I’ve written often about how “South Asian" is a trope for the erasure of India and Indians. Recent incidents after the horrifying attack on Hindu in Kashmir brought this to light again. “South Asia" academic departments in Western universities are often the seat of anti-Hindu and anti-India rhetoric. These academicians were also the ones who pushed for the replacement of “India" by “South Asia" in US academic references.

In late April 2025, terrorists brutally attacked Hindu tourists in Kashmir’s Pahalgam district, killing 26 people. These Pakistan-trained terrorists selected victims by religious identity, forcing captives to recite an Islamic kalima and executing those who could not. Yet, instead of an unequivocal condemnation of the attack, a student statement emerging from UC Berkeley did not focus on the Hindu victims. Instead, it chose to condemn “Islamophobia", completely sidestepping the real tragedy — the targeted killing of Hindus by Islamic terrorists.

This pattern — erasing Hindu suffering under vague “South Asian" framing — is not new. In my article How “South Asian" is a racist trope of cultural erasure, I had highlighted how the term “South Asian" was not an innocent geographic descriptor, but a politically charged label used to flatten Indian civilisational identity into an amorphous “brown" category. No one calls Chinese-Americans “East Asians" in everyday conversation. Italians are not “South Europeans." Only Indians are persistently stripped of a national identity and forced under this nebulous regional umbrella.

The implications of........

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