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South Asian hate spikes after Mamdani’s primary win
Online narratives link Mamdani to Minnesota State Senator Omar Fateh and London Mayor Sadiq Khan, framing Muslim political participation as part of a so-called “global Muslim takeover.”
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Malvika Choudhary - Fri, 08, Aug 2025
- 17:55 EDT
- 23
Zohran Mamdani won the New York City Democratic mayoral primary on June 24, 2025 / Vincent Alban/Pool via REUTERS
South Asian communities in the United States are facing a significant rise in targeted hate, with new data linking the latest spike to New York City Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani’s political ascent.
According to Moonshot, which tracks threats of violence and racial slurs in extremist online spaces, May and June 2025 ranked among the highest months for anti-South Asian hate speech since monitoring began in January 2023.
Also Read: Mamdani holds lead in NYC mayoral race, new poll shows
May recorded the third-highest number of violent threats, while June was fifth. The same period also saw the fourth- and fifth-highest levels of anti-South Asian slurs.
June alone registered 44,535 slurs, with anti-Muslim and anti-Sikh language seeing the sharpest rise — “rag heads” up 192 percent and “towelhead” up 175 percent from the 12-month baseline.
Researchers found the surge closely tied to Mamdani’s mayoral primary win. On platforms including 4chan, Gab, Truth Social, and X, users called him a “muslim jeet,” demanded he be “sent back to India,” and issued explicit death threats against South Asians, referring to them as a “virus race.”
The slur “pajeet,” originating on 4chan in 2015, was widely used and is now common on mainstream platforms like Facebook and Instagram.
Some online narratives link Mamdani to Minnesota State Senator Omar Fateh and London Mayor Sadiq Khan, framing Muslim political participation as part of a so-called “global Muslim takeover.”
Google autocomplete searches for Mamdani focus on when he came to the United States — often misspelling his name — while similar searches for his defeated opponent, Andrew Cuomo, return only political background.
Political figures have echoed the rhetoric. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand falsely associated Mamdani with “global jihad,” Representative Brandon Gill mocked his eating habits and told him to “go back to the third world,” and some officials even suggested denaturalization.
Immigration debate and geopolitical tensions
The spike also coincides with renewed hostility over H-1B visas, 80 percent of which in 2024 went to South Asians, including 71 percent to Indians. False claims of a Jewish-led effort to replace white workers have revived earlier waves of scapegoating, from the 1907 attacks on Punjabi mill workers to the Dotbusters assaults in the 1980s.
Elon Musk’s support for H-1B visas and launch of a new political party have further intensified the backlash.
Tensions between India and Pakistan have also driven a rise in hate activity, with a 40 percent increase in violent threats in May compared to the previous six-month average. In extremist spaces, users called for “total pajeet and paki death” and advocated global violence against Indian and Pakistani people.
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