On January 24, 2025, Representative Shri Thanedar (D-MI 13) introduced House Resolution 69 titled “Celebrating Hindu Americans, condemning attacks on Hindu places of worship, Hinduphobia, and anti-Hindu bigotry.” It is a near-verbatim reintroduction of his 2024 measure, H.Res.1131, and by June 2026 it carried 32 bipartisan cosponsors, among them Rep. Ro Khanna. House resolutions are nonbinding: they express the sense of the chamber and create no law. What H.Res.69 would do, for the first time at the federal level, is lend congressional weight to a controversial and weaponized term “Hinduphobia”.

 Importantly it is being advanced at a moment when hate aimed at South Asians, and at Indians in particular, is rising sharply. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue recorded a 1,350% surge in anti-South-Asian slurs on X between 2023 and 2024.

Data from the Stop AAPI Hate shows that anti-South Asian hate surges in direct response to the political ascendance of prominent South Asian public figures including Zohran Mamdani and Kamala Harris. When tracking extremist spaces, threats of violence and online slurs peaked heavily in late 2024 and mid-2025.

But that hostility is not sorted by religion. It falls on Indians of every background that includes Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Sikh, Dalit and anyone merely perceived as Indian.

The case for scrutiny rests on who is driving the term. The grassroots push behind H.Res.69 is led by three organizations whose published output this data brief analyzes: the Hindu American Foundation (HAF), the Coalition of Hindus of North America (CoHNA), and HinduPACT. By its own description, HinduPACT is an initiative of the World Hindu Council of America (VHPA). The VHPA is in turn the U.S. affiliate of India’s Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), a Sangh Parivar body that the CIA’s World Factbook has listed as a “militant religious organization” and that Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have linked to anti-Christian and anti-Muslim violence in India.

Because H.Res.69 does not define the term “Hinduphobia,” the public meaning of the term is being shaped largely by the organizations promoting the resolution. This data brief examines how those organizations themselves use the term.

We examined 242 articles, webpages, and event posts drawn from the three organizations’ own “Hinduphobia” search results. Of these, 87 (36 percent) contained a specific accusation of “Hinduphobia.” These accusations were directed overwhelmingly at critics of Hindu nationalism, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his government, India’s treatment of religious minorities, academics, and advocates for caste discrimination protections. These 87 articles form the analytic sample: 22 from HAF, 43 from CoHNA, and 22 from HinduPACT. Each article was coded for the specific party it accuses and assigned a normalized “collective target” label that groups many phrasings into consistent buckets. A second variable records the framing: whether the cited offense is direct anti-Hindu bigotry, or criticism of Hindutva, caste, or the Indian government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi recast as Hinduphobia.

The remaining 64% of the 242 items consist largely of persecution-abroad reports, temple-attacks coverage, and routine legislative proclamations and resolutions. These articles and pages name no critic and are therefore set aside by the accusation-focused analysis that follows. One pertinent thing observed in the whole corpus is that these organizations rarely name what civil-rights groups identify as the principal drivers of anti-Indian and anti-Hindu hostility in the US: white supremacy and Christian nationalism.