Who will tackle anti-India hate in America? NRIs and government miss the propaganda war

In the first part of this series, we argued that both factions in American politics, the Make America Great Again (Maga) and Anti-Maga ones, have stoked a “Miga” (Make Indians Go Away) sentiment even as Indians and NRIs continue to fail at grasping the core reality of Western societies—these are over-designed to enable deep control of populations. This design operates primarily through storytelling. Central to the storytelling process is a simple dichotomy: you are either a victim or a villain.

Indians have long avoided the first label out of a sense of pride, real and imagined. Indians have also long avoided confronting the reality that despite occasional flattering press about how successful Indian-Americans are, the “villain” template was only growing in media and academia.

For a long time, it perhaps did not matter much to India or to Indian Americans that such a story was being constructed relentlessly around them and about them. However, with the recent rise in both online hatred towards Indians and new US policies discouraging students and workers and even trade with India, the consequences of ignoring storytelling are becoming clearer.

In the present essay, we examine some key factors in the rise of the “villain” trope in American narratives about India, particularly in relation to Indian political developments since 2014. These factors include the global image projection of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, as well as the complicated “use” of the trope of the “NRI” by Indian media and officials.

It should also be noted that since the time of publication of the first part of this essay, two articles relevant to the topic at hand have emerged. One is that of a familiar global voice from India. Shashi Tharoor has written a long appeal to American NRIs urging them to support India. Its effect remains to be seen. The other voice is that of Charlie Kirk, the American conservative youth celebrity who was recently assassinated while on a college campus. A letter reportedly written by Kirk to Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu urging him to organise a better response to anti-Israeli narratives in America was recently made public.

While the release of the letter may have been intended to defuse conspiracy theories, it also reveals a mind keenly aware of the ground realities of belief, behaviour, and battles for meaning and perception in American life today, particularly among the youth.

Diplomatic officials and world leaders tend to focus on what is said or not said in important offices and forums like the UN. A youth-oriented public speaker like Kirk knew where the narratives of tomorrow are actually being spun, won, or lost — in homes, schools, colleges, small groups of friends, and in everyday life. It is not the place of this article to suggest “narrative strategies” for Indian governments or leaders. But it is imperative for readers, in India or abroad, to become more critically aware of how narratives are being built about them and their future.

2014: The Year the Trope Hatched

The sixth point to remember (points 1-5 were addressed in part one of this essay) is that there has been a qualitative change in the overall communication campaign about India, Indians, and Hindus since about 2014. While some tropes may have been old, and persuasion tactics a combination of old and new ones (and technologies too; smartphone-based social media, TikTok, X and other vectors for propaganda did not exist earlier), there have been two important, interacting factors in the narrative wars. One is the figure of the “NRI” (to use the general label used in India for Indian-origin people living or working or studying abroad). The other is, simply, the name “Modi”.

“Modi” marks the first time (since Indira Gandhi or even Mahatma Gandhi maybe) that an Indian politician’s name has been made an almost household one in America – by the Americans themselves. Like “Castro” or “Saddam” or “Putin”, the word is short, crisp, and easy to say for Americans. It has a hold on the tongue, mind, and to an extent, over everyday social interactions as well.

From 2002 to 2014, the US media and academia built up the name “Modi” simply as a shortcut to thinking about India. It was a demonisation campaign. “Something sinister was happening” is all everyone was conditioned to feel, including many “NRIs” (or PIOs). Even after courts and elections had effectively cleared the air, the effects of the fear campaign remained, and their ability to spring back at any time was left unaddressed.

This was a projection of the Indian image, a false and negative one, into the American cultural mainstream on an unprecedented scale. Simply put, no Indian walking on the street in America would have ever been assaulted over “Manmohan” or even “Vajpayee”. But the name “Modi” was disseminated widely as a “get out of jail” card for racists. They could assault random Indians on the road and then insist they were not racist but only calling out Modi. This was a new front in propaganda warfare.

Before 2014, Indians could face generic racism or religious racism, and they did. But the kind of “permission” for harm that was created against Indians using this name was indeed new. This psy-op was the main contribution of the so-called anti-racist liberal-left to anti-Indian racists these past two decades. And now that they see the Maga-Right attacking Indians and Hinduism, they are quite happy to endorse it with their silence or say, “We told you so” to the handful of Indian Americans who did not vote for Democrats in 2024.

Unfortunately, the demonisation campaign of Modi was something the Indian government and ruling party did not even understand while planning his visit in 2014, except perhaps as something that could be ignored or used in domestic politics. He was the first Indian Prime Minister since Indira Gandhi who came in already known, somewhat, to the average reader in the West.

Unfortunately, the media circus in India never asked the hard questions about what the government was doing to make the Americans set the record straight. Instead, they just used the image of NRIs celebrating at his stadium events to build a narrative that somehow all was well with, and for, NRIs in their host countries. When 2025 and the new Trump presidency came, no one knew what to do except perhaps to find more scapegoats for having missed the obvious.

The NRI as Strawman

Now this is not a criticism of an individual, necessarily, but of the machine that manages the image of a charismatic prime minister and the country he represents. The reality now is that every Indian abroad carries the burden of being held accountable for the failures of that machine. Laws that could be used to label Indian-origin people abroad as agents of transnational repression by the Indian government are moving forward in America very quickly. The Indian government and public seem to think NRIs should fight it (sort of like a case of the dog asking the tail to wag him instead). NRIs, meanwhile, often accused of “dual loyalty”, flounder about not knowing how to do things the Indian government’s foreign affairs officials should rightly be doing (defending their government and country and diaspora’s image against dehumanisation campaigns abroad, for one thing).

It has become very easy on social media and even in Indian mainstream media to use the figure of the “NRI” as a shortcut for all sorts of claims. For many years, critics and opponents of the Modi government used to accuse their NRI relatives and friends of “imposing” the prime minister on them and escaping to nice lives in Western liberal democracies. It didn’t matter perhaps that it is the poor masses of India, their own “servants” and farmers, who vote for the prime minister.

Now, with the rising hostility from the US government towards India in the form of visas and tariffs, once again the NRI has become a scapegoat in some social media trends. In America, NRIs are easy targets now for those who wish to harm them by labelling them as “Modi’s supporters” (not unlike how Winston Smith and others are labelled Goldstein’s followers in the novel 1984). In India, it can become quite easy for governments and politicians who have failed at entering the global information age to also settle on the NRI as a scapegoat, or at least the “weakest link”.

Scapegoating

The seventh and last point to ponder about the persuasion battlefield in which ordinary human beings find themselves, powerless before two big states and their officials and politicians (and business tycoons) negotiating with each other oblivious to the harm to sanity and safety that has been caused by neglect of the communication dimension of our global existence today, is the need for Indians abroad to take a sympathetic view of the people we live with as neighbours, employers, employees, students, or teachers.

Indians have been tremendously uncurious about others, and sometimes we come across as oblivious or even callous. In our favour, we might say that we mind our business, keep our heads down, follow the law, and just study and make money, so what’s the problem? That no longer works considering that Indians and India and Hinduism have been very successfully made scapegoat #1 in the West. Left and right, white or brown, everyone has settled on this convenient arrangement. Indians, meanwhile, are scrambling for adjustments, solutions, and sometimes theories and explanations. But most of these will only be short-term things.

We have to understand the heart of the problem. Miga may dislike all immigrants, but then, clearly, it hates some immigrants even more than others. Anti-Maga may like all immigrants, but then it clearly likes some immigrants less than others! What is it about the Hindu elephant in the room that rattles both? Skin colour? Race? Class? Our conduct? Their association of this with what they have been told is our “religion”? There are now thousands of words on social media about Hinduphobia, and there is no need to revisit this here. But there is one last thing to understand about propaganda and persuasion that might be useful in bridging realities and dwindling empathy gaps here.

Compassion for Victims of Deception

Researchers working in the field of deception studies (a topic that ranges from military strategy to zoology to, of course, mass media) have noted that most psychologists focus on the tactics of the deceiver but very rarely on the victim. Victims of deception, usually of financial fraud by “confidence tricksters” or “conmen”, have certain coping strategies which usually involve denial.

America, and indeed most of the world, will be better understood from this long-haul temporal and psychological perspective. Anti-immigrant sentiment may be catalysed by economic worries, understandably, but Hinduphobia, specifically, comes from a more complex place of existential angst, quite frankly.

It was very common in American society to hear people complain that they “felt violated” when someone lied to them. In Indian society and interactions, perhaps small things are left to pass as a matter of routine. In the West, especially in Protestant America, where one fad after another has come and gone, where, from PT Barnum to Wall Street crooks to politicians to religious figures, there is a feeling that life is a journey from one con to another, there is a gap in trust and faith that many Indians fail to notice or develop a deeper understanding of.

From books like the 1850 classic Extraordinary Delusions and the Madness of Crowds to the more recent Fantasyland, the cultural history of Europe and America is a fascinating contrast to ours, where delusions and deceptions may have come and gone, but the primal turning point they had once was never accepted by us: that of “false gods”, only one true path, hell, damnation and the like.

Somehow, karma, usually understood over many lifetimes, stayed a better explanation and regulator of our behaviour than theological ideas of sin or guilt. That, and hope. I hope that whether this life is one of many or the only one even, dharma, staying in tune with the right things to do, would help. And beyond all these strivings, bhakti and saranagati, the unwavering surrender, are not just to God in general but to gods and goddesses all.

Everyone, Americans and Indians, gets fooled by professional con men: politicians, money scammers, and intimate partners. But how we cope with the aftermath of it, over generations, especially now when we live in a global society where we all have partially influenced each other and adapted to each other, is the question. Indians in America have tried very hard to adapt to liberal American society. Yet, their assimilation will remain incomplete for many.

Religion, language, names, and mannerisms — some of these might be choices some make, happily or otherwise. But the bigger question really is this: who will finally enter the others’ story? And as what, in what roles? It’s a hard choice when only “victim” or “villain” is on the table from the dominant story-telling side. That side has billions invested in the process. The other has barely even understood that there is a process, and it’s coming their way. One side has a story machine. The other side has degrees only in making or fixing literal machines, not the storytelling or cultural kinds at all! One side looks to martyrs for inspiration. One side still looks to Mahavatars for liberation. Human, animal, pagan, gods. The cast is assembled for a show of a yuga, it appears.

This is the final part of a two-part series on rising anti-India sentiments in the US. Click here to read the first part. 

Vamsee Juluri is Professor of Media Studies, University of San Francisco. He has authored several books, including ‘Rearming Hinduism: Nature, Hinduphobia and the Return of Indian Intelligence’ (Westland, 2015). C Raghothama Rao is a writer, podcaster and YouTuber. The views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.