SUDDEN SPATE OF DEATHS OF INDIAN-ORIGIN STUDENTS AND RISE OF ANTI-INDIA SENTIMENTS IN THE US

At least 11 Indian students were killed or died mysteriously in the US in 2024. What makes the situation serious is the fact that within a three-week period from January 15 to February 5, seven Indian-origin students lost their lives. Overall, from October 2022 to March 2024, at least 15 Indian-origin students have lost their lives in the US.

The issue of sudden, spiralling deaths of Indian students in the US hasn’t gone unnoticed, with the Indian government taking up the issue through diplomatic channels. The Ministry of External Affairs Spokesperson, Randhir Jaiswal, condemned the deaths of Indian students in the US and said the cases had been appropriately taken up with the authorities in America to seek justice.

The Ministry of External Affairs also noted that the Indian student deaths in the US are multicausal and that there were some community issues apart from law-and-order concerns. Most of these deaths have taken place under mysterious circumstances, with the exact cause of death not ascertained.

However, considering the mysterious circumstances under which most of the students died and the rather concentrated time span, the first three months of 2024, within which maximum deaths took place, these need to be investigated in totality and not as randomised isolated incidents, according to various US-based Hindu advocacy groups.

Let’s take a look at the circumstances under which a few of these student deaths occurred.

Vivek Saini, age: 25 years, was killed in Lithonia, Georgia, on January 3. He was working at a convenience store when a drug addict hammered him to death. As per a report in the Hindustan Times, Saini came to the US to pursue further studies and was pursuing a master’s course in Business Administration at the Alabama University.

Indian-origin student Neel Acharya was found dead on the Purdue University campus in January 2024. He was a computer science and data science student at Purdue University in Indiana state. Acharya’s body was recovered hours after his mother had reported him missing on January 28. The autopsy revealed that there were no signs of trauma on his body. As per local media reports from the US, the investigation concluded he died of asphyxia. The authorities reportedly listed cold exposure and alcohol poisoning as other factors contributing to his death. In 2022, another Indian-origin student studying at Purdue University was murdered. Varun Manish Chheda, age: 20 years, was allegedly murdered by his 22-year-old Korean student Ji min Sha.

Akul Dhawan, age: 18 years, was found dead outside the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign on January 18. According to the investigating authorities, the initial findings suggest he died from hypothermia, that is, he froze to death on West Nevada Street after a club refused him entry during a night out with friends. According to the official account provided by the investigating agencies, acute alcohol intoxication and prolonged exposure to extremely cold temperatures contributed significantly to Dhawan’s death.

Dhawan’s parents live in California. He studied robotics at the University of Illinois’ Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Dhawan’s parents also reportedly filed a complaint against the university’s police for negligence, alleging that the police never searched for their son. One of Dhawan’s friends had reached out to the campus police at 1:23 am on the same day after calls to him remained unanswered. Dhawan’s body was found at 11 am the next day at a location within walking distance of the club where he was denied entry.

Sameer Kamath, who was 23 years of age, was found dead in a nature preserve in Indiana on February 5. Kamath had reportedly completed his master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering at Purdue University in August 2023. The cause of his death is not known yet. Some media reports suggest that the authorities claim that Kamath died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. But this cannot be verified.

Shreyas Reddy Benigeri, 19 years old, was found dead in his dormitory room at the Lindner School of Business in Ohio. Authorities have reportedly ruled out foul play in this case.

Amarnath Ghosh, a 34-year-old trained classical dancer from India and a student at Washington University, was shot dead in St Louis, Missouri. An alumni of the prestigious Kalashetra in Chennai, Ghosh was pursuing his master’s in the Performing Arts Department of Washington University.

These are a few examples of Indian-origin student deaths in the US in 2024. As evident, most of these deaths seem to have taken place under rather mysterious circumstances, and there is ample scope for investigation. Yet, it’s strange that the authorities have casually ruled out foul play in some of the cases, despite the fact that the cause of the death is not known yet.

The US-based advocacy think tank and educational platform Castefiles, which describes itself as “challenging false caste narratives in policy and media”, has been vocal about the sudden spate of Indian-origin student deaths in the US under mysterious circumstances and has called for a more holistic investigation from all angles, including the angle of Hinduphobia and the anti-India sentiment in certain sections of US civil society.

“Castefiles noted the speed of deaths of Indian students early this year, between 15 January and 4^th February, there were seven deaths of Indian students; and as a pattern, this was concerning, even though it was hard to nail them down as hate crimes. I will describe the Deaths as related to drug overdose, or road accidents or actual murders. All deaths occurred when the witness was alone, solitary so they have no witnesses. That is when Castefiles took note of this uncommon pattern compared to previous years and realized that this was an anomaly – this is when we started to tweet and notify authorities to raise an alarm, and after that, we have seen many more series of students dying in different geographies in the US and Canada. We were relieved to see the Consulate MEA raise the issue at White House Press briefings. Secondly, Indra Nooyi offered a student advisory, which was most welcome given that this is a much-needed message,” says Richa Gautam, founder and policy director at Castefiles.

Although the Indian-origin student deaths in the US cannot be directly attributed to anti-Hindu and anti-India hate crimes as such, one perhaps needs to look at the larger context of Hinduphobia that has made its inroads felt in the US civil society, politics, and academia over the past couple of years. Hindus in the US are being increasingly targeted through legislations that ostensibly seek to ban caste discrimination. Seattle became the first city in the US to pass a law exclusively banning caste discrimination. An anti-caste discrimination legislation was passed by the US state of California as well, but it was vetoed by California Governor Gavin Newsom on the ground that ample provision banning all sorts of discrimination based on race, ancestry, etc, already existed in the US legal system, thus enacting such a law would be akin to singling out the Hindu community.

Hindus are being increasingly singled out in the US for their lifestyle, culture, and religious beliefs. From the dietary preferences of Hindus to their cultural and religious symbols, everything is being demonised and essentialised through the lens of caste. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that Hindus in the US are being reduced to their caste by a vested interests’ lobby. Caste sensitisation workshops are being held in US schools, universities, and even workplaces.

In the name of such initiatives, Hindus are being stereotyped and essentially being forcefully cast into the binary of oppressor versus oppressed. School textbooks in the US and Canada often portray rather disturbing and prejudiced ideas about Hinduism and Hindus.

In such a charged-up atmosphere, it is obvious that Hindus and other Indian-origin students feel vulnerable in the US and are prone to becoming victims of all sorts of bullying and harassment based on their identity. Stereotypes don’t operate in a vacuum. If the US academia and certain lobbies representing vested interests are constantly generating anti-Hindu stereotypes, it is natural that such stereotypes will circulate through civil society and influence the perception of Indian-origin students in the US.

Jaahnavi Kandula’s gruesome death in a hit-and-run case is still ripe in one’s memory. Kandula, an Indian origin student in the US was killed on January 23, 2023, by a speeding car being driven by a cop. The incident would have probably gone unnoticed, had it not been for the controversy generated by the bodycam footage from her death. In bodycam footage of the incident released by the Seattle Police Department, Officer Daniel Auderer could be heard laughing about the deadly crash and casually dismissing any implication of the cop driving the vehicle being at fault or that a criminal investigation was necessary.

In the bodycam footage, Officer Daniel Auderer could be heard saying that Kandula’s life had “limited value” and that the case could be settled by fixing a monetary settlement. The obnoxious remarks by the US police officer regarding the death of an Indian-origin student sparked widespread outrage, promoting a deeper discussion on racism in the context of Indian-origin students studying in the US.

Despite all the backlash and with even the Indian authorities pushing for justice for Kandula, the US authorities decided not to pursue criminal charges against the Seattle police officer involved in the tragic incident that resulted in Jaahnavi Kandula’s death. As per a February 2024 report in The Seattle Times, Kandula’s family was “shocked and disappointed” at the decision by the authorities not to file criminal charges against the concerned police officer whose speeding vehicle caused her death.

This puts in context the widespread apathy regarding the investigation of incidents involving Indians in the US. The flippant and insensitive remarks made by Daniel Auderer regarding Kandula and the decision of the US authorities not to pursue criminal charges against the perpetrator, may not be exactly interrelated, but one is kind of forced to look at these in tandem in the context of growing Hinduphobia and anti-India sentiment in the US.

“These crimes are real and not random student deaths but a sinister pattern of targeted anti-India violence reports such as an NCRI have correlated the rising social media antagonism to rising heat in real life. We have seen vandalism and desecration of temples at least a dozen, we have seen about 20 + students dying in the first quarter of 2024. If this is not targeting of Indians and especially Hindus, then what is, and if this does not require an escalation and intervention by law enforcement, then it’s hard to call America the first-world nation that cares for its residents. Citizens’ safety concerns need to be addressed. Police defunding has not helped. Law enforcement needs to step up its game,” says Richa Gautam from Castefiles.

A 2022 report by the members of the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) at Rutgers University discovered that white supremacist and genocidal memes being shared about Hindus are being shared prolifically within extremist Islamist web networks on various social media platforms. The researchers analysed millions of Hinduphobic code words and memes and deduced that one could see patterns of correlation between online hate campaigns being run against Hindus and read world offline violence against Hindus. The researchers discovered that close to an incident of real-life violence or hate crime against Hindus, the intensity of the circulation of the Hinduphobic genocidal material increased sharply.

The analysis follows a series of reports that NCRI and Rutgers University have released collectively since 2020 that examine the use of social media networks and conspiracy theories to instigate real-world violence. The 2022 report by the NCRI also discovers parallels between the Hinduphobic memes being circulated online and the anti-Semitic memes circulated in the virtual space targeting Jews. The most important finding of the report however is its discovery of the alarming correlation between the circulation of online anti-Hindu hate material and the rise in real-life incidents of violence against Hindus and vandalism of Hindu places of worship in the west.

Richa Gautam from Castefiles says that the spate of deaths of Indian-origin students in the US needs to be investigated from the angle of rising Hinduphobia in the West, as highlighted through various research studies done by the likes of NCRI and renowned Western academicians like Salvatore Babones.

“The threat to Hinduism is real. The threat is not just in academia but it has traveled to manifest in various real-life issues as seen in hate crimes with Students like Amarnath Ghosh and Chirag Antvil who were shot dead for no apparent reason. Salavotre Babones has recently written a paper on the Weaponization of Caste and how a civil society issue from South Asia has been turned into an Anti-Hindu propaganda. A Muslim-Sikh-Dalit coalition has targeted the Indian American diaspora with a goal to turn an ill-informed American public against Hindus and Hindu religious institutions. Additionally, mischaracterising any Hindu by using Hindutva and Hindu nationalist labels has become a norm. The NCRI report looked at the social media trends and how virtual-world hate has a tendency to translate into real-world hate. American lawmakers and authorities need to be alerted as the overarching need for Hindu Americans and their skill sets remains an important factor for the American economy. Hate crimes should not be tolerated or treated with callous disregard,” she says.

Even as one presses for the need for a more holistic investigation into the spate of Indian-origin student deaths in the US, the alarming rise in anti-Hindu hate crimes in Canada hasn’t gone unnoticed either. Extremist Khalistani leaders operating from the soil routinely and casually issue all sorts of violent threats to Indians living there. A 24-year-old student from Haryana was recently shot dead in Canada’s Vancouver on April 12. Chirag Antil was found dead inside his Audi car and preliminary investigations revealed that he had been shot dead by unknown miscreants.

With the ongoing Lok Sabha elections in India, the links between the stereotyping of Hindus in the West, and the vilification of PM Modi’s government as being “Hindu majoritarian, nationalist and right-wing” are too hard to be missed. The mass-scale demonisation of Hinduism and Hindutva by the Western media and the coining of phrases like “Hindutva terror” and “saffron terror” rooted in anti-Hindu conspiracy theories by anti-Hindu groups have further contributed to the demonising of Hindus and Indians in the West.

Thus, when one talks about ensuring the safety of Indian-origin students in the US, the discourse cannot be kept limited to providing them with safe and secure spaces for discussion and community bonding. While those things are certainly important, we shouldn’t ignore the larger point which is that the large-scale propagation of anti-Hindu and anti-Indian stereotypes in the West needs to be checked through the conceptualisation and implementation of a multi-pronged strategy.

Rati Agnihotri is an independent journalist and writer currently based in Dehradun (Uttarakhand). Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.

2024-04-27T13:07:03Z dg43tfdfdgfd