“A Threat to Justice Everywhere: Stemming the Tide of Hate Crimes in America”
Statement on record from
Hindus for Human Rights (HfHR)
United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary Hearing
“A Threat to Justice Everywhere: Stemming the Tide of Hate Crimes in America”
September 19, 2024
Hindus for Human Rights (HfHR) submits this statement for the record for the aforementioned Judiciary Hearing.
HfHR is a human rights advocacy and social justice organization rooted in peace, justice, and truth. HfHR seeks to provide an explicitly Hindu voice of resistance to religious nationalism, caste, and bigotry. We work with a broad range of civil society partners to advocate for human rights issues in South Asia and the diaspora. As the only progressive Hindu advocacy organization in the world, we explore how our communities have been affected by the global rise of hate and xenophobia. In the US, this means we are closely monitoring how white Christian nationalism, Hindu nationalism, casteism, and transnational repression have harmed Hindu Americans.
To this end, we urge Congress to pass legislation that will ensure the safety and freedoms of Hindu Americans, including the Transnational Repression Policy Act, the Improving Reporting to Prevent Hate Act, and the Safe Workplaces Act. We also recommend that the federal government engage with Hindu Americans across caste, class, and ethnic identities to understand the diversity of our community. Hindu Americans are not a monolith and to effectively engage with Hindu Americans, the US government must understand our community’s diverse needs.
Rising Hate in the United States
Hindu Americans, like other religious minorities, have faced increasing threats to their freedom of religion in the face of rising Christian nationalism in the United States. This includes state-level efforts to institutionalize Christian practices in schools, incidents of racial and Islamophobic violence, and vandalisms of places of worship. However, we must also acknowledge that the term “Hinduphobia” has been weaponized to divide South Asian communities, undermine hard-won efforts to advance the civil rights of Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh Americans after 9/11, and construct a politically motivated narrative of rampant ‘Hinduphobia’ to silence and censor anyone who speaks out against the violence of Hindu supremacy and caste oppression.
In 2017, an Indian Hindu man was murdered and his friend was shot in a bar in Kansas. When the shooter targeted both men, he shouted, “Get out of my country.” As anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies again take center stage, Hindu Americans, many of whom are Indian American, will face violence.
In 2022, a woman racially abused and attacked three Indian American women in a parking lot in Plano, Texas. While the women identify as Hindu, they were attacked because of their race and perceived foreignness, as Indian Americans.
In 2024, the Oklahoma State Superintendent ordered public schools to include the Bible in the education curriculum for 5th-12th graders. Absent any orders to implement curricula that would educate Oklahoma students about other religions, this is an imposition of the Christian faith and will encourage the bullying of Hindu and other non-Christian students.
In 2024, Louisiana passed a law requiring public schools to display the Ten Commandments, and the law effectively prioritized Christian students over other students. A similar law was introduced in Texas in 2023, but failed.
In 2023 and 2024, reports emerged of a spate of vandalisms of temples. While these vandalisms on houses of worship caused concern within the Hindu American community, they were not attacks on Hindu Americans from majority communities. Instead, these vandalisms reflect politics within the South Asian diaspora surrounding the relationship between India’s Sikh community and the Indian government.
Rising Hindu supremacy in the US
Organizations closely aligned with the far right Indian political movement of Hindu nationalism have used their positions as some of the only Hindu American organizations to allege that they are the true representatives of the Hindu American community. However, in their advocacy, they have propagated narratives and engaged in policies that materially harm all Indian Americans, including Hindu Americans.
In Illinois, Hindu nationalists drafted General Assembly Public Act 102-1058 to establish an Indian American Advisory Council. The legislation initially described “Indian citizens” as members of any South Asian diaspora, except for Muslims, even though Indian Americans include Indian Muslims. Additionally, South Asian Americans who trace their origin to other countries in South Asia are, by definition, not Indian. While legislators eventually changed the definition of “Indian” to reflect reality, the Council did not reflect the linguistic, caste, or religious diversity of the Indian American community in Illinois.
At Edison, New Jersey’s India Day parade in 2022, organizers included a float of a bulldozer with images of Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath and India Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The bulldozer, which has been used to demolish the homes of Muslims across India, has become a symbol of hate in Indian politics. As we argued, alongside our Indian American Muslim partners, this bulldozer sent a clear message to Indian American Muslims that they would not be welcome in the US or in India.
In 2024, in New York’s India Day Parade in Manhattan, organizers included a float depicting a temple to the Lord Ram in Ayodhya. The temple (or mandir), which was inaugurated by Prime Minister Modi in January 2024, was built on the land where a 16th century mosque was demolished by Hindu nationalists in 1992 and whose destruction led to Islamophobic pogroms across India. Modi’s inauguration of the temple was widely viewed as a breakdown of secularism in India, the launch of his electoral campaign, and his clear support for Islamophobia in India. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America, which sponsored the float, also organized rallies in the US in support of the consecration of the Ram Mandir. For many Indian Americans across faiths, the inclusion of the Ram Mandir in the India Day Parade was a clear endorsement of hate.
New York City officials, including Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani, City Councillors Shekhar Krishnan and Shahana Hanif, Comptroller Brad Lander, and Mayor Eric Adams, denounced the float as a hate symbol. No officials from the City of New York attended this India Day parade.
Transnational repression in the US
In 2023, as Indian democracy under Prime Minister Narendra Modi has decayed further, the Modi regime has begun targeting civil society actors outside of India’s borders. This shift has been exemplified by two high-profile recent cases: the alleged assassination of a Canadian citizen on Canadian soil, and the alleged conspiracy to assassinate an American citizen on U.S. soil. These incidents, however, are not isolated cases, but rather form part of a larger pattern of transnational repression. While this is not an exhaustive list of incidents or tactics of transnational repression, below are a number of choice incidents that exemplify the violations of free speech and civil rights of Indian Americans, especially Indian Hindu Americans:
Hindu nationalists doxxed a number of Indian American students because of their membership in Harvard University’s Palestinian Caucus.
Throughout 2023, the BJP circulated antisemitic conspiracy theories on their official accounts, and directed harassment towards Hindus for Human Rights (HfHR) Executive Director Sunita Viswanath.
The conspiracy theory, which was first constructed by Disinfo Labs, was then amplified by Hindu nationalist civil society organizations in the United States, including Hindu Action, which was then amplified by BJP officials.
In October 2023, the Indian government withheld the Twitter/X accounts of major human rights organizations, Indian American Muslim Council (IAMC) and HfHR.
The Indian government has refused entry to individuals with an Overseas Citizenship of India (OCI) and even suspended the OCIs of critics of the Indian government. The Indian government has also refused visas to human rights activists. Finally, the Indian government has suspended the passports of journalists, activists, and students, rendering these individuals stateless.
In 2022, Vice journalist Angad Singh, an OCI holder, was deported from Delhi airport. Singh previously made documentaries about India’s COVID crisis and the 2020-2021 Farmers’ protest.
In 2023, the Middle East Eye reported that the Indian government suspended the passports of at least 10 Kashmiri journalists, students and activists, including individuals living abroad.
Kashmiri Americans who advocate for human rights in Kashmir have alleged that their families in Kashmir have been detained or questioned arbitrarily because of their advocacy. Indian Americans from other communities have recently reported similar incidents.
In 2023, IAMC led a coalition of organizations expressing alarm about Hindu nationalists who filmed and took pictures of participants at an anti-Modi protest, including IAMC and HfHR staff.
In September 2023, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau alleged that agents of the Indian government killed Canadian citizen Hardeep Singh Nijjar. Nijjar was targeted because of his support for the Khalistan movement, which seeks the creation of an independent state for Sikhs.
In November 2023, the US Department of Justice announced charges against an Indian national for an attempt to assassinate US citizen Gurpatwant Singh Pannun. Like Nijjar, Pannun is a supporter of the Khalistan movement.
Caste-based discrimination
As the South Asian American community grows, and other immigrant communities build more political power, our communities are grappling with the rise in caste-based discrimination. Employers, educational institutions, and even cities are now exploring how to ensure that workers, students, and city residents have access to tools to combat caste discrimination. However, as the City of Seattle’s Civil Rights Department noted when Seattle passed the country’s first civil rights bill to make caste a protected category, legislation to ban caste discrimination, they would be unable to help Seattle residents pursue civil rights cases without legislation.
After a 2020 California Civil Rights Department lawsuit against Cisco Systems in Silicon Valley, Equality Labs reported receiving 260 complaints from workers in the tech industry involving caste-related bias
In 2023, the City of Seattle passed the country’s first law that established caste as a protected category for civil rights. The law will ensure that no one can be discriminated against based on their caste identity.
In 2023, California also passed the nation’s first state-level bill to establish caste as a protected category. While the bill passed both chambers with broad support, the bill was vetoed by Governor Gavin Newsom, who argued that caste was already covered by ancestry. We, along with other anti-caste activists, maintain that this is not the case and that laws that protect against discrimination based on ancestry exclude many caste-oppressed individuals, including people who marry into a different caste.
Many universities, including Brown University and the California State University system, have now included prohibitions on caste discrimination in their student codes of conduct.
Apple became the first of a string of Big Tech employers to ban caste discrimination in their employee code of conduct.
Policy Recommendations
The Senate should introduce a Senate companion to H.R.7648 – Improving Reporting to Prevent Hate Act (IRPHA). This bill would address underreporting of hate crimes by law enforcement by creating standardized requirements for law enforcement to more accurately report these incidents to the federal government.
The Executive Branch should engage with a diverse array of Hindu American stakeholders to properly educate policymakers around the multitude of challenges facing the Hindu American community. For the Senate, this means increasing funding to the Department of Justice’s Community Relations Service as well other community engagement programs for Executive Branch agencies.
Pass the Transnational Repression Policy Act and/or the International Freedom Protection Act, which would create a federal definition of transnational repression and equip the federal government with tools to address transnational repression.
Congress should amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to include caste as a protected class and ensure that there are federal protections for Americans against caste discrimination.
The Senate should pass the S.1591 - the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act of 2023 to strengthen monitoring of white supremacist and neo-Nazi terrorism. We also caution against the over-policing and surveillance of racial and religious minority communities who are often most vulnerable to white Christian nationalist violence.
The Senate should pass a suite of reforms to existing gun laws to understand gun violence and prevention through laws like S.1026 - the Gun Violence Prevention Research Act of 2023 and H.R.8669 - the Safe Workplaces Act. The Senate should also pass the S.2776 - Disarm Hate Act to prevent individuals guilty of hate crimes from accessing guns. Moreover, the Senate should adopt stronger background checks, training, and licensing requirements for Americans to access guns. Finally, lawmakers make it much more difficult for Americans to access weapons that are designed to inflict maximum damage on other humans and have no recreational purpose.
We are grateful to the Committee for holding this hearing on hate violence, especially as it affects religious and cultural minority communities in the United States. To effectively do so, we are grateful to provide an honest look at the challenges facing Hindu Americans, both because of the rise of white Christian nationalism and Hindu nationalism. We would be remiss, however, if we did not also note the appalling treatment of Dr. Maya Berry by a Member of the Committee who accused Dr. Berry of supporting Hamas and Hezbollah - organizations that she disavowed repeatedly. She was only targeted because she is an Arab American, and it is ironic that she faced this racism during a hearing to address the rise of anti-Arab hate crimes in this country. None of our communities will be safe until we are all safe from hate crimes, and we will continue to advocate for the safety of Hindu Americans as well as other religious and racial minorities in the United States and around the world.