Hate crimes against Indian Americans rise in California, widening divide between Hindus and Sikhs – Daily Democrat

One morning, a few days before New Year’s, Kiran Thakkar received a disturbing phone call. A friend had found anti-India graffiti overnight on the Newark Hindu temple he had helped found.

Someone made negative statements about the Prime Minister of India and praised a separatist movement for the country’s Sikh minority.

Support came from Indian-American community leaders and politicians. But Thakkar and the rest of the board of the picturesque suburban temple had little disagreement about how to proceed. They didn’t want to make a fuss. They painted over the vandalism within a 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 knew that yes, it was a hate crime or a fringe incident, and let’s just move on.”

The Newark Shri Swaminarayan Temple was one of three Hindu houses of worship in California desecrated in 2023. As many as eight hate crimes against Hindus were reported in California, according to data released in June by the Department of Justice.

Separately, California is collecting more anecdotal reports of hate incidents through a new civil rights hotline meant to connect people with resources who can help them. A disproportionate number of incidents involving Hindus were reported in the first year, according to state data.

But Hindus aren’t the only ones in California’s Indian community seeing an increase in hate crimes and bias against them. Sikhs, members of the ethno-religious minority whose separatist slogans appeared on the Newark temple, reported six hate crimes against them — the highest number since the state’s Justice Department began reporting that data in 2014.

A Sikh leader who lives in Woodland told police in early August that he was the target of a shooting on the highway.

Satinder Pal Singh Raju, from Woodland, is a leader of the group Sikhs for Justice and involved in the Khalistan movement, which aims to create a homeland for Sikhs in the Punjab region of India.

According to published reports, on August 11, Raju was in the passenger seat of a truck traveling south on Interstate 505 toward Vacaville. As the truck approached the County Road 27 exit north of Winters, what appeared to be a white Honda Civic pulled close to the car’s bumper.

Within seconds, Raju said, bullets came through the driver’s window. The driver pulled into a ditch to escape, and the men hid behind nearby hay bales.

The men waited until CHP officers arrived on the scene. I-505 was closed during the investigation.

Many Sikhs are on edge following several recent high-profile attacks across the country. The June 2023 assassination of Canadian Sikh separatist Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a subsequent foiled plot in New York, and an August shooting outside Sacramento have revived fears among Sikh activists that they are being targeted by India for their advocacy in North America.

The potential for escalation has Thakkar, a key figure in the local Hindu community who moved to the Bay Area from India in 2012, feeling anxious about stoking tensions. While some devotees expressed fear after the attack, his temple members were generally ready to move on, he said.

“I personally have had nothing to do with it,” he says when asked if he has ever experienced discrimination in California.

Other Hindus don’t want to forget the temple vandalism. Instead, they have asked the legislature to recognize that Hindu Californians are the subject of “pro-Khalistan extremism,” a reference to the name of an independent state that some Sikhs want to separate from India.

They also opposed two bills in the California legislature in the past year that they believed would discriminate against them. One would explicitly ban caste discrimination in California, and the other would name India as a sponsor of international political repression. Neither bill became law.

“Nearly all of the documented anti-Hindu hatred in California comes from pro-Khalistan activists who use violence and intimidation to advocate for an independent theocracy in India,” the Hindu American Foundation wrote in a letter opposing the political repression law, citing the vandalism of temples as an example of such intimidation.

National and local Sikh groups supported both measures and have roundly disputed that characterization of the modern separatist movement. They had hoped the legislature would back them, given the more than century-old Sikh presence in California, and some felt the hand of the Indian government in opposition.

“They’re using these broad terms, like Hindu Americans, to justify killing a bill that’s against transnational repression,” said Karam Singh, advocacy director for the California Sikh Youth Alliance, which sponsored both bills. “I think most Americans of all walks of life would clearly be in favor of protections for Californians from being intimidated, harassed and targeted by a foreign government.”

Is anti-Hindu animosity growing in California?

California is specially equipped to track incidents of hate and bias, thanks to a hotline launched by Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2023. The so-called “CA vs. Hate” hotline reported receiving more than 2,000 calls in its first year, according to a May 2024 report from the California Department of Civil Rights.

During that period, hotline investigators said they documented 24 acts of verified anti-Hindu bias, about 23% of all acts of religious hatred that investigators verified. Nearly 37% were anti-Jewish and 15% were anti-Muslim. No anti-Sikh figures were mentioned.

The numbers shocked California Hindus across the political spectrum. Extremist and hate-motivated acts are nothing new for Sikh and Muslim Americans, who have been dealing with hate crimes in the United States for decades since 9/11. There have been isolated cases, but Hindu Americans have not been disproportionately targeted in such crimes overall.

Pushpita Prasad, a spokeswoman for the Coalition of Hindus of North America, is not a fan of the state’s civil rights wing. The wing has anti-hate partnerships with major Sikh, Jewish and Muslim organizations, but not Hindu groups. Her organization opposed the caste law last year.

But she called the hotline data “yet another confirmation” of the “experience of Hinduphobia.” Her group encouraged Hindus to use the hotline during debates over the caste discrimination bill, she said. They also told people to use it after temple vandalisms in Newark and Hayward.

“Anti-India issues are constantly being conflated with Hinduism,” she told CalMatters. More and more non-Hindus are becoming aware of caste and Indian politics, and “there’s a double standard at play that we all participate in, and some of us resist, but most of us don’t.”

The Daily Democrat contributed to this story.