Culture
Design And Data: The Dark Underbelly Of Rising Hate Against Indians
- As India gains global influence, a new wave of racism targeting Indians and Hindus is spreading across Western platforms and politics, fueled by conspiracy theories, media bias, and unchecked digital hate.
Sharp rise in anti-Indian racism.
Racism is an enduring and often aggressive problem on the internet, a pervasive issue in today’s digital landscape.
Although scholars and mental health experts have only recently intensified their focus on this area, recognising its growing impact on individuals and society, the presence of racist behaviour in online environments is not a new phenomenon. As early as the 2000s, researchers were raising alarms over the growing online presence of hate groups, particularly white supremacist circles.
Digital platforms, with their anonymous interfaces and unregulated "free speech" havens, have only magnified the reach and intensity of these ideologies. The resulting impunity has emboldened users to share overtly racist content without fear of real-world consequences. Despite the pervasive and impactful nature of this problem, online racism targeting minority immigrant groups like Indians adequate remains grossly under-researched and under-addressed.
Statistics of Online Racism
In late December 2024, there was a sharp rise in overt anti-Indian racism directed at both Indians and Indian-Americans on X (formerly Twitter). This wave of hostility was sparked by the announcement that Indian-origin technologist Sriram Krishnan would serve as an AI adviser to the incoming Trump administration.
From 22 to 26 December, this development coupled with Vivek Ramaswamy’s post criticising American culture for “venerating mediocrity over excellence”, ignited a wave of hateful rhetoric on X.
The hostility rapidly coalesced around two themes:
Generic immigrant hate: Broad, recycled stereotypes portraying immigrants and people of colour, especially Indians, as economic and cultural threats, reminiscent of historical attacks on Muslims, Haitians, and Hispanics.
Far-right figures like Laura Loomer fuelled these narratives, with posts on X amassing millions of views, exposing deep rifts within the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement and further intensifying fear among Indian-American communities.
Key data from that period reveals the scale of the backlash:
128 posts on X targeted Indians, primarily within a Western context.
These posts received 138.54 million views in total by 3 January 2025. Notably, 36 posts crossed 1 million views; 12 of them explicitly cast Indians as a demographic threat to white America.
64 of the 85 accounts in this dataset were X Premium (blue tick) users, suggesting the hate was not just grassroots, it was algorithmically boosted (see image below).
The top-viewed post with 17.4 million views, from @leonardaisfunE (163.7k followers), depicted a white man mocking Indian street food vendors, indicating that anti-India content consistently garners high engagement on X.
Most of these posts violated X’s own Hateful Conduct Policy, including offenses such as inciting fear or promoting harmful stereotypes about protected groups, using slurs and derogatory tropes, and engaging in dehumanising language.
Similar racist, anti-India, and anti-Indian remarks surfaced in a grotesque fashion following the crash of Air India flight AI-171, which went down minutes after it took off from Ahmedabad en route to London.
Instead of mourning for the mass tragedy, several white-supremacist corners of social media seized on the disaster, posting mocking memes, slurs, and tasteless “jokes” about Indian pilots, passengers, and even Hindu rituals.
How West promotes Anti Indian Sentiments?
Anti-Indian and anti-Hindu bias in the US often follows a fast loop:
- Elite and academic forums and watchdog reports recast Hindu identity as extremist or suspect,
- Social-media algorithms amplify these as "hot takes", and
A sixth-grader is mocked as an "idol-worshipper". A Hindu college freshman is belittled by her professor. A US official of Indian origin is accused of “dual loyalty”. Meanwhile, anyone pointing to the bias is told they’re imagining it.
The US Government’s recent hiring of 25-year-old Marko Elez into Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) further exposed these blind spots. The Wall Street Journal found old X posts where Elez supported a “eugenic immigration policy”, said he would “never marry outside [his] ethnicity”, and urged people to “normalise Indian hate”.
Elez quit once these posts became public, but many ask how he passed background checks and was about to handle a federal payment system. They argue this failure let anti-Indian racism slip into government work and signaled tolerance for such views.
At the core of this racism amplified on Western social media is the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, falsely claiming Jewish plots to “replace” European populations with non-European immigrants like Indians.
These platforms, through their architecture and often inadequate moderation, become fertile ground for this hateful framework, fuelling both antisemitism and anti-Indian hatred. This allows anxieties about job displacement and perceived “white subversion” to proliferate unchecked, thereby actively promoting anti-Indian racism and animosity.
On 4chan, a platform known for unhinged hate speech, anti-Indian slurs, including the derogatory term “Pajeets”, surged by 122 per cent between January 2023 and 2024, rising from 11,427 to 25,420. March 2024 hit a 16-month high with 32,703 instances of extreme hate.
Indians are the most successful immigrant group in the US, with a median household income of $151,200. Nearly 48% of Indian-alone adults are Hindu, compared to just 11% of Asian adults overall. But this success is weaponised.
White-nationalist commentators fold Indian prosperity into the “Great Replacement” conspiracy, warning that skilled-migration visas will “make America look like India”. During the 2024 H-1B fight, Laura Loomer called an Indian adviser a sign of a “third-world tech invasion”, while Nick Fuentes floated visions of “500 million Indians” swamping the country.
India is no longer a soft target. A Rapid Response India Lobby in Washington and major cities, which includes a bipartisan Indian-American PAC that mimics the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), issues talking points within 12 hours of any anti-India incident and tracks Congressional floor speeches.
As the IT Rules 2021 already created a 36-hour takedown clock, this shows legal precedent. A further upgradation to 3-hour takedown window for hate flagged by any accredited body and a mandatory quarterly “Hinduphobia transparency report” from platforms is warranted.
India has already begun revoking Overseas Citizen visas of diaspora critics. To act more decisively, the government should consider: foreign nationals whose verified accounts peddle violent anti-India hate lose e-visa eligibility for five years, which will be processed under the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) watchlist.
Diplomatically, India must push for recognising Hinduphobia at state and national levels in the West. Georgia’s 2023 law acknowledging Hinduphobia could be replicated in at least five other US states and in Canada’s House of Commons.
The metrics of hate are rising. But so are the capabilities to counter it—with clarity, coordination, and the confidence of a rising power.
