Opinion | The Rise Of Indians In US Is Making Some Americans Very, Very Angry

The US Second Lady, Usha Vance, has again been in the news this week for her Indian heritage. Her husband, Vice President JD Vance, attacked Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Party's Senate nominee for Michigan, at a campaign rally on Monday over remarks about Usha. "Abdul, keep my wife's name the hell out of your mouth because she's way out of your league," Vance warned. A week earlier, El-Sayed wondered in a social media post whether the Vice President would take Usha "back in time to meet Papaw" if he could, referring to Vance's late grandfather and seemingly implying that he would not have approved of their interracial marriage. Indian community leaders criticised El Sayed for the remarks. Ironically, he himself has been a target of racial and Islamophobic hatred from members of Vance's Republican Party.

Usha Vance, a Hindu, has been among the most high-profile victims of racial attacks in the United States, mostly from supporters of the Republican Party and far-right activists. The most prominent among them is Nick Fuentes, a 27-year-old white supremacist leader, an admirer of Adolf Hitler and Holocaust denier. Fuentes has frequently attacked Usha's Indian heritage and Hindu background and has condemned JD as a "race traitor" for marrying her and betraying white identity. The attacks began after Trump picked Vance as his Vice-President for the 2024 election. "What kind of man marries somebody named Usha? Clearly, he doesn't value his racial identity," Fuentes said.

Other prominent Indian American targets of such hatred include former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy (also a Hindu), New York's mayor, Zohran Mamdani (a Muslim), and Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon (a Sikh). Ramaswamy, who is currently campaigning to become governor of Ohio on a Republican Party ticket, faces racial abuse online almost daily and sometimes in person, despite being endorsed by President Trump. Some ask him to go back to India; others say they will only elect a white person.

Disturbing Trends

The latest FBI report on hate crimes, released last month, said there was a 10% reduction in such cases against Asians across the US in 2025. But it also reported that such crimes were up by 24.6% against Sikhs and 12% against Hindus, while anti-Muslim hate crimes fell by 10%. However, independent researchers paint a much more alarming picture of racial abuse against the Indian community, as many more cases go unreported. Hate speech and racial slurs are not crimes in the United States unless they lead to physical violence. So many such cases fall outside the FBI's purview.

Racist incidents against Indians and other South Asians in the United States have more than doubled over the past two years and have sharply escalated since Trump's return to the White House, according to a new report published on Thursday by Stop AAPI Hate, a US campaign group that monitors such data. Between January 2023 and December 2025, the use of anti-South Asian slurs rose by 109%, the report said, based on surveys conducted by the market intelligence firm Moonshot and NORC at the University of Chicago.

In 2025 alone, 48% of South Asian adults in the US said they experienced a hate act due to their race, ethnicity, or nationality, according to the report. Nearly half of them suffered racial harassment, but 14% were physically harmed. Anti-South Asian slurs accounted for 66% (over 1.3 million or 13 lakhs) of all anti-Asian slurs online between January 2023 and December 2025. The most widely used racist slur in the US against Indians, particularly Sikhs and Hindus, is "jeet" or "pajeet". Fuentes has used this slur against JD and Usha Vance's children. Ramaswamy has also been abused with such slurs, in addition to being attacked for his Indian and Hindu heritage.

Mamdani, who made history by becoming New York's first Indian-American and Muslim mayor on November 4, was subjected to an unprecedented number of Islamophobic slurs during and after the election campaign. In terms of hate directed specifically at Mamdani, there was "an alarming 238% increase in anti-Muslim and anti-South Asian slurs between October 1 and November 11, 2025", according to Moonshot data.

Most Asian Victims Are Indians

Stop AAPI Hate uses the broader term South Asians, but there is no doubt that most victims of racism and hatred among Asians in the US are from the Indian community. Most examples cited by the group are of Indians, and data from the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) also show that Indians were the most targeted group among Asians. Other recent independent reports of racial hatred incidents in the US also report that Indians are now a leading group of victims. A survey conducted last year by an American NGO, the Centre for the Study of Organised Hate (CSOS), on anti-Indian racism on X found that 680 high-engagement anti-Indian racist posts on X garnered 281.2 M (2.81 crore) views between July 1 and September 7, 2025.

Raqib Naik, the CSOS's founder and executive director, had told CNN in November 2025 that his team recorded nearly 2,700 posts promoting racism and xenophobia against Indians and Indian Americans in October alone. That spike was partly in response to prominent Indian Americans, including Nikki Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Harmeet Dhillon, posting Diwali greetings online last year. Targets of hate also included Kash Patel, the FBI director, who organised Diwali celebrations at the White House in 2025.

A Carnegie Endowment survey earlier this year of 1,000 Indian American adults found that half of the respondents reported experiencing personal discrimination since the start of 2025. Another NGO, the Indian American Advocacy Council, formed by a San Francisco-based tech entrepreneur, Sidharth, has also reported a surge in hate against Indians. Sidharth told this author that in less than two months after he started a tracker to monitor such abuse in July, his portal received 30 complaints of hate against Indians. He has also been a frequent target of online abuse. Sidharth, who doesn't give his full name for his own safety, said he voted for Trump in 2024, though he is now one of his fiercest critics.

The More They Rise...

Mamdani's entry into the New York mayoral race last summer has been cited by Stop AAPI Hate as a reason for the escalation of anti-India and South Asian hostility in 2025. The election brought him and his assertion of his Muslim and American Indian identity to national attention. Fuentes has also attacked him, though the white supremacist's main targets have been JD Vance's wife and Ramaswamy among Indian Americans. He has vowed to campaign against him in Ohio and even said he would rather have a Democrat win in his place.

The spike in hate against Indians coincided with Indian-origin Kamala Harris entering the US presidential race in 2024, and later with JD Vance becoming Trump's choice for Vice-President. That brought his wife, Usha, into the limelight. What really fuelled anti-Indian hate, though, was Trump's re-election and his focus on immigration, along with the debate over H-1B visas, more than 70% of which are granted to Indians. Most analysts, including the CSOH survey last year, found that H-1B resentment and alleged job theft by Indians from white people were prominent complaints. That blended with xenophobia and economic insecurity, amplifying calls for visa bans, denials, deportation and denaturalisation of Indians. Hate against Sikhs and other Indians also rose after Harjinder Singh, an Indian-born truck driver, crashed into a minivan in Florida in August last year, killing three people.

Trump's tariffs against India worsened the problem. His deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, added fuel to the fire after accusing India of "a lot of cheating on immigration policies" in an August 2025 interview with Fox News. There is also an element of envy towards Indians, the highest-earning and most highly educated ethnic population in the US. They are visibly successful and prominent in the healthcare and hospitality industries. Resentment also stems from their huge achievements in America's tech industry and, increasingly, in politics. Sandeep Srivastava, a Democratic candidate for the Texas House of Representatives, has faced online backlash after a conservative activist mocked his accent in a social media post described by critics as xenophobic and anti-immigrant, according to a report in American Bazaar.

Hate And Irony

As we have seen with the hatred and slurs directed at JD Vance's wife and Vivek Ramaswamy, being a prominent face in the Republican Party doesn't protect you from racism, even if you are close to Trump, as Kash Patel has also discovered. Another American Indian, the veteran conservative commentator and Trump supporter Dinesh D'Souza, has criticised diversity and supported anti-immigration policies. But now he is facing calls for him to "go back to India". These people helped Trump get elected, yet their leader doesn't speak out against racist slurs hurled by his fans.

Perhaps the biggest threat to Indians in America, to multiculturalism, and even to Trump's Republican Party comes from Fuentes, who has tried to normalise hate. He leads the Groyper movement. The term 'Groyper' is a racist version of a frog meme on the internet featuring a character called "Pepe". Followers of Groyperism and Trump's MAGA supporters are largely responsible for spreading hate against Indians and other minorities. Fuentes' vitriolic tirade against Jews must also be a concern for the United States and Israel. He is now growing in popularity and is believed to have a support base within the Republican Party.

Trump has not condemned him, despite Fuentes frequently making racist comments against black, Hindu, Muslim, and Jewish people. In fact, the US President even hosted a dinner for Fuentes at his Florida home in 2022 and declined to condemn conservative commentator Tucker Carlson for interviewing the white supremacist last year, thereby giving him a larger platform to air his racist views. Vance, who sees himself as Trump's successor in the White House, must feel threatened by Fuentes' expanding political base. He has bitterly criticised Fuentes for slurs against his wife and children, but has refrained from speaking out against his supporters and other far-right activists.

(Naresh Kaushik is a former editor at the BBC and Associated Press. He is based in London)

Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author