Harmeet Kaur’s recent CNN piece on the open targeting of Indian Americans names something that has been building for a long time. She shows that anti-Indian and anti–South Asian hate is no longer just scattered incidents or fringe hostility. It is part of a coherent, expanding white nationalist and Christian nationalist project.

Kaur traces how Diwali greetings from public officials, Indian American conservatives, and government accounts were met with open abuse. Replies told people to “go back home,” mocked “sand demons,” and insisted that “this is America, we don’t do this.” Those responses were not simply anti-immigrant in a generic sense. They targeted the very idea that Indian and South Asian Americans—Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian, Jain, Buddhist, atheist, Dalit, Bahujan, Indo-Caribbean, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan—belong fully here, in public and visible ways.

Her reporting makes it impossible to pretend that these attacks are misunderstandings. They are part of a deliberate effort to push Indian Americans and South Asian Americans back into the shadows, to treat them as guests at best, intruders at worst. And because the backlash is happening so publicly, it forces a deeper question: what kind of country is being built when anyone marked as South Asian, brown, immigrant, or non-Christian becomes a target?

Vivek Ramamswamy confronted at Turning Point

Why does Hindu visibility become a flashpoint in this Christian nationalist moment?

While Kaur writes about Indian Americans and South Asian Americans in all their complexity, a key part of the backlash centers on Hindu visibility in public life. Diwali celebrations at the White House, Hindu American officials speaking openly about their traditions, and Hindu festivals recognized by civic institutions all draw intense rage from the Christian nationalist right. The point is not that Hindu Americans are the only ones being targeted; they clearly are not. But Hindu public presence has become a particularly visible site where Christian nationalism feels threatened.

Hindu practices—lighting diyas in a federal building, offering prayers that are not framed within a Christian idiom, telling stories of Ram, Sita, Durga, Krishna, or other deities—make clear that the United States is not, and has never been, religiously monolithic. In the eyes of Christian nationalists, this is not just foreign; it is a profound theological challenge. Hindu traditions embody a plural, layered, many-paths understanding of the sacred. Simply by existing in public institutions, they call into question the idea that one faith can claim the state as its own.

Kaur’s article helps us see that when far-right commenters sneer at “foreign gods,” they are not only attacking Hindus. They are signaling a broader project: to define Americanness as white and Christian, and to push all other religious communities—Muslim, Sikh, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, Indigenous spiritualities—out of the frame. Hindu visibility is one of the places where this project becomes starkly visible, but it is deeply entwined with attacks on many other communities.

How does Indian and South Asian American diversity expose the lie of the ‘model minority’ myth?

The model minority myth insists that “Indians” or “Asians” are uniformly successful, apolitical, grateful, and assimilated—and that this alleged success proves racism is over. In reality, Indian Americans and South Asian Americans are profoundly diverse: they include undocumented workers, low-wage laborers, taxi drivers, farmworkers, domestic workers, and students navigating debt and precarity, alongside the tech professionals and CEOs who dominate the public image.

Some prominent Indian American conservatives—such as Dinesh D’Souza and Vivek Ramaswamy—have spent years (decades in D’Souza’s case) leaning into that myth. They have defended harsh policing, mocked movements for racial justice, and aligned themselves with political currents that harm Black communities, migrants, Muslims, and other people of color. Their bet was simple: if they performed a certain kind of respectability, if they distanced themselves from other marginalized groups, they would be accepted as full insiders.

Now the bill for that bet is coming due. Both men have watched as the same online spaces that once amplified them with adulation now turn on them with open contempt. Ramaswamy, flirting with gubernatorial ambitions and speaking at events hosted by outfits like Turning Point, has been forced to confront the fact that the base he has courted does not see him as one of “us” the racist confrontations from his audiences make it brutally clear: his Hinduness and his skin are not incidental details—they are disqualifying marks. The message, spelled out in slurs, is simple: go back to where you came from.

Their recent performances of shock—suddenly discovering racism in the ranks, suddenly invoking the language of diversity, tolerance, and acceptance—ring as something more than hollow. It is the hollowness of men who are not just surprised by the monster at the door, but offended that it does not recognize them as monster-friendly.

The same far-right spaces that once amplified these figures now swarm with open contempt for Indian and South Asian Americans, including those who are conservative. The message again is brutal in its clarity: you can echo our talking points, but your brownness, your names, your accents, your families, your faiths, remain suspect. The immorality of joining hands with white nationalism is now matched by its practical failure.

How are anti-immigrant policy and racialized hate intersecting for Indian and South Asian Americans?

This eruption of anti-Indian American racism is situated inside a wider assault on immigrants. Indian and South Asian people become lightning rods in debates around the H-1B visa, student visas, and broader immigration policy. Far-right narratives depict Indian workers as “cheating the system,” “stealing American jobs,” or forming conspiratorial networks based on caste or ethnicity.

Because Indian and South Asian Americans are often coded as foreign and permanent outsiders, these economic narratives easily blur into cultural and religious panic. A turbaned Sikh at a gas station, a hijabi Muslim in a grocery store, a Hindu temple in a suburb, a South Asian Christian pastor, a Dalit organizer speaking about caste in the U.S.—all are folded into a single story about an “invasion.” Slurs that originated on anonymous forums now spill into mainstream political discourse. The targets may be Hindu in one moment, Muslim or Sikh in the next, but the underlying logic is the same: people who look like you do not belong here.

This is why treating anti-Indian racism as an isolated problem misses the point. It is part of the same machinery that detains migrants at the border, encourages harassment of Chinese and East Asian communities, and normalizes suspicion of Black and Brown people in every public space. The attacks on Indian and South Asian Americans do not stand apart from other racialized violence in the U.S.; they follow the same script.

What does this reveal about the state of church–state separation?

When Diwali or Eid or Vaisakhi are acknowledged by government institutions, the outrage from Christian nationalists is immediate. The complaint is rarely framed as “the state should recognize no religion”; instead, it is framed as “we don’t do this here” or “America is a Christian nation.” In other words, the objection is not to state entanglement with religion as such, but to the state recognizing more than one religious community.

Hindu visibility in particular forces the contradiction into the open. If federal buildings can host Christmas trees and Easter egg rolls under the banner of “tradition,” on what basis can a diya, a rangoli, or a Hindu prayer be treated as improper or foreign? The presence of Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Jewish, Buddhist, Indigenous, and other religious practices in public life tests whether the United States is willing to take its own constitutional commitments seriously. If Christian nationalism wins, church–state separation will not disappear in a neutral way; it will simply be replaced by a state that openly favors one faith over others. A real sign that Christian nationalism has little sense of the history of the violent struggle between Protestant denominations that made the separation of church and state a founding principle.

Indian and South Asian Americans of every religion are caught in this struggle, whether or not they foreground faith in their identities. The same forces that rage at Hindu rituals in the White House also attack mosques, synagogues, Black churches, and any sign that the public square belongs to multiple communities, not just one.

How Are Indian and South Asian Americans Being Positioned in the New Politics of White Christian Nationalism?

Teen Vogue with its consistently insightful takes

Seen through the lens of Kaur’s article, Indian and South Asian Americans are being positioned in a distinctly double-edged way within the emerging landscape of white Christian nationalism. On the one hand, they are treated as useful symbols: evidence that the United States is “open” to high-achieving immigrants, proof that conservative movements can claim a veneer of multiracial participation, and convenient spokespeople when their rhetoric aligns with anti-woke, anti-Black, or anti-immigrant narratives. On the other hand, they remain legible as permanent outsiders—racially marked, religiously suspect, and quickly recast as foreign interlopers the moment their visibility exceeds a narrow, instrumental role.

This helps explain why even those Indian American conservatives who are most closely aligned with the hard right now encounter open hostility from the very constituencies they hoped to cultivate. Their presence signals that inclusion, in this formation, is rarely stable and almost never equal. Formal prominence—appointments, media platforms, proximity to power—does not fundamentally alter how they are read when larger anxieties about race, religion, and demographic change are activated. In that sense, the backlash functions less as a rupture than as a clarification: it reveals how quickly the language of welcome gives way to calls to “go back” when the line between token presence and genuine belonging (and its ambitions) is crossed.

At the same time, “the Indian American community” or “the South Asian community” is not a unified political bloc standing behind these figures. Survey data and organizing practice alike suggest that many, and likely most, Indian and South Asian Americans experience the politics of Patel, Ramaswamy, Dhillon, or D’Souza less as representation than as a source of discomfort— on a continuum from embarrassment to reprehensible. In that sense, these high-profile allies of white Christian nationalism function not as authentic emissaries, but as outliers whose visibility exceeds their actual constituency. The tension between how they are projected outward—as stand-ins for an entire diaspora—and how they are received inward—as marginal, proto-Quisling-like actors—becomes one of the more revealing fault lines in understanding how South Asian communities and individuals are being both enlisted, and resisted, within the broader architecture of the racial and religious politics of the United States.

Racists Are Openly Targeting Indian Americans — Visibility and the Politics of Belonging

Why does Hindu visibility become a flashpoint in this Christian nationalist moment?

How does Indian and South Asian American diversity expose the lie of the ‘model minority’ myth?

How are anti-immigrant policy and racialized hate intersecting for Indian and South Asian Americans?

What does this reveal about the state of church–state separation?

How Are Indian and South Asian Americans Being Positioned in the New Politics of White Christian Nationalism?

Further Reading:

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Racists Are Openly Targeting Indian Americans — Visibility and the Politics of Belonging

Why does Hindu visibility become a flashpoint in this Christian nationalist moment?

How does Indian and South Asian American diversity expose the lie of the ‘model minority’ myth?

How are anti-immigrant policy and racialized hate intersecting for Indian and South Asian Americans?

What does this reveal about the state of church–state separation?

How Are Indian and South Asian Americans Being Positioned in the New Politics of White Christian Nationalism?

Further Reading:

Sheikh Hasina’s Death Sentence, the International Crimes Tribunal, and Justice in Bangladesh

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