Suffering of Hindu Americans in USA
British colonizers invented fake categories to control India two centuries ago. Those same categories are now becoming American law, targeting Hindu Americans. Violence is climbing. Nobody’s connecting the dots. This is neo-colonization.
Origin of the Trap
The British needed justification to rule India after 1857 when people violently revolted. British created theories about race and caste that didn’t match reality, but these theories were useful for control. Divide people, and they can’t unite against you. Scholars who never visited India wrote these ideas into textbooks. Max Mueller allegedly translated sacred texts while taking money from the East India Company. Operation Sanskrit Mill ensued. He invented the “Aryan race” theory. Weber theorized about Indian society from Germany, never setting foot in India.
These weren’t neutral observations. They were tools of empire.
Lies Stuck
India gained independence in 1947, but the British frameworks stayed in place. British educated leadership continued with same policies. Universities kept teaching the colonial version as scholarship. Indian textbooks continued using the same narratives. When Hindu practitioners said “that’s not accurate,” academics dismissed them as biased. The colonizer’s version became official truth.Then came the internet.
Generations learned a distorted Hinduism created by its oppressors. But the twist is that Western academia treats Hindu studies differently than other religions. Christian scholars can be practicing Christians. Jewish scholars can observe their faith. But Hindu scholars who practice Hinduism are considered too close to their subject, somehow unreliable. The subjects themselves are muted while outsiders claim authority.
The Weaponization in USA
Now we’re in 2025, and those colonial categories are becoming American law.
Seattle passed the first caste discrimination ordinance. California is close behind. These laws single out Hindu Americans specifically, even though caste hierarchies exist in Sikh, Muslim, Buddhist and Christian South Asian communities too.
The laws profile people by ancestry. Your birth marks you. Your children are marked. Their children, marked. Ten generations from now, still marked.
Professor Salvatore Bobonus from the University of Sydney got it right. He told lawmakers that caste has come to America, but not as actual discrimination. It came as politicization, as a weapon.
There’s no evidence of systematic caste discrimination by Hindu Americans requiring special legislation. But the laws are passed anyway, built on colonial frameworks that academia never questioned.
The Violence Follows
FBI data shows hate crimes against Indian Americans jumped 500 percent. Let that sink in. Five times more attacks. Temples are being shot at while people pray. In Utah, gunshots hit an ISKCON temple with devotees inside. In California, temples get vandalized repeatedly. Gandhi statues are smashed in New York. Someone attacked a woman in California for wearing a saree.
Between 2020 and 2025, documented temple attacks went from one per year to multiple incidents every few months. The Coalition of Hindus of North America tracks these, but many go unreported because communities fear drawing more attention.
Meanwhile, the media erases Hindu identity. When chess champion Praggnanandhaa won international tournaments, news outlets photoshopped his tilak off his forehead. The religious marker disappeared.
The Hindu Holocaust
Hindu Americans face attacks from both sides.
Violence increases. Temples shot, people assaulted, symbols erased. But simultaneously, they’re profiled as oppressors through caste legislation. When they object, they’re labeled “Hindu extremists” or dismissed with the term “Hindutva,” which has been weaponized beyond recognition.
Their history of suffering gets minimized. Three million died in Bengal Famine under Churchill’s policies. Two million died in Partition violence. Four hundred fifty thousand Roma, who are Hindu descendants, died in Nazi gas chambers. Ongoing ethnic cleansing in Pakistan and Bangladesh barely makes news.
Rohingyas massacred Hindus in Myanmar, but global attention focused only on Rohingya suffering. The Hindu victims stayed invisible, mentioned briefly in one Amnesty International report then forgotten.
Only one in four Americans actually knows a Hindu person. Ignorance breeds stereotypes, and stereotypes enable violence.
The Academic Machine
This didn’t happen by accident. There’s a pattern to how Hinduphobia operates in academia. First, impose ideological scholarship that implicates Hinduism negatively. Use colonial frameworks, superimpose racial theories on religious texts, misinterpret practices through Western lenses.
Second, attack any academics who question this approach. Call them “Hindutva supporters” or coin new terms like “soft-Hindutva.” Isolate them professionally.
Third, divide the practicing community. Create artificial categories like “good Hindu versus bad Hindu.” Organize events like “Holi Against Hindutva” or “Diwali Against Hindutva” on college campuses, turning festivals into political battlegrounds.
Students who want to celebrate their religious festivals face opposition from faculty and administration. They’re young, often second or third generation, barely aware of India’s colonial history. They don’t understand why celebrating Holi makes them targets. They feel isolated, confused, sometimes afraid.
Neo Colonialism
The British rigidified fluid social structures, imposed hierarchies, invented racial theories about Aryans and Dravidians. These were tools of empire, not neutral observations. Those tools never disappeared. They moved from colonial administration to academic scholarship to American legislation. The same frameworks, recycled across centuries, always used to control and divide.
Modern India has constitutional protections against caste discrimination. Reservations ensure educational and employment opportunities for historically marginalized groups. Democratic processes address real issues. But America imports British colonial frameworks and calls it progress. They are legislating 19th century imperial categories in the 21st century, targeting a minority of 2.23 million people who’ve done nothing to warrant special scrutiny.
The Historical Pattern
This follows a recognizable sequence. First, construct the category and define who belongs to the problem group. Second, create academic justification that gives the category intellectual legitimacy. Third, codify it into law. Fourth, watch as social permission for violence emerges. Fifth, systematic erasure of culture and history.
USA is at stage four, moving toward five.
The pattern isn’t hypothetical. It happened to Jews in Europe. It happened to Roma. It happened to Tutsis in Rwanda. Categories get created, academia provides cover, laws formalize discrimination, violence escalates.
Hindu Americans have the highest religious retention rate in America at 80 percent. They’re not leaving their faith despite mistreatment. They contribute enormously to medicine, technology, education, business. They’re peaceful, law-abiding, integrated. Yet they’re being marked as perpetual suspects based on ancestry, using categories their oppressors invented.
The Precedent
This isn’t just about one community. It’s about precedent.
Once it is accepted that one group can be permanently profiled by birth, any group becomes vulnerable. Irish Americans for British imperial history. Japanese Americans for World War II. German Americans for Nazi atrocities. The logic, once established, applies anywhere.
Civil liberties don’t survive selective application. Either ancestry-based profiling is wrong for everyone, or it’s acceptable for anyone.
The people claiming moral authority, the ones pushing caste legislation and opposing Hindu celebrations, they present themselves as fighting discrimination. But they’re enabling it. They use progressive language to advance colonial frameworks.
That’s the trap. It looks like social justice but functions as oppression. It sounds like scholarship but repeats imperial propaganda. It claims to protect minorities while targeting a global minority.
The Future
Hindu Americans are caught in a system designed to mark them as problematic regardless of what they do. Practice their faith openly, they’re called extremists. Try to correct colonial distortions, they’re dismissed as biased. Object to profiling, they’re accused of denying discrimination. There’s no winning move in a rigged game.
History shows what happens when societies allow categories of people to be permanently ‘othered’. It doesn’t end with legislation and academic papers. It ends with violence that everyone later claims they didn’t see coming. But the warning signs are clear. The pattern is visible. They are doing what Hitler did in Nazi Germany, while denouncing the Hitler and Nazi both.
The colonial circle is completing. The question is whether anyone will break it before it’s too late.