A video has sparked outrage in Canada and in India after showing a young man using racist slurs against an Indian-origin female employee, demanding she return to India, amid reports of repeated targeting of South Asian staff by a group of teens.In the video, a boy could be heard saying, “Go back to your f*****g country, you st****ng as***le Indian.”The incident reportedly took place in Oakville, Ontario, according to multiple reports.
Video receives backlash
Several users on social media slammed the video and called the teen’s behaviour “disgusting and gross.”One of the users, sharing the post on X, said, “This is so gross. Teenagers say stupid things but I hope their parents/schools see this and help them understand their privilege and the harm their racist bile does to others. I live nearby in a city that has one of the most diverse high schools in world. Let’s do better.”Another user said, “Absolutely. Disgusting. People are getting more and more brazen. Every day make it like it’s okay now to be racist.” A user claimed that there is a whole echosystem of political actors in Canada who are radicalizing these white kids into destroying their life and career subscribing to racist ideologies.
Rise in anti Indian hate crimes and online slurs in Canada
The Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a UK-based think tank and non-profit organisation that focuses on countering extremism, hate, and disinformation, found that hate crimes against South Asian communities in Canada increased by a staggering 227% between 2019 and 2023. The ISD said these incidents occurred both online and offline. According to the ISD, posts containing anti-South Asian slurs, primarily targeting immigrants of Indian origin, surged by more than 1,350% on X during the same period. This, it said, not only put the physical and emotional safety of these communities at risk but also affected their civic engagement and participation in public life. The report claimed that the anti-South Asian rhetoric surged online ahead of the Canadian election, fuelled by domestic extremists. Between March 1-2025 and April 20-2025, in the lead-up to Canada’s federal election, over 2,300 posts containing anti-South Asian rhetoric were shared across various platforms, which collectively generated over 1.2 million engagements, the report, which was released last Thursday, stated. The use of keywords, such as slurs, provided an indication of the scale of hate targeting South Asians. One of the most common slurs was “pajeet”, an invented name which sounds “Indian” and which emerged among far-right accounts in spaces such as 4chan. While “pajeet” and its variants remained popular among far-right users, they were also adopted by a range of groups, according to the report. Between May 2023 and April 2025, there were over 26,600 posts which included “pajeet” and other anti-South Asian slurs in the Canadian context, compared to nearly 1,600 posts containing anti-Muslim slurs, the report stated. Indians in Canada were also frequently subjected to stereotypes that portrayed them as “unclean”, “unskilled”, or “threatening”. “Hateful posts contained wider stereotypes of Indians being dirty, dangerous and clannish; by contrast to earlier caricatures of Indians being overly educated, they are often portrayed as lacking formal skills or training,” the report said. The report also observed that Indians were commonly targeted with language invoking the Great Replacement, an implicitly anti-semitic conspiracy theory alleging that non-white migration to Western countries is part of a plan by elites to deliberately change country demographics, which has been influential in a number of terrorist attacks.
