‘Pajeet’: The white supremacist slur weaponised by South Asians is amplifying anti-Indian hate

This is the second of a two-part series. Read the first here.

As the camera zooms in on a map of the Indian subcontinent, an AI-generated voiceover in David Attenborough’s iconic tone says that India “is a cursed land, and quite possibly the most disgusting country on Earth today… In this godforsaken land, the native Indian Hindu, more colloquially known as the Pajeet, breeds out of control like a plague of rats.”

It goes on to intone, “Often defecating in the open with no regard for its native habitat, the Pajeet spreads across the face of the earth like a cancerous tumor, consuming all in its path while the world watches in disgust and horror.”

India the Worst Country on Earth was released around April 2024 on far-right message boards in the West. Styled as a nature documentary to maximise the dehumanisation of Indians, it splices crowd-sourced footage from far-right networks showing Indians run over by trains, corpses in the Ganga and Indians raping animals. There is an obsession with open defecation.

The film shows how far racism against Indians has evolved. But this prejudice is not just restricted to online spaces: on September 11, Indiatimes posted a video from Poland showing a man accosting an Indian with his Polish girlfriend....

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