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 and steep rise in anti-South Asian and anti-Hindu hate. Police in Palatine, Ill., announced that on Oct. 11, a college student and Taco Bell cashier named Alexandros Paporakis tried to carry out the attack at the Sri Venkateswara Swami Temple in Aurora, Ill., roughly 40 miles west of Chicago. They said the plot was averted by a jammed gun.
"Something of this scale … has not been directed at South Asians before," said Rohit Chopra, professor of communications at Santa Clara University and visiting fellow at the Center for South Asia at Stanford University. Two decades ago, the predominant narrative about Indian immigrants to the U.S. was glowing, describing the relatively small population as a "model minority." But Chopra says that over the last four years, a combination of growing anti-immigrant populism, economic anxiety and rising political visibility have dramatically changed the script. Today, he said, online and political discourse more often depict Indian Americans and a broader community of people of South Asian descent in conspiracist, degrading and dehumanizing ways.
"It's become a question of who is American, and deliberately trying to keep the Hindu- and Indian-American community out of those conversations entirely with these sort of preconceived notions and bias against the community," said Prasiddha Sudhakar, a board member of the Network Contagion Research Institute. Sudhakar was formerly a researcher at the NCRI who coauthored some of that organization's reports on the topic. Most concerning, said Sudhakar and Chopra, is that the toxic online rhetoric they have documented has moved from fringe social media platforms to mainstream ones in a short period of time.
And, they said, they see strong connections between online hate and offline violence. "It didn't start off as mainstream, maybe even like a year or a few years ago. You still saw it on the internet," Sudhakar said.
"But what has actually become more important now is that this is reaching many different parts of society in a scale that we've never seen before." Paporakis has been charged in Illinois with making a terrorist threat and unlawful possession of a rifle, both felonies. Police said his coworkers called to report the attempted massacre. One of them, according to an affidavit filed by a Cook County assistant state attorney, had spoken by phone with the defendant shortly after the attempted attack.
The affidavit further states that Paporakis had also sent that coworker messages, including an eight-page document he had written outlining his motivation for the alleged plot. Later that day, police said that a search of Paporakis' apartment turned up a bag containing an AR-style rifle, 300 rounds of ammunition, eight loaded magazines, one loaded extended magazine and body armor. They also found a gas can and items bearing Nazi symbols and anti-Indian slurs.
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