
Kaur’s reporting documents how something as simple and celebratory as Diwali greetings—from elected officials, Indian American conservatives, and official government accounts—triggered waves of racist abuse. Replies flooded in telling Indian Americans to “go back home,” mocking “foreign gods,” and declaring, “This is America, we don’t do this.” These were not generic anti-immigrant jabs. They were explicit attempts to deny belonging, to insist that Indian and South Asian Americans—across religions, castes, and national origins—remain outsiders no matter how long they have lived, voted, paid taxes, or served in public life.
What emerges is not confusion or misunderstanding, but intent. The backlash is part of a broader white nationalist and Christian nationalist project that seeks to redefine Americanness as narrowly white and Christian, while pushing everyone else to the margins.
Why Hindu Visibility Has Become a Flashpoint
While the attacks target Indian and South Asian Americans broadly—including Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Buddhists, and others—Hindu visibility has become a particularly intense trigger. Public Diwali celebrations, the lighting of diyas in federal buildings, and Hindu officials openly acknowledging their traditions expose a reality Christian nationalism finds intolerable: the United States is not, and never has been, religiously monolithic.
Hindu traditions embody pluralism at their core—many paths, many names, many expressions of the sacred. Simply existing in public institutions, without translation into Christian terms, challenges the idea that one faith can claim the state as its own. When far-right voices sneer at “foreign gods,” they are signaling something larger than discomfort with Hinduism. They are announcing a desire to push all non-Christian religions—Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Jewish, Buddhist, Indigenous—out of the public square.
The Collapse of the ‘Model Minority’ Illusion
This moment also exposes the hollowness of the “model minority” myth. Indian Americans are often portrayed as uniformly wealthy, compliant, and apolitical—a convenient narrative used to deny the existence of racism itself. In reality, South Asian America includes undocumented workers, cab drivers, domestic workers, farm laborers, students buried in debt, and families living one crisis away from instability, alongside doctors and tech executives.
Some high-profile Indian American conservatives built careers by leaning into that myth, aligning themselves with movements hostile to immigrants, racial justice, and religious pluralism. Their wager was that respectability and ideological loyalty would buy acceptance. But the backlash has made something brutally clear: proximity to power does not erase brown skin, non-Christian faith, or immigrant origins. The same spaces that once amplified these voices now turn on them with open slurs, making plain that conditional inclusion was never real inclusion.
Immigration Policy and Racialized Hate
Anti-Indian racism is unfolding alongside a wider assault on immigrants. Indian and South Asian Americans have become lightning rods in debates over H-1B visas, student visas, and labor competition. Far-right narratives frame Indian workers as “job stealers” or conspirators, easily slipping from economic resentment into cultural and religious panic.
In this framework, a Sikh man in a turban, a Muslim woman in a hijab, a Hindu temple in a suburb, or a South Asian Christian pastor all become interchangeable symbols of an imagined “invasion.” The targets shift, but the logic remains constant: people who look like you do not belong here.
Church–State Separation Under Strain
The outrage over Diwali, Eid, or Vaisakhi recognition reveals a deeper contradiction. Critics rarely argue that the state should recognize no religion at all. Instead, they insist that only certain traditions count as “American.” Christmas trees and Easter events are waved through as culture; a diya or rangoli is framed as foreign intrusion.
This is not secularism—it is selective exclusion. If Christian nationalism prevails, church–state separation will not vanish neutrally. It will be replaced by a state that openly favors one faith while treating others as suspect. Indian and South Asian Americans, regardless of personal belief, are caught in this struggle because their presence makes pluralism visible.
A Clarifying Moment
What this wave of racism reveals is not a sudden breakdown, but a clarification. Indian and South Asian Americans are being positioned as useful symbols when convenient and disposable outsiders when they assert full belonging. The language of welcome evaporates the moment visibility turns into power, presence into permanence.
“This is not about holidays or hashtags,” a South Asian community organizer said privately after the Diwali backlash. “It’s about who gets to be seen as American without apology.”
The attacks documented by Kaur force a reckoning. They ask whether the United States will live up to its constitutional promises or retreat into an exclusionary vision of nationhood. For Indian and South Asian Americans, the answer will shape not only their safety, but the future meaning of belonging itself.
