When police arrested a self-described White supremacist in an alleged plot to shoot up a Hindu temple in Aurora, Illinois, Pushpita Prasad saw more than hate.
She saw racism, she saw bigotry and she saw what she calls Hinduphobia.
The term has not had widespread usage or acceptance, and Prasad sees that as a problem.
“They do not want to call it Hindu hate, because they feel doing that it validates the religious bigotry that we face, and that a lot of institutions and academia have been trying to downplay or deny,” Prasad said in an interview with AsAmNews.
Prasad is chief communications officer for the Coalition of Hindus of North America (COHNA) and is based out of the San Francisco Bay Area’s Silicon Valley. Her group which is headquartered in New Jersey has been tracking attacks on Hindu temples. It’s counted 15 attacks since 2022. In the last 12 incidents, she says there have been no prosecutions.
Call for hate crime probe
105 members of Congress are calling for FBI director Kash Patel to launch a hate crime probe into the suspected plot in Illinois.
Prosecutors have charged admitted neo-Nazi Alexandros Paporakis with two felony counts of making a terrorist threat and unlawful possession of a short‑barreled rifle.
Authorities say he drove to the Sri Venkateswara Swami Hindu temple in Aurora with the intent to carry out a mass shooting, but his gun jammed. Despite the suspect being a Nazi, hate crime charges have not been filed. Yet, authorities say Parorakis intended “to kill a significant number of Indians”
Prasad supports the call for hate crime charges but offered no opinion as to why prosecutors have been slow to add the charge.
Like Prasad, Manjusha Kulkarni is Hindu. She is also co-founder of Stop AAPI Hate and executive director of AAPI Equity Alliance in Los Angeles.
Stop AAPI Hate has tracked a 71% increase in threats of violence against South Asians from 2023 to 2025 and a 109% increase in online slurs.
Trifecta of hate
“I do think that we are seeing some specifically anti-Hindu hate,” Kulkarni said during a phone interview with AsAmNews. “Sometimes it’s hard to differentiate between just overall anti-Indian or anti-South Asian hate. What we’re seeing is really a trifecta of hate……So the first bucket was racist rhetoric, the second is xenophobic policies…and of course we see ICE.”
She pointed to a recent Pro-Publica story which documented the arrest of 500 American citizens by ICE.
Both Kulkarni and Prasad see as significant attacks on Hindu temples. They do not believe it’s a coincidence.
“So, the identities are definitely not watertight. They merge, they overlap in reality and in people’s perceptions,”said Prasad. “If you just wanted to be racist against brown people in general, why pick only a Hindu temple? There are other places you could go to.”