ABHIJNAN REJ
The Indian diaspora finds itself in the middle of a massive storm powered by old prejudices and newer predilections. The “model minority” is being targeted by a motley crew of inveterate xenophobes, political opportunists, and online provocateurs across what is sometimes referred to – with an ideological accent – as the “Anglosphere”. Imitation and its close cousin, contagion, lie at the heart of its recent troubles.
Indian-origin migrants were explicit targets of choice in the anti-immigration “March for Australia” rallies last month. Matters were not helped by Liberal senator Jacinta Price’s instrumental and defiant use of Indian migrants for political point-scoring amid palpable panic within the Indian community.
Weeks before, people of Indian origin were attacked in Ireland – a country that had elected a (partly) ethnically Indian as prime minister, twice, in the past – in a spate of seemingly-random incidents. A massive “Unite the Kingdom” rally in London on Saturday did not single out Indians; the racist vitriol was largely reserved for Muslims. But despite rally organiser Tommy Robinson’s apparent fondness for Indians, many of them are jumpy. And rightly so. After all, over in Australia, One Nation senator Pauline Hanson was once all for Indian immigrants. And yet, there she was, Marching for Australia.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s return to the American presidency last year “inaugurated a new phase of racism against Indians in America”, as one observant Indian commentator put it. Neither Trump’s Indian-American appointees and allies, nor his number-two’s Indian-origin wife, have been spared online racist attacks. His ham-fisted approach towards illegal Indian immigrants – some of whom were shackled and deported in military transport aircraft earlier this year – has had many in India looking askance. Legitimate debates around legal immigration of highly-skilled Indian workers have acquired ugly overtones. January, after Trump’s return, also saw an “alarming surge” in online hate against South Asians in platforms such as 4chan, the Elon Musk-owned X, and Reddit.
Given that what happens in America rarely stays in America, ideological seepage from the MAGA scene is a global political risk. For the Indian diaspora across the world, the seepage is slowly but surely shapeshifting into a flood of malice.
Protesters march through the central business district in Sydney, Australia, 13 September 2025 (Getty Images)
The August March for Australia received online endorsements from highly-visible MAGA-neighbouring figures. They include Musk, who for reasons only clear to him – if that – has made it his life’s mission to support the far-right far and wide. Musk also (virtually) addressed the London “free speech rally” on Saturday, and demanded the immediate dissolution of the British parliament. “Violence is coming,” he predicted.
Trump himself has courted Conor McGregor – an odious character who emerged as leader of Ireland’s small far-right during the 2023 Dublin anti-immigrant riots largely courtesy X – inviting him to the White House for St Patrick’s Day this year. “What is going on in Ireland is a travesty,” McGregor said, referring to the country’s alleged immigration problem. From the White House press briefing podium. Accompanied by Trump’s press secretary.
The mainstream is far from immune to MAGA contagion.
More than America’s foreign policy, it is the country’s domestic politics that now casts a long shadow globally.
Hanson had once hired a Trump campaign advisor for economic issues, while she repeatedly claimed that Australia was being “swamped by Muslims” – around the same time Trump was calling for a ban on Muslim immigrants. (She was apparently thrilled to be invited to Trump’s inauguration in 2017.) Price, in the run-up to the federal elections, promised to “make Australia great again”, and was the shadow minister in charge of the Musk-inspired department of government efficiency. When US Vice President J.D. Vance waded into Europe’s culture wars in an unnerving speech in Munich earlier this year, Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, also a Musk fan, came to his defence. The list goes on.
The sprawling MAGA ecosystem continues to influence and prod the extreme right, both within the United States and elsewhere, their cachet largely borrowed from Trump’s dramatic return for a second term in office. As two academics, writing about the March for Australia, put it, “[f]or the rally organisers, public support from figures such as [Musk and others] greatly expands the reach of their message, and repositions them from isolated fringe events to vital parts of a global anti-immigration movement”.
But this is only one half of the story. The approval MAGA and contiguous opinion-peddlers receive from the target, including through imitation, helps gratify and broaden their primary bases, which in turn, emboldens the target – a dynamic that plays out within and between geographies alike. For example, the outlandish far-right online conspiracy QAnon simped for Trump from the get-go. In turn, Trump’s occasional nod to QAnon vastly enthused the group. Ditto for Trump and his relationship with the Proud Boys, an American White supremacist organisation.
In other words, positive feedback settles in, often mediated by algorithms that reward performance and groupthink. The source and target co-evolve, feeding off each other. Far from a globe-spanning, coherent far-right conspiracy, it is this loyalists’ loop, as it were, that is now making the lives of Indians so difficult across the world.
The fringe seeks to draw the mainstream in. The mainstream, thus flattered, leaves a crumb or two of approval for the fringe, thereby validating it.
At its core, this is no different from how we feel when a favourite celebrity reposts our online post; we perceive their action as contributing to our clout. Gratified, we continue to post things we imagine would draw their attention. By this point, the content becomes immaterial. It could be what we have for breakfast every day; it could be racist slurs directed at Indians. Our “followers” take notice. Some even – depending on how successful we are at drawing the celebrity’s attention – copy us.
The trouble is, what happens online rarely stays there exclusively, as reams of research show. More than America’s foreign policy, it is the country’s domestic politics that now casts a long shadow globally, largely due to opportunistic, and often profitable, imitation of its most outrageous elements by others, on- and offline, by the fringe and mainstream alike. This is the reality the Indian diaspora must now contend with.
The article appeared in .lowyinstitute
