Being an Indian in the United States is no longer a point of diversity and celebration. Instead, openly revealing your Indian identity might get you attacked on the streets and targeted online. This isn’t just a hypothesis, but a proven statement. A 2026 survey by the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace examined the attitudes of the roughly 5.2 million Indian-Americans living in US. As per the survey, since the start of 2025, one in four Indian Americans have been called a slur. The survey also noted that one in five respondents shied away from wearing their religious identities such as bindis and tilaks in public.
Those who still do, are targeted enough to inspire them to withhold wearing their identity in public. A case in point is an Indian-origin doctor in the US who faced racist comments on social media over wearing a bindi. In an
Instagram video, Dr Karishma Reddy, a board-certified plastic surgeon with a following of 23K on Instagram, shared an incident from one of her rural rotations as a medical student studying at the College of Georgia.
She was seeing a patient for diabetes when his wife asked her why she wore a dot (bindi). “Before I could even explain, her husband was like I’ll tell you why she wears that dot, when she gets married, her husband scratches it off and finds out if he won a motel or a gas station,” said the doctor.
The comment was an off-handed racist remark on the doctor’s Indian identity since many Americans believe that Indians come to the states and take up either of the businesses, owning or working at a motel or a gas station. “Not the Bindhi being a scratch-off lottery ticket. Anyway, my husband won a plastic surgeon, but this patient did make my dark passenger giggle deep down,” she wrote in the caption.
In a follow-up video, the doctor said that she had never experienced this level of anti-Indian rhetoric or hate directed at her in her entire life, all over her bindi. “Earlier this week, I made a reel about a patient encounter regarding my bindi, and it was a light, fun memory that I have. But wow, the comment section went absolutely nuts. I have never seen so much anti-Indian rhetoric in my entire life. And I might be naive to that because I’ve spent a lot of my life in a healthcare setting in the hospital and clinics, and in the healthcare setting, Indian people aren’t really seen as a minority,” she can be heard saying in the video.
The plastic surgeon added that in the medical industry, her colleagues have always respected her, and hence she is more puzzled over the hate comments on her social media. “I bet if the guy went to your home country, they would ask him why he wears deodorant!” wrote one user. “I am not gonna lie this was a hilarious joke. You’re very lucky that you are not in India in a hospital with cow dung on the floor where they think drinking cow urine is good for your health,” added another.
“A lot of these comments were regarding telling me to go back to India. I was born and raised here in America. And a lot of fixation with cows, so, just to clarify that, Hindu people don’t eat beef. And the main reason for that is not because we have a sacred text telling us not to eat cows. It’s because in the old days when a lot of women died in childbirth, babies survived off of cow’s milk, so out of respect for the cow, for giving humans the gift of life. We do not slaughter or kill cows,” she said.
Reddy added that the incident left her sad and urged people to treat others from different cultural backgrounds with respect. “I hope that this at least opened your mind to Hinduism and cows and cleared that all up because I don’t know what in the Ripley’s Believe It or Not happened where people think we’re worshipping them and doing weird things with their pee,” she concluded.
Five other times Indian have faced this rhetoric
It was in October 2025 that anti-H1B hate exploded online and slurs were only aimed at Hindu deities, traditions and names. A post that went viral on X in February had Carlos Turcios, a Republican activist based in the Dallas-Fort Worth region, calling out the 90-foot-tall “Statue of Union” of Lord Hanuman in Texas, claiming that “third world aliens” were slowly taking over Texas and America. Numerous other posts have ranted about “demon gods” and the “monkey god” with one bestselling author arguing against immigration that leads to temples.Around the same time, American YouTuber Tyler Oliveira’s video mocking the Gorehabba festival in Karnataka’s village gained 5 million views on X. With no context into the culture or the festival, he criticised it with the title ‘Inside India’s Poop-Throwing Festival’.In another video that went viral on X, comedian Alex Stein attended a Plano City Council meeting where he mocked Hindu customs, while dressed in a yellow kurta with shorts, slippers and a red tilak. The conservative media personality mocked the culture’s cow worship and use of cow dung and urine in a sarcastic way, causing many Indian-Americans to walk out.Madhu Raja, an Indian-origin man, faced intense backlash for his video dancing at the National World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C. What began as a debate over solemnity associated with the site turned into a discussion over immigrants in US and fears of job loss and deportation for the man.Moreover, there has been a recent trend of influencers and independent journalists, ‘busting’ alleged H-1B frauds by visiting the homes of Indian-Americans and asking them questions. For instance, Texas journalist Sara Gonzales confronted numerous Indians living in the Dallas-Fort Worth area in the name of receiving tips and busting scams.
An anti-Indian America?
Much of the online hate directed at Indian communities frequently invokes Hindu symbols, traditions or religious references.
Indian-origin individuals in US face multifaceted forms of racism, ranging from digital harassment to real-world hostility. The Carnegie report surveyed 1000 Indian-American adults who reported experiencing bias, online racism, personal harassment and discrimination, forcing some to change how they speak, dress or participate in public life in order to avoid confrontation. It also notes that much of the online hate directed at Indian communities frequently invokes Hindu symbols, traditions or religious references.At least 71 per cent of Indian Americans disapprove of Trump’s overall performance as president, with 55 per cent expressing strong disapproval, states the report. “While a majority of Americans disapprove of Trump’s job performance, disapproval among Indian Americans is markedly higher, among both men and women. At the same time, approval of Trump is consistently lower among Indian Americans than among Americans overall. Together, these patterns suggest that Indian Americans’ assessments of Trump are distinctly more unfavourable than the overall US population,” states the study.Moreover, in 2022, research by the Network Contagion Research Institute at Rutgers University documented this pattern where social media was systematically weaponised to target Hindu communities often by bots and geopolitical players. It also warned Hindu communities to be cautious since hate online often tends to slip into the physical world.
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