On the 31st of August, tens of thousands of Australians took to the streets in various Australian cities to oppose immigration in Australia. Official promotional materials for the event singled out one group of immigrants in particular: Indians. Flyers for the events claimed that there have been “more Indians in 5 years, than Greeks and Italians in 100”.
Shortly thereafter, Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price appeared on the ABC’s Background Briefing and claimed that the Labour government was deliberately allowing higher numbers of Indian immigrants into the country in order to secure political support. Despite significant pressure, Price refused to apologise for her comments, but was subsequently removed from the Liberal front bench by Susan Ley. Ley then apologised for Price’s remarks herself.
These recent anti-Indian sentiments did not come out of nowhere. In the online context, anti-Indian racism has been bubbling away on Tiktok videos, Instagram posts, X threads and Youtube comments sections for some time now. Of all the types of racism that one is exposed to on social media, anti-Indian hate is amongst the most prevalent. It is possible that organisers for the March for Australia, and Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, were aware of, and deliberately chose to exploit, this pre-existing anti-Indian sentiment when singling out Australia’s Indian community.
This briefing analyses anti-Indian racism on social media. It identifies two strands of anti-Indian hatred that we have found to be particularly prevalent: claims that Indians are poor members of society, and claims that Indians have bad hygiene. These two strands of anti-Indian hatred also offer some explanation of why Indian hate in particular has become so prevalent on social media. On the one hand, Indians represent one of the biggest groups of immigrants globally, and here in Australia, making them a natural focal point for racist anti-immigrant hatred more generally. Secondly, the unfair stereotype that Indians have poor hygiene has the potential to motivate feelings of disgust towards the community, with the feeling of disgust being a plausible motivation behind various kinds of hate-speech and discrimination. As such, this briefing offers two possible explanations for why the Indian community in particular have become the subject to such vitriolic online hate in recent months and years.
The stereotype that Indians are poor members of society:
India has the highest number of emigrants world-wide, and Indians were also the biggest group of immigrants to Australia in 2023-4. As we saw in the promotional materials for the March for Australia and Jacinta Nampijinpa Price’s recent controversial comments, this makes the Indian diaspora a natural focus point for racist anti-immigrant sentiments.
This could explain why much of the anti-Indian hatred we see online involves the claim that Indian people make poor members of society. If racism against Indians is often motivated by concerns about immigration, then it makes sense that it would seek to portray Indians as being unable to effectively fit into broader society. This could then be used to justify anti-immigration attitudes according to which Indians should not be allowed to live in the country.
Racism of this kind is doubly harmful to the Indian community. Firstly, it involves unfairly portraying all Indians in a negative light, and spreading harmful stereotypes that demonise the community as a whole. Secondly, these stereotypes are then used to justify claims that Indians should be excluded from Australian society. Those who consume this content online are therefore encouraged to be suspicious of, and to reject, Indian people in Australia.
The following user denies the possibility that Australia can flourish as a multicultural society, and asserts that “Jacinta is correct. Indians are ruining Australia.”
This next user, from Tiktok, claims that Indians do not assimilate to the “forst world countries” that they move to, and that they “abuse the system and disrespect their countries”. The implication is that Indian immigrants should not be accepted because they are unable to assimilate into western society.
This next user promotes stereotypes about Indians stealing, and about their residing in Australia on fake visas. Once again, there is a clear implication that we should all be concerned about Indian immigration to Australia.
This next screenshot, from a Canadian profile on X, promotes offensive stereotypes about Indians in addition to the claim that “They have no respect for our land and will turn it into a barren open-air dump, just like India, if we don’t stop them now.”
This next commenter on Tiktok claims they have “blocked every Indian customer [they] had” because they are “ridiculous to deal with”. This comment spreads harmful stereotypes about Indians in order to justify excluding them from society.
Clearly, then, much of the anti-Indian hatred we see online is used to criticise Indian migration into Australia and other Western countries. In much of this kind of hate we see echoes of the “Great Replacement Theory”; an extremist narrative according to which immigration is a deliberate attempt to replace native white populations with members of other races, orchestrated by a shadowy group of elites (usually Jews).
Official flyers for the recent March for Australia, featured above, called Indian Immigration “replacement plain and simple”. The following post on X discusses claims about AI replacing people’s jobs and concludes “No jobs are going to be lost to AI. That’s just the excuse they use to replace you with Indians.”
This tweet promotes a conspiracy theory according to which “Indians have hijacked both the ruling as well as the opposition parties in Australia” and describes an apparent “flood of Indian immigration that threatens to replace” white Australians.
Finally, in response to a post about Indian immigration, this user writes “And they keep saying White replacement is a conspiracy theory”.
These portrayals of Indian immigrants help justify claims that Indians should be rejected from western society, as we see in the following post:
This user explicitly states that they did not hold their own racist attitudes towards Indians until they got on the social media platform X. This is an acknowledgement of both the pervasiveness of anti-Indian racism on popular social media platforms, as well as the role that social media can play in shaping users’ prejudicial views.
Disgust and racism: self-fulfilling bigotry
One of the most common forms of racism against Indians online involves the stereotype that Indian people have poor physical hygiene. This kind of anti-Indian hate is extremely prevalent.
There is a connection between the emotion of disgust, which can be encouraged by claims about poor physical hygiene, and prejudicial feelings towards a group. George Orwell claimed that English upper-class prejudice towards the lower classes was rooted in anxieties about the lower class’s physical hygiene. Martha Nussbaum has argued forcefully that the feeling of disgust played a central role in justifying discriminatory laws and practices against gay men. There is also significant empirical research suggesting a link between the feeling of disgust, motivated by considerations about poor hygiene, and prejudicial attitudes towards various groups (including ethnic groups).
This could help to explain why anti-Indian racism has become so rampant online. The stereotype that Indians have poor hygiene can motivate feelings of disgust towards that community, which can motivate racist attitudes and hate-speech against them. Of course, the initial claim about Indian people’s hygiene is typically motivated by a pre-existing prejudice against them. This suggests that this kind of anti-Indian racism may be circular and self fulfilling; hate motivates users to spread this stereotype, and the presence of this stereotype motivates further hate.
Generally speaking, hate speech should not just be viewed as the end-point of racist sentiments; it is the cause of, as well as the product of, discriminatory attitudes. The particular effect that feelings of disgust can have on prejudicial beliefs against Indians is just one (in my view, particularly strong) example of this phenomenon.
Below, we’ve included a few examples of this extremely common stereotype. In the following vitriolic post on X, a user does their best to stoke feelings of disgust for Indians by claiming that “cow shit and human shit and piss sewer diving” are part of India’s “national DNA”.
Other users propagate the same stereotype more casually. This popular comment in Tiktok, found under an Indian content creator’s video, just features an image of deodorant. Another justifies anti-Indian racism with appeal to their “odour”.
In a similar vein, Indians are sometimes referred to as “Bioweapons”, as in the screenshot featured below.
This term feeds into both the stereotypes discussed in this briefing. Bioweapons are used to spread diseases in opposition countries. Referring to Indians as bioweapons implies both that they are unhygienic and liable to spread diseases, and also that they are a threat to the societies to which they immigrate. This dehumanising term therefore unites both the stereotypes that we have explored in this briefing.
Conclusion:
It is easy to dismiss online hate, especially when compared with real-world hate crimes. But this ignores the effect that online hate speech can have on shaping attitudes that go on to motivate our offline behaviour. Increasingly, much of our lives are spent on social media, and the biases that we absorb online will inevitably inform our treatment of people in the real world. The persistent wave of anti-Indian racism we see online will, in addition to being harmful in and of itself, undoubtedly play a role in encouraging racism against Indians in Australian society more broadly. Recent high-profile examples of this racism demonstrate the reality of this problem, and any adequate solution will have to involve addressing online racism as a prominent source of anti-Indian prejudice.