Sadbhistu līlayā proktaṃ śilālikhitam akṣaram Asadbhiśśapathenoktaṃ jale likhitam akṣaram (Even words said in fun by good people are like letters carved in stone. Even oaths sworn by bad people are like letters written on water.) -Subhashitham US Hindu groups are expressing a sense of vindication and concern after a press release from California’s Civil Rights Department (CDR) showed that 23.
3 per cent of all acts of religious hate reported to the Department’s Anti-Hate Hotline in the last year were anti-Hindu incidents. Not surprisingly, the largest category of religious hate incidents recorded were anti-Jewish in nature (36.9 per cent) but possibly quite surprisingly, for certain well-funded anti-Islamophobia groups (including some self-styled ‘progressive’ Hindu groups), the percentage of anti-Muslim hate incidents (14.
6 per cent) recorded was lower than that of both anti-Jewish and anti-Hindu incidents. On the face of it, this data confirms what many Hindus have been saying all along: that Hinduphobia is real and incidents of anti-Hindu bigotry and violence are on the rise. In the San Francisco Bay Area alone, for example, at least six Hindu temples were vandalised in the past few months.
Before that, there were notorious examples of random outbursts of hatred against Hindus in public spaces in California, such as the vicious abuse of a Hindu customer at a Taco Bell in Fremont by an American of South Asian descent and the religious profiling an.
