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. The man mimics the voiceover from India the Worst Country on Earth: “You are the world’s most invasive species, Pajeet.”

The man tells the Polish woman: “You are a white woman, what’re you going to do, mix your genetics up with the shit-skinned?”

Much of this history centres on the slur “Pajeet”. Understanding its history and use shows how these white supremacist slurs have been internalised by South Asian communities – and whenever South Asian communities spread hatred against each other, it boomerangs spectacularly.

The first known use of “Pajeet” dates to a July 2015 post on the 4chan internet message board. While it’s impossible to know what its coiner intended, a plausible theory is that it combines the Punjabi honorific “Paji” and names ending in -jeet, common among Sikhs.

By September, as reported by US-based anti-hate coalition Stop AAPI Hate, “Pajeet” was the most common anti-Asian slur found by monitoring organisation Moonshot in its study of online spaces that promote violence against specific groups. The slur “chink” ranked second and “Paki” was third.

For racists who use “Pajeet”, “Indian” is largely equated with “Hindu”. Some elements of the term, especially references to cows, are distinctly Hindu-coded. Yet those trafficking in this hate show little grasp of distinctions between South Asian communities – just as in 1907, when mobs in Bellingham in the US state of Washington, attacked Sikh labourers they called “Hindus”.

The slur “Pajeet” targets Indians from all backgrounds, especially Sikh truck drivers.

In recent years, trolls and bigoted networks in Pakistan have adopted the term, including influencers, such as in a clip of India the Worst Country on Earth posted by Pakistan Army veteran Brig Ashfaq Hassan on X. On Facebook, “Pajeet” slurs circulate among South Asian groups, with Pakistani pages with half a million followers joining in.

While it’s difficult to know how many of these accounts belong to organised networks, the racist memes often mirror broader online information warfare between India and Pakistan. Forums also show Hindus using “Mujeet” or “Muslim pajeet” to denigrate South Asian Muslims online.

Pakistan has recently become competitive, but so far, Indians have been at the forefront of such online operations. Organised Hindutva networks have arguably led the world in spreading bigoted and false narratives. In both 2024 and 2025, the World Economic Forum listed disinformation and misinformation as the most critical short-term risk worldwide, with India considered most at risk.

These Hindutva networks have repeatedly trafficked in inflammatory rhetoric, in both India and the diaspora. Among the more shameful poisonings of global discourse was their distortion of the carnage in Gaza, reported widely, notably by fact-check organisation Boom.

Anti-Muslim bigotry harms Indians in the diaspora – regardless of faith. Nearly 20% of incidents that US-based Hindutva organisation Hindu American Foundation tried to frame as anti-Hindu violence involved perpetrators mistaking Hindus for Muslims, per a report in July.

This recalls the horrifying days after 9/11, when all South Asian communities, especially Sikhs, were targeted as Muslims. The more Hindutva networks spread anti-Muslim bigotry (for example, by demonising New York Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani on the eve of an election, as a report by the Centre for the Study of Organised Hate shows), the more they endanger themselves and place all South Asian communities in the path of the boomerang of hate.

Consider also the slur “Paki”, weaponised against Pakistanis abroad, including by other South Asian communities. It was also used by British neo-Nazi Mark Collett to attack the UK’s first Indian-origin prime minister, Rishi Sunak. Collet described Sunak as a “little Paki rat… illegally inserted into the position of Prime Minister”. Others called Sunak a “Pajeet”.

This circulation of bigotry has offline consequences. Several “Pajeet”-related videos on Rumble – an “alternative” video platform rife with racist content – featured advertisements from the US immigration enforcement body, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, seeking to recruit viewers who enjoyed such material.

The Washington Post has quoted one 36-year-old ICE hopeful saying, “I keep seeing memes where Indians are bragging about taking our tech jobs. So I said, ‘Oh yeah? Well I’m going to work with these guys that are going to arrest you, slam your face on the pavement and send you home’.”

Before fuelling this cycle of bigotry, online trolls – Hindutva or Pakistani – should consider harms on their own communities. To the wannabe ICE agent or the xenophobic bigot, it matters little whether South Asians are Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan, or Nepali; Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian, or Buddhist. To them, as a cartoon documented by the Center for the Study of Organized Hate in September shows, we are all the same.

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