A 19-year-old man's alleged plot to carry out a mass shooting at a Hindu temple in suburban Chicago last month is drawing attention to a recent, steep rise in anti-South Asian and anti-Hindu hate. Police in Palatine, Ill., said Alexandros Paporakis, a college student and Taco Bell cashier, tried to attack the Sri Venkateswara Swami Temple in Aurora on Oct. 11, and was stopped only by a jammed gun.
Paporakis is charged in Illinois with making a terrorist threat and unlawful possession of a rifle, both felonies. Police said coworkers reported him; an affidavit says one coworker spoke with him by phone and received an eight-page document outlining his motivation. A search of his apartment found an AR-style rifle, 300 rounds of ammunition, body armor, a gas can and items bearing Nazi symbols and anti-Indian slurs.
Court filings describe the document as filled with "derogatory and racially charged slurs" aimed at "people of Indian ancestry, Jews and African Americans," whom it called "subhumans." He had settled on the temple two months earlier but had been planning an attack for two years, allegedly describing himself as "a sociopathic white supremacist Neo Nazi filled with hatred." The alleged attempt fell on the first day of a major nine-day Hindu festival; U.S. Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill., and his family were there, and he has asked the FBI to investigate as a federal hate crime.
"Something of this scale … has not been directed at South Asians before," said Rohit Chopra, a communications professor at Santa Clara University and visiting fellow at Stanford's Center for South Asia. Two decades ago, the dominant narrative cast the small Indian immigrant population as a "model minority." He said anti-immigrant populism, economic anxiety and rising political visibility have flipped the script over the past four years.
Prasiddha Sudhakar, a board member and former researcher at the Network Contagion Research Institute, said fringe platforms like 4chan and Gab were the rhetoric's original hubs. Around 2022, she said, it hardened into full-blown conspiracy theories, including a baseless "Brahmin Organized Government" narrative echoing the neo-Nazi "Zionist Organized Government" theory. The anti-Indian versions fixate on immigration and jobs, pairing claims of secret control with tropes of "dirty" immigrant "invaders" displacing technology workers.
Sudhakar said the rhetoric has since moved to mainstream platforms like X, spiking when people of Indian or Hindu origin gained prominence. But 2025, she said, was when online anti-Hindu and anti-Indian hate truly mushroomed. Research Chopra co-authored for the Center for the Study of Organized Hate found anti-South Asian hate speech on X from January 2025 through June 2026 ran 240% higher than in January 2024. Chopra noted Indian nationals account for more than 70% of H-1B visas and said the right has made the issue "a political hot button."
Explicit racism has surfaced in politics as well, Chopra said. The Department of Homeland Security drew backlash after sharing a poster captioned "Transformers" that showed a Sikh man beside the words "Get off our roads, you don't know how to drive Mr. Singh," an apparent reference to an Aug. 25 crash in which a truck driver of Indian nationality made an illegal U-turn on a Florida highway and killed three people. DHS later removed the post.
Since the plot became public, calls have grown in Hindu and Indian American communities to speak out; Krishnamoorthi released a video urging engagement. Chopra said limited organized opposition made the uptick possible: the community, estimated around 5 million, pairs high median income and visible success with little political power.
Pushpita Prasad of the Coalition of Hindus of North America said organizing is harder because "we don't belong to temples and we are not part of congregations." She said success can mask insecurity: according to the Pew Research Center, two-thirds of the Indian population in the U.S. are immigrants, and of those, nearly half are not naturalized citizens, leaving many, in her words, in "immigration limbo."
