Hate crimes rise against Indian Americans in California, deepening a divide between Hindus

On a morning just days before the New Year, Kiran Thakkar received a worrying phone call. A friend had found anti-India graffiti overnight on the Newark Hindu temple he co-founded. Someone sprayed phrases disparaging India’s prime minister and hailing a secessionist movement for the country’s Sikh minority.

Support rushed in from Indian American community leaders and politicians. But Thakkar and the rest of the quaint suburban temple’s board had little disagreement about how to move forward. They didn’t want to make a fuss. They painted over the vandalism within the day.

“We didn’t want to politicize,” said Thakkar, who’s called the Bay Area home for more than a decade. “So we were clear from day one that, yes, it was a hate crime or fringe incident, and let’s just move on from there.”

The Newark Shri Swaminarayan Temple was one of three California Hindu houses of worship desecrated in 2023, when a record eight anti-Hindu hate crimes were reported in California, according to data released by the Department of Justice in June.

Separately, California is collecting more anecdotal reports of hate incidents through a new civil rights hotline that’s intended to connect people with resources that could help them. A disproportionate number of incidents involving Hindus were reported in its first year, according to state data.

But Hindus aren’t the only ones in California’s Indian community who are seeing a rise in hate crimes and bias against them. Sikhs, members of the ethno religious minority whose separatist slogans appeared on the Newark temple, reported six hate crimes against them — the highest number since the state justice department began displaying that data in 2014.

Many Sikhs are on edge because of several recent high-profile attacks across the nation. The slaying of Canadian Sikh separatist Hardeep Singh Nijjar in June 2023, a subsequent foiled plot in New York, and an August shooting outside Sacramento have revived fears among Sikh activists that they’re being targeted by India for their advocacy in North America.

“Nearly all documented anti-Hindu hate in California comes from pro-Khalistan activists who employ violence and harassment to advocate for an independent theocracy in India,” wrote the Hindu American Foundation in a letter opposing the political repression bill, citing the temple vandalizations as an example of such harassment.

National and local groups for Sikhs supported both measures and have roundly disputed that characterization of the modern separatist movement. They had hoped the Legislature would stand with them, given Sikhs’ over-a-century long presence in California, and some felt the hand of India’s government in the opposition.

“They’re using these broad terms, like Hindu Americans, to justify killing a bill against transnational repression,” said Karam Singh, advocacy director for the California Sikh Youth Alliance, which supported both bills. “I think most Americans of all stripes would be clearly in favor of having protections for Californians to not be intimidated, harassed and targeted by a foreign government.”

Is anti-Hindu animus on the rise in California?

California is especially equipped to track incidents of hate and bias because of the hotline that Gov. Gavin Newsom launched in 2023. The so-called “CA vs. Hate” hotline reported receiving over 2,000 calls in its first year, according to a May 2024 report from the California Department of Civil Rights.

During that period, hotline researchers said they documented 24 acts of verified anti-Hindu bias, around 23% of all acts of religious hate that investigators verified. Nearly 37% were anti-Jewish and 15% were anti-Muslim. No anti-Sikh figures were listed.

The numbers jolted California Hindus across the political spectrum. Extremist and hate-motivated acts are not new for Sikh and Muslim Americans, who have endured decades of hate crimes in the United States since 9/11. There have been isolated cases, but Hindu Americans have largely not been disproportionate targets of such crimes.

Pushpita Prasad, a spokeswoman for the Coalition of Hindus of North America, is no fan of the state’s civil rights department. The department holds anti-hate partnerships with major Sikh, Jewish and Muslim organizations, but no Hindu groups. Her organization opposed last year’s caste bill.

But she called the hotline data “one more validation” of the “experience of Hinduphobia.” Her group encouraged Hindus to use the hotline during debates over the caste discrimination bill, she said. They also told people to use it after temple vandalizations in Newark and Hayward.

“Anti-India issues are constantly conflated with Hinduism,” she told CalMatters. More non-Hindus are becoming aware of caste and Indian politics, and “there’s a double standard in play that we all subscribe to, and some of us push back but most of us don’t.”

Analysts with the state offered few details on the anti-Hindu incidents. They are not necessarily criminal acts; some of the incidents could allege workplace discrimination or other kids of bias.

“I’m not sure there is too much more I can add on the specific questions regarding anti-Hindu acts,” Arvind Krishnamurthy, a postdoctoral scholar at UC Berkeley, wrote in an email. “Any data on reports to CA vs Hate should not be used to make generalizations about the extent of any particular kind of hate across California.”

Five Indian American lawmakers, meanwhile, have cautiously attempted to address the fears of both communities. None are Sikh.

In March, they requested a briefing from the federal justice department concerning attacks on Hindu temples and anti-Hindu hate. They also in December called federal prosecutors’ allegations of the foiled plot against a Sikh activist in New York “deeply concerning” and welcomed an India-led investigation into the matter.

That was slammed as “insufficient to ensure accountability” by a major Sikh civil rights group, which wants an independent review.

“There needs to be other actors,” said Sangay Mishra, an associate professor of political science at Drew University who studies South Asian Americans. “Not necessarily government agencies, but other kinds of nonprofit or civil rights groups who are willing to invest in this and make sense of what’s happening so that it doesn’t become such a deeply partisan, polarizing issue.”

A spokesperson for Rep. Ro Khanna, who signed onto both letters and represents Newark in Congress, declined an interview request and did not respond to written questions. He condemned the vandalism at the time on social media.

Anti-Hindu incidents are ‘taken very seriously,’ authorities say

Thakkar said elected officials did everything right at the Newark temple. He never had to call a hotline from the state to get help from the local community.

The State Department’s Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs and three California state lawmakers denounced the incident. Local authorities said they moved swiftly to provide the house of worship with the resources necessary.

“The temple vandalisms were taken very seriously,” wrote Newark Police Capt. Jolice Macias, in a statement. A similar vandalism took place at a Hindu temple in Hayward a few weeks later, and investigators combed through security footage from nearby businesses for leads. Officials from the FBI and Department of Justice were in attendance. “Every possible investigative lead was followed up on.”

One of the bills that some Hindu groups opposed would have given law enforcement agencies more training on how to combat and respond to incidents of foreign governments harassing American citizens, a trend that is known as transnational repression. Some Hindu leaders opposed it because it listed India alongside Russia, Iran and China as states of particular concern for law enforcement. It died in the Senate Appropriations Committee in August amid the opposition and a price tag of over $600,000.

In opposition letters to Assembly Bill 3027, the transnational repression bill, the Hindu American Foundation and Coalition of Hindus of North America argued that the legislation would usurp federal law and give police officers further leeway to ignore acts of violence from the separatist movement.

The bill’s author, Assemblymember Jasmeet Bains, a Democrat from Bakersfield, is the Legislature’s only Sikh. She has said that California is a safe haven for immigrants that should take more steps to make good on that promise. She has also reported threats and intimidation at her office, similar to Sen. Aisha Wahab, the Democrat from Hayward who sponsored the caste discrimination bill last year.

But it hasn’t always been clear from where the threats and violence are coming. In fact, the graffiti on the Newark temple misspelled the name of an infamous Sikh leader from India.

One Sikh media group suggested in October that a man who stormed a Fremont gurdwara and tore down a poster devoted to Nijjar was an “Indian nationalist extremist” and Hindu. In fact, his family told the house of worship he was experiencing mental health issues. And in June, federal authorities charged a Hindu man from Dallas for sending threats to a Sikh nonprofit group about separatist activism while often using anti-Muslim language.

“The citizens themselves are in some sense all victims of this phenomenon, whether Sikh, Muslim or Hindu or any other religious tradition,” said Nirvikar Singh, co-author of “The Other One Percent: Indians in America,” and a professor of economics at UC Santa Cruz. “Democracy allows us to work through differences in nonviolent and equalizing ways, but we’re seeing a lot of disruption.”

Tensions in politics or online, though, are far less palpable on the ground in California. The Bay Area defacings did not spark direct or immediate protest. Rallies led by Sikh separatists in California have by and large avoided counter protests and violent clashes. That’s a contrast from demonstrations over the war in Gaza after Oct. 7, which saw a subsequent spike in Islamophobic and antisemitic hate crimes.

Thakkar, nowadays, is less concerned with the temple vandalism, and can often be seen preparing the temple for dozens of attendees to come pray and eat on weekends. Just a quick drive away from Newark, local Sikh leaders came from a Fremont house of worship and helped paint over the graffiti, he said.

This year, he’s planning on applying for the state’s next round of security funding for vulnerable houses of worship. The only other remnants of the attack are the new security cameras all around the perimeter, and splotches of off-white paint covering the front sign.

“We informed the regular devotees that we have taken some measures. We are careful,” he recalls. “We are working with the police department to get immediate attention if anything were to happen again. So we are safe, secure, and you shouldn’t be worried.”