Good afternoon. My name is Rishab Chatty, and I'm here representing Hindus for Human Rights.
Earlier this week, a man drove to a Hindu temple in Aurora carrying a rifle and hundreds of rounds of ammunition. According to investigators, he intended to kill the people worshipping there.
He was a self-described white supremacist and neo-Nazi who allegedly intended to kill people because they were Indian.
We are standing here today because his gun reportedly malfunctioned.
Think about how horrifying that is. The difference between a community gathering for prayer and a community gathering to bury its dead may have come down to a malfunctioning gun.
I am profoundly relieved that those families are alive. But I am furious that they were put in this position in the first place.
We should not have to wait until our temples become massacre sites before this country takes anti-Hindu hatred, anti-Indian racism, and white supremacist violence seriously.
And I am furious that this hatred is still treated as some fringe phenomenon confined to anonymous extremists on the internet.
It isn't.
Congressman Brandon Gill called Hindu religious ceremonies in Texas "Third World" and said he didn't want them in his community.
Bo French, a Republican nominee for statewide office in Texas, circulated a photograph of South Asian students celebrating a University of Texas football game, treating their presence as evidence that foreigners were taking over America.
These were college students. At a football game. Enjoying themselves. And somehow, that was a threat to America.
Former Ohio gubernatorial candidate Casey Putsch mocked Vivek Ramaswamy's Indian heritage in a video before firing a gun. And Laura Loomer has called Indian immigrants invaders.
I want to know when any of this became acceptable.
When did Hindu worship become something a congressman could openly disparage? When did South Asian students succeeding at American universities become something to fear rather than celebrate? And what kind of political culture allows gunfire to become the punchline of a joke about someone's Indian identity?
These people have names. They have political careers. They have audiences. And they should be held accountable for what they say.
Accountability cannot stop with the person holding the gun. It must extend to those who have made hatred against our communities politically acceptable and profited from spreading it.
To Congressman Gill, Bo French, Casey Putsch, Laura Loomer, and every other public figure who has trafficked in this rhetoric: You owe our communities an answer. Retract these hateful remarks. Explain why you thought it was acceptable to make our religion, our ethnicity, and our very presence in this country objects of suspicion and contempt.
And to those who have elevated or defended these voices: stop making excuses. Hold the people within your own ranks accountable.
We know where white supremacy leads. We have seen its violence at mosques, synagogues, Black churches, and Sikh gurdwaras. And this week, we came terrifyingly close to witnessing it at a Hindu temple in Illinois.
And I have a warning for anyone who thinks they can use what happened here to turn our communities against one another.
Don't you dare use our pain to advance your own bigotry.
Do not use this incident to demonize Muslims, vilify immigrants, or spread hatred against transgender people based on unverified rumors.
You don’t get to claim you're protecting Hindu Americans while threatening other vulnerable communities. If your response to white supremacist violence is to find another marginalized community to blame, then you have learned absolutely nothing from what happened in Aurora.
Hindus for Human Rights will not stand for it, and we expect every religious leader and elected official speaking about this incident to do the same.
We demand a thorough investigation and accountability under the law. We demand that threats against places of worship be taken seriously before lives are lost. And we demand that political leaders confront the hatred being promoted within their own institutions.
Condemnation after an attack is not enough. We need accountability before the next one.
The people who gathered to worship in Aurora deserved to return home to their families. They deserved more than the luck of a malfunctioning gun.
We refuse to wait for another massacre before America decides that our lives are worth protecting.
Thank you.