Amid attempts to label Hinduphobia in the US as a ‘Hindu nationalist construct’, the Civil Rights Department of the State of California has revealed that over 23% of reported religiously motivated incidents of hate were directed towards the Hindu community.
The revelations were made on 20th May based on data collected from a state-wide multilingual hotline named ‘CA Vs Hate.’ A total of 1,020 hate crimes were reported to the hotline within a span of 1 year.
The ‘Possibility Lab’ of the University of California Berkley analysed the data [pdf] and found that 23.3% of reports related to religious targeting constituted anti-Hindu hate.
“Anti-Jewish (36.9%), anti Hindu (23.3%) and antiMuslim (14.6%) were the most cited reasons for reports related to religious targeting,” it stated.
Interestingly, reports alleging anti-Muslim hate were 8.7% less than the reports of anti-Hindu hate received on the hotline of ‘CA Vs Hate.’
It must be mentioned that the hotline can be used to report any form of non-emergency hate crime or incident between 9 am to 6 pm from Monday to Friday. Victims can report in over 200 different languages and in a completely anonymous form.
Attacks on Hindus in US
The development comes amid a surge in attacks on Hindu temples in the United States. Earlier in March this year, five Indian-origin lawmakers in the United States wrote to the Civil Rights Division of the US Department of Justice, seeking status information on the investigation into attacks on Hindu temples in the country.
The letter was written by House Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi and signed by four other Indian-origin Congress members namely Shri Thanedar, Ro Khanna, Pramila Jayapal and Ami Bera.
They emphasised, “Attacks at mandirs from New York to California have contributed to increased collective anxiety among Hindu Americans. “
Attempts to whitewash Hinduphobia
Despite facts to the contrary, anti-Hindus and pro-Islamist outfits have left no stone unturned to brush Hinduphonbia under the carpet
Pro-Islamist outfit, Hindus for Human Rights (HfHR) had even claimed that the term Hinduphobia was somehow coined to draw false equivalence to Islamophobia and anti-Semitism.
According to the popular OSINT handle ‘Disinfo Lab’, HfHR was formed in the year 2019 and was at the forefront of leading demonstrations against the visit of PM Modi to Houston on September 22, 2019.
Sunita Vishwanath, the co-founder of ‘Hindus for Human Rights’ had also tried to create hysteria and panic among Indian Muslims about the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in 2019.
She is also the co-founder of an organisation named ‘Women for Afghan Women’, which is funded by George Soros’ Open Society Foundations (OSF)/ Open Society Institute (OSI).
In 2021, ‘Hindus for Human Rights’ also endorsed the anti-Hindu event ‘Dismantling Global Hindutva’ conference. It also came up with a “special toolkit” to propagate against Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his State visit to the US in June 2023.
In October last year, the X (formerly Twitter) account of HfHR was withheld in India in response to a legal demand.
The likes of historical distortionists such as Audrey Truschke had previously opposed US House Resolution 1131, which was introduced to officially acknowledge the violence faced by Hindus in America.
