‘I was ruined’: How U.S. professors rise above increasing digital threats by Hindu nationalists

Dheepa Sudaram has not been able to return to India for the past five years.

The University of Denver professor wrote an academic article about Druga Puja, a Hindu festival, and became a target following her involvement in the South Asia Scholar Activist Collective. 

Then she was doxxed, and the threats hit too close to home. 

“Somebody put my home address and my cell phone number on Twitter,” Sundaram said. “I had a campus safety officer escorting me to my car. Those kinds of things made it so that we put cameras in our house, things that we didn’t do (before).”

Sundaram’s experiences are shared by other American scholars who research India, its religions and history due to rising Hindu nationalism. Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), who have been in power since 2014, violence has not only increased against India’s minorities, but also against his critics in the diaspora, including academics, activists and journalists. 

“I was ruined by that,” Sundaram said. “People were willing to suggest that we were anti-nationals, anti-Hindus, anti Indians, and that we should be destroyed in some way, professionally or personally, for having this scholarly opinion.”

The persistence of online attacks comes five years after a major online conference organized by a collective of scholars came under attack. The conference, called Dismantling Global Hindutva, was described by the Hindu American Foundation as “hinduphobic.” Indian news channels aired commentaries claiming it promoted narratives that “demonized Hinduism.”

Hindu nationalist groups are increasingly using social media to target scholars who study South Asian history, culture and politics, a form of transnational repression. Still, academics attempt to protect themselves against rising nationalism and find solace in solidarity. 

Transnational repression, or TNR, has been a long-standing threat against professors who provide a nuanced perspective about Indian history or religious identity. In 2026, scholars’ experiences with TNR impact their academic and digital life, as well as their ability to travel. 

The FBI defines TNR as foreign governments extending beyond their borders to intimidate or silence members of their diasporas or exile communities. Freedom House, a nonprofit that conducts human rights research, has reported at least 1,375 cases of TNR between 2014 to 2025. 

According to a 2025 Indian American Muslim Council report, the Indian consulate and other state actors have used at least nine of the 11 tactics recognized by the FBI as forms of TNR, including attempted murder, cyber hacking and threats to family members. 

Safa Ahmed, former media director at Indian American Muslim Council, said Hindu nationalist groups, some with ties to the Indian government, have wielded digital spaces to target activists and academics. 

“If you have an academic in the United States or an activist in the United States, who is suddenly seeing this wave of coordinated hatred coming at them online from someplace like India, it’s not an accident,” Ahmed said, “especially if the Hindu right is so closely affiliated with the Indian government.”

Audrey Truschke, a professor of South Asian history at Rutgers University, said scholars have been subjected to TNR due to their teaching of histories that are often erased in nationalist discourses, especially about caste discrimination as well as Muslim and Sikh communities.  

“(Hindu nationalists have) long identified scholars across the board, especially humanities scholars, as among their chief enemies,” Trushcke said. “I would say they are correct in viewing us as a unique threat, because humanity scholars, we possess the ability to analyze Hindu nationalism, to tell you its history, to fact-check the various kinds of fictions that they promote.”

Truschke recalls some of her earliest experiences facing TNR in early 2021, when she began a project researching Hindu nationalism in the United States.

Truschke said she received hate mail “every minute,” which included physical hate mail, death threats, anti-Muslim comments and rape threats, with some directed to members of her family. Some threats were even directed to the university, police told her. 

“Because I tend to often highlight Muslim contributions to South Asian history, that doesn’t sit well with Hindu nationalists,” Truschke said. “Their position is, you either hate and malign Indian Muslims, or you’re a problem.”

Rohit Chopra, a professor at Santa Clara University, studies right-wing Hindu nationalist digital spaces. He has found that the use of digital spaces and social media have become a key defining feature of Hindu nationalist threats to religious minorities and activists. 

A 2025 report by the Center for the Study of Organized Hate found that across almost 300 accounts on X, Instagram and Facebook, AI images are increasingly being used to create anti-Muslim visuals and narratives in India. 

As reported in the Deccan Herald, an Indian English-language newspaper, at least 5 million Whatsapp groups are operated by the BJP in India. Platforms like Whatsapp, owned by Meta, have been used to spread Hindutva messaging, influencing Indian elections and reproducing anti-Muslim messaging, according to Rest of World . 

“There are specific ways you can circulate misinformation, target people. A small number of bad actors can very quickly hone in on a target, attack that particular target and manufacture outrage,” Chopra said. 

Sundaram has found that social media has “captured most of the Indian public.” Her research has focused on how Facebook’s algorithms have reinforced casteism and how Hindu supremacist ideology is marketed to users. 

“It is not enough to say that social media can potentially harm people,” Sundaram said. We need to think about what the implications of an algorithm are. Algorithms of death are not actually a metaphor.” 

As they navigate threats from abroad, U.S.-based scholars of South Asia also face transnational repression and hostility at home. The Trump administration initiated a crackdown on academia impacting professors of all backgrounds, including threats to research funding and deportation of professors with visas.

“To me, the solution is to create stronger academic protections,” Truschke said. “And instead, we’re sort of weakening them across the board in the United States right now by undercutting the basics of academic freedom.”

Truschke attempts to build protections against TNR in her syllabus by including an “offense statement,” which informs students that they should “expect to be offended” due to the nature of history. She said it encourages academic engagement with course curriculum, even when historical events prompt discomfort. 

In the face of doxxing and threats, continuing to research and speak out publicly is part of the “historian’s mission,” Truschke said. She remains hopeful in the power of solidarity. 

“As bad as the transnational repression gets, it’s nothing compared to what our colleagues in India face,” Truschke said. If  U.S. academics ever face similar repression domestically, she said she hopes international colleagues would also speak up for them. 

Sundaram also finds hope in solidarity, especially with her involvement in the collective. 

“Free speech is a big deal for me,” Sundaram said. “One of our tenets of the collective is that we fight for academic freedom and inclusive politics, both in South Asia, but mostly in our transnational space.”