Conservative influencer Charlie Kirk died a horribly tragic death last week. In the aftermath of his violent murder, I expected that the many Americans he appealed to would forget his racist, misogynistic, and homophobic views overnight. But I was certainly not prepared for the brown men falling over themselves to defend him as a free speech advocate. Indian men mourned the same Charlie Kirk who died believing that America was “full” of Indians.
On 2 September, Kirk had tweeted: “America does not need more visas for people from India. Perhaps no form of legal immigration has so displaced American workers as those from India. Enough already. We’re full. Let’s finally put our own people first.” Days later, he questioned whether conservative influencers were being paid by Indian lobbyists to spread propaganda about India being a great ally to America. Kirk had then asked, “Who exactly is paying them and how much? We have laws against foreign interests paying social media influencers. We should start enforcing them.”
Kirk embodied the “America First” ideology that viewed anyone who wasn’t male, straight, and White as outsiders. But his very public views are no match for a community determined to gaslight itself.
However, Kirk alone was not responsible for fomenting anti-India sentiment. That juggernaut has been in motion for months now. Across the West, a rogue wave has arisen in the form of the far-Right conspiracy “Great Replacement Theory” and Indians — online as well as offline — have been caught up in it. In Canada, people of Indian origin are assaulted and threatened to “go back to India”. Australia, which has a history of targeting Indian students, held an anti-immigration rally recently. In London, where a South Asian community has thrived for decades, far-Right activist Tommy Robinson led a “Unite the Kingdom” march that witnessed participation from 1,10,000 people.
The sentiment manifests across these countries in only mildly different variations of the familiar theme of job displacement. A world that once embraced Indian talent across fields — medicine, technology, and even hard labour — has now reframed the narrative to suggest that their jobs are being “stolen”.
Declining favourability
For decades, Indians were the “good immigrants”, who kept their heads down and followed the unwritten rules of assimilation. Their success was widely celebrated at the individual and community levels, and reflected in Bollywood’s frothiest romances. In addition to heading some of the biggest tech giants in the world, earlier this year, Indian Americans also became the country’s highest-earning ethnic group. The Indian diaspora has wielded genuine soft power — and canny Indian politicians, aided by a googly-eyed media, have heralded them as definitive evidence of the homeland’s rising global status.
Somewhere over the last year, though, that vision has soured. Twenty minutes on any social media platform will confirm the bitterness with which Indians are viewed. Right-wing accounts take immense pride in scapegoating a population that were the darlings of Silicon Valley until last year. Stereotypes that were out of vogue even 15 years ago have made a rousing comeback.
This dangerous rhetoric has real consequences for real people. Days before the London march, a British-born Sikh woman was sexually assaulted and beaten in a UK park by two men who told her to “go back” to her country. Robin Westman, the Minneapolis church shooter who killed two students, had scrawled “Nuke India” on his guns. In March, Indian-origin nurse Leelamma Lal in Florida was brutally attacked by a patient who claimed “Indians are bad”.
Between 2019 and 2024, 633 Indian students died abroad; 108 in the US alone. While not all deaths were hate-motivated, the numbers reflect a community under unprecedented stress. Even Chandra Mouli Nagamallaiah’s brutal beheading in Dallas, while not a racial incident, has amplified fears within a community already on edge.
Pew Research confirms the shift: favourability toward India has declined across 15 of 24 countries surveyed, with particularly sharp drops in traditional allies like Canada and Australia. The social contract that protected Indians as the “model minority” has been torn up.
But this unravelling is partly because we’ve stopped honouring our end of the bargain. The worst offenders here are a new breed of content creators whose performative outrageousness has muddied the waters for the rest of the country.
Rememeber YouTuber Malik Swashbuckler (Malik SD Khan), who made intensely lewd comments and rape threats against Turkish women, and was later arrested? Khan probably believed his subscriber count granted him diplomatic immunity. Or Jyoti Malhotra, who before being arrested for espionage, was harassing Chinese passengers on Beijing’s trains and forcing herself onto strangers’ scooters while making racist remarks about them?
Also read: Why the thriving Indian diaspora in the US is not an asset anymore
Paying the price
Cultural insensitivity has travelled so well that regular Indians have begun to follow the playbook. We have taken our baraats to Wall Street, and Ganpati Visarjans to parking lots. Earlier this year, a Canadian woman posted about a loud and disruptive Indian wedding that had been going on all night. The caption accompanying her post said, “Everyone will despise the Indians given enough time.”
Her words turned out to be prescient. Since then, we have naagin danced in the streets of Toronto, done the garba on top of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, and even taken a bath in a children’s pool in New Zealand. We have allowed our children to walk on restaurant tables in Singapore. We have to be urged by fellow Indians to walk on footpaths in Thailand, instead of busy streets. We have been accused of public urination and defecation, whether we are in Nepal, Singapore, or mid-flight.
After garnering a reputation for stealing towels and accessories from hotels around the world, we’ve now graduated to department stores like Target. Last year, two Indian students, accused of stealing from ShopRite in New Jersey, asked the cops, “Will this affect us for H-1B process or any job?”
This brazenness — rather, shamelessness — is the direct outcome of Indians buying into their own mythologising. The worst thing you could once have said about Indians was that they followed the rules of a foreign country, but not their own. That seems like an antiquated memory. Now, drunk on the Kool-Aid of India’s imminent Vishwaguru status and the Madison Square Garden rallies, we’re convinced that our obnoxious behaviour will be accepted wherever we go.
The result is a community that demands accommodation without offering reciprocity. Professor Aditi Sen, who teaches at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada, watches this unfold daily. Sen told me that new Indian students admitted to surrounding colleges over the last few years tend to be very insular and rigid about their dietary preferences. New shops that advertise “Pure Vegetarian” cuisine have popped up. Sen has also noticed that male students tend to use extremely vulgar and derogatory language for foreign women.
“You used to go to another country and learn their culture,” Sen said. “Now you’ve already decided you are the best, and that whatever you are saying is anti-colonial. That kind of black-and-white thinking is problematic.”
Sen added that “complete assimilation”, symbolised by politicians like Vivek Ramaswamy and Nikki Haley, should not be the standard one aspires to. “You should want to retain your culture, but you should not be so dismissive of everything,” she said.
The Indian diaspora spent decades building something precious — respect, acceptance, genuine assimilation. Those early immigrants understood the fragility of their position, and knew that acceptance in alien societies was conditional. So they earned it through discipline and dignity.
Now, we’re watching a new generation of Indians squander away that respect. As we go viral for our brashness every other week, entire communities pay the price for individual arrogance. These videos become ammunition for those who never wanted Indians there in the first place. The model minority myth was always flawed — but what’s replacing it is infinitely worse.
Karanjeet Kaur is a journalist, former editor of Arré, and a partner at TWO Design. She tweets @Kaju_Katri. Views are personal.
(Edited by Aamaan Alam Khan)