By Shaanth Nanguneri, CalMatters Network
One morning, a few days before New Year’s, Kiran Thakkar received a worrying phone call. A friend had found anti-India graffiti overnight at the Newark Hindu temple he co-founded. Someone had painted phrases disparaging the prime minister of India and praised a secessionist movement by the country’s Sikh minority .
Thakkar and the rest of the quaint suburban temple’s board of directors disagreed on how to move forward. They didn’t want to make a fuss. They painted over the vandalism during the day.
“We didn’t want to politicize it,” said Thakkar, who has lived in the Bay Area for more than a decade. “So from day one we were clear that yes, this was a hate crime or a fringe incident, and that we should leave it like that.”
Newark’s Shri Swaminarayan Temple was one of three Hindu houses of worship in California desecrated in 2023, when a record eight hate crimes against Hindus were reported in California, according to data released by the Justice Department in June.
Meanwhile, California is collecting more anecdotal reports of hate incidents through a new civil rights hotline that aims to connect people with resources that could help them. In its first year, a disproportionate number of incidents involving hate were reported to Hindus, according to state data.
But Hindus are not the only ones in California’s Indian community who are seeing a rise in hate crimes and prejudice against them. Sikhs, members of the religious ethnic minority whose separatist slogans appeared on the Newark temple, reported six hate crimes against them, the highest number since the state Department of Justice began reporting such data in 2014.
Many Sikhs are on edge due to several recent high-profile attacks across the country. The June 2023 killing of Canadian Sikh separatist Hardeep Singh Nijjar , a subsequent foiled plot in New York , and an August shooting outside Sacramento have reignited fears among Sikh activists that India is targeting them for their activism in North America .
The possibility of an escalation has made Thakkar, a key figure in the local Hindu community who moved from India to the Bay Area in 2012, feel a responsibility to avoid stoking tensions. While there were some devotees who expressed fear after the attack, overall, he said, members of his temple were ready to move on.
“I haven’t experienced anything personally,” he says when asked if he has ever experienced discrimination in California.
Other Hindus are not ready to forget the temple vandalism. Instead, they have asked the Legislature to recognize that California Hindus are the target of “pro-Khalistan extremism,” a reference to the name of an independent state that some Sikhs want to break away from. from India.
They also opposed two bills introduced in the California Legislature last year because they believed they discriminated against them. One would have explicitly banned caste discrimination in California and the other would have named India as a sponsor of international political repression. Neither proposal became law.
“Almost all of the documented anti-Hindu hate in California comes from pro-Khalistan activists who employ violence and harassment to defend an independent theocracy in India,” the Hindu American Foundation wrote in a letter opposing the political repression bill, citing vandalism of temples as an example of such harassment.
National and local Sikh groups supported both measures and have strongly disputed that characterization of the modern separatist movement. They had hoped the Legislature would support them, given the Sikh presence in California for more than a century, and some felt the government’s hand of India in the opposition.
“They are using such general 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 clearly be in favor of having protections so that Californians are not intimidated, harassed and persecuted by a foreign government.”
Is anti-Hindu sentiment rising in California?
California is uniquely equipped to track incidents of hate and bias thanks to the hotline that Gov. Gavin Newsom launched in 2023. The so-called “CA vs. Hate” hotline reported receiving more than 2,000 calls in its first year, according to a report May 2024 by the California Department of Civil Rights.
During that period, the hotline researchers said they documented 24 verified acts of anti-Hindu hate, about 23% of all acts of religious hate that the researchers verified. Nearly 37% were anti-Jewish and 15% were anti-Muslim. There were no listed anti-Sikh figures.
The numbers shocked California Hindus across the political spectrum. Extremist, hate-motivated acts are nothing new to Sikh and Muslim Americans, who have endured decades of hate crimes in the United States since 9/11 . There have been isolated cases, but Indian Americans have largely not been disproportionately targeted by such crimes.
Pushpita Prasad, a spokeswoman for the Coalition of Hindus of North America, is not a fan of the state’s civil rights department. The department maintains anti-hate partnerships with major Sikh, Jewish and Muslim organizations, but not with any Hindu groups. Her organization opposed last year’s caste bill.
But he called the hotline data “further validation” of the “experience of Hinduphobia.” His group encouraged Hindus to use the hotline during debates on the caste discrimination bill, he said. People were also told to use it after the vandalism at the Newark and Hayward temples.
“Anti-India issues are constantly being mixed up with Hinduism,” he told CalMatters. More and more non-Hindus are becoming aware of caste and Indian politics, and “there is a double standard at play that we all share, and some “Some of us reject it, but most of us don’t.”
State analysts offered few details about the incidents against Hindus. They are not necessarily criminal acts; some of the incidents could be due to workplace discrimination or other types of prejudice.
“I am not sure I can add much more on the specific issues related to anti-Hindu acts,” Arvind Krishnamurthy, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote in an email. “Any data on complaints to CA vs Hate is not available.” should not be used to make generalizations about the scope of any particular type of hate in California.”
Meanwhile, five Indian American lawmakers have cautiously attempted to address the fears of both communities. None of them is Sikh.
In March, they requested information from the federal Justice Department about attacks on Hindu temples and anti-Hindu hate. In December, they also called “deeply disturbing” allegations by federal prosecutors about the foiled plot against a Sikh activist in New York and welcomed welcomes an Indian-led investigation into the matter.
This was criticized as “insufficient to ensure accountability” by a leading Sikh civil rights group, which wants an independent review .
“There have 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 types of nonprofit or civil rights groups that are willing to invest in this and understand what is happening so that it does not become such a deeply partisan and polarizing issue.”
A spokesman for Rep Ro Khanna(D-CA), who signed both letters and represents Newark in Congress, declined an interview request and did not respond to written questions. At the time, he condemned the vandalism on social media.
Authorities say anti-Hindu incidents are taken “very seriously”
Thakkar said elected officials did everything right at the Newark temple.
The State Department’s Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs and three California state legislators denounced the incident. Local authorities said they moved swiftly to provide the house of worship with the necessary resources.
“The vandalism at the temple was taken very seriously,” Newark Police Capt. Jolice Macias wrote in a statement. A similar act of vandalism took place at a Hindu temple in Hayward a few weeks later, and investigators reviewed the evidence and surveillance footage from nearby businesses for clues. FBI and Justice Department officials were present. “Every possible investigative lead was pursued.”
One of the bills opposed by some Hindu groups would have given law enforcement agencies more training on how to combat and respond to incidents of foreign governments harassing American citizens, a trend known as transnational repression. Some Hindu leaders objected because it included India along with Russia, Iran and China as states of special concern for the law’s implementation. The bill was rejected in the Senate Appropriations Committee in August amid opposition and a price of more than $600,000.
In letters of opposition to Assembly Bill 3027, the transnational repression bill, the Hindu American Foundation and the Coalition of Hindus of North America argued that the legislation would usurp federal law.
The bill’s author, Assemblywoman Jasmeet Bains, a Bakersfield Democrat, is the only Sikh in the Legislature. Bains has said California is a safe haven for immigrants and should do more to fulfill that promise. She has also denounced threats and intimidation in her office, as did Sen. Aisha Wahab, a Hayward Democrat who sponsored the anti-caste discrimination bill last year .
But it has not always been clear where the threats and violence are coming from. In fact, the graffiti on the Newark temple misspelled the name of a notorious Sikh leader from India.
In October, a Sikh media group suggested that a man who broke into a Fremont gurdwara and tore down a sign dedicated to Nijjar was an “Indian nationalist extremist” and Hindu. In fact, his family told the house of worship that he was suffering mental health issues. And in June, federal authorities charged a Hindu man from Dallas with sending threats to a Sikh nonprofit group about separatist activism while frequently using anti-Muslim language.
“Citizens themselves are, in a sense, victims of this phenomenon, whether they are Sikhs, Muslims, Hindus or any other religious tradition,” said Nirvikar Singh, co-author of “ The Other One Percent: Indians in America ” and a professor of economics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “Democracy allows us to resolve differences in a nonviolent and equitable way, but we are seeing a lot of disruption.”
However, tensions in politics or on the Internet are much less palpable in California. The Bay Area disruptions did not spark direct or immediate protests. Demonstrations led by Sikh separatists in California have generally avoided counterprotests and clashes. This contrasts with the protests over the war in Gaza after 7 October, which led to a subsequent rise in Islamophobic and anti-Semitic hate crimes.
These days, Thakkar is less concerned about vandalism at the temple and can often be seen preparing it for dozens of worshippers to come for prayers and meals on weekends. Just a few minutes drive from Newark, local Sikh leaders came from a Fremont house of worship and helped paint over the graffiti, he said.
This year, it plans to apply for the next round of state funding for security at the most vulnerable temples. The only remnants of the attack are the new security cameras around the perimeter and smears of whitish paint covering the sign at the entrance.
“We are letting the regular worshippers know that we have taken some measures. We are careful,” he recalls. “We are working with the police department to get immediate attention if something were to happen again. So we are safe, secure, and they should not worry.”
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