Last week, I asked a question on X that touched a raw nerve. “Chinese have more tech jobs in the US. China is America’s No. 1 enemy. Yet you don’t see hate directed at Chinese in the US, but against Indians. Why?"

Within hours, the post exploded — thousands of replies, hundreds of quote-tweets, more than three hundred thousand views. The responses themselves told the story: anger, guilt, self-reproach, and, running through all of it, a strange willingness to blame Indians for being targets.

Right on cue, Varghese K George of The Hindu by came up with this column— “India’s diaspora diplomacy and the limits of cultural nationalism abroad" — with the answer for us: Indians who display faith and culture overseas are “crossing limits"; the culprit, inevitably, is “Hindutva." It reads like a polite sermon to stay out of sight in “developed" countries and if Hindus are visible in any way, we must blame “Hindutva."

Apparently, it isn’t racism when Indians are attacked — it’s our “culture." We are too loud, too religious, too visible. It’s an old trick — turn the victim into the culprit. When Jews were persecuted, they were called clannish. When the Irish were mocked, they were called superstitious. When Indians face hostility, we are told it is because we have temples and festivals.

Meanwhile, the Chinese stage magnificent New Year parades in every Western capital. Nobody calls that Han chauvinism. Hollywood celebrates it. Yet if Indians light diyas or say Jai Shri Ram, it becomes “assertive" and “political."

The prejudice comes from both sides of the Western aisle. From the Right, it carries the odor of theology. For two thousand years the “pagan" has been the devil’s child — the idol-worshipper, the heathen, the damned. That vocabulary still seeps through pulpits and politics and shows up in social media posts targeting Hindu temples. From the Left, the prejudice is dressed-up as the good fight against vile Hindutva “fascism"—the proxy for “devil worshipper" in the idiom of the Left. Under the banners of “South Asian Studies"........

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