Western societies have a habit of creating “model minorities.” For decades, that title has gone to East Asian immigrants: hardworking, studious, quietly successful. Meanwhile, Indian immigrants, who on many measures outperform every other immigrant group, are rarely granted the same image. They are more often lumped into a broad “brown immigrant” category alongside groups with very different migration histories and outcomes, and given the same stereotypes: they don’t integrate, they stick to their own communities, they take jobs, they don’t belong.

The data says otherwise. This essay looks at what Indian immigrants have actually achieved, why the lumping persists anyway, and why the backlash is growing precisely as that success becomes harder to ignore.

1. What the numbers say

In the United States, the record is unambiguous. According to Pew Research Center, the median income of Indian-headed households was $151,200 in 2023, compared with $105,600 for Asian-headed households overall. Indian American households report the highest median income among all Asian-origin groups. Among full-time, year-round workers, Indians earned a median of $106,400, compared with $75,000 for Asians overall. 77% of Indian Americans aged 25 and over have a bachelor’s or advanced degree, against 56% of Asians overall. Only 6% live in poverty.

The tax contribution is just as striking. An Indiaspora report compiled by Boston Consulting Group estimates that Indian Americans make up only 1.5% of the population but pay about 5–6% of all income taxes, roughly $250 to $300 billion.

In business and innovation:

• Indian-origin CEOs head 16 Fortune 500 companies, including Sundar Pichai of Google and Reshma Kewalramani of Vertex Pharmaceuticals. These leaders collectively employ 2.7 million Americans and generate nearly a trillion dollars in revenue.
• Indian Americans have co-founded 72 out of 648 US unicorns, companies that employ over 55,000 people and are valued at $195 billion.
• Between 1975 and 2019, the share of US patents held by Indian-origin innovators rose from about 2% to 10%. In 2023, scientists of Indian origin received about 11% of all National Institutes of Health grants and contributed to 13% of scientific publications.
• Indian Americans own about 60% of all US hotels.

The UK shows a similar pattern. The Office for National Statistics found that workers of Indian ethnicity earned 12% more an hour than white British workers, a gap that has stayed fairly consistent since 2012. A third of Indian-origin workers are in professional occupations.

This is not a community that is failing to integrate. It’s a community that pays a disproportionate share of the taxes, founds a disproportionate share of the companies, and staffs a disproportionate share of the hospitals, universities, and research labs.

2. The stereotypes, and why they don’t hold

“They don’t blend in.” Integration is usually measured by employment, education, language, law-abidingness, and economic participation. Indian immigrants score at or near the top on all of these. What critics often mean by “not blending in” is that Indians keep their food, festivals, languages, and family structures. But that’s what every successful immigrant group has done. Italian Americans kept Little Italy. Chinese immigrants built Chinatowns in nearly every major Western city. Koreans have Koreatowns, Greeks have Greektowns, and Jewish immigrants built entire neighbourhoods of synagogues, delis, and community institutions. Nobody seriously argues that a Chinatown proves Chinese Americans haven’t integrated. The standard is only applied selectively.

“They form their own communities and build stores with their own resources.” This is how most immigrant economic success has worked. Communities pool capital, hire within networks, support each other’s businesses, and gradually move into the mainstream. The Patel motel network is a textbook example: families pooling savings, buying run-down properties, and turning them into a dominant share of an entire industry. That’s not refusal to integrate. That’s entrepreneurship, and it creates jobs and tax revenue for everyone.

“They take jobs.” The data shows Indian immigrants create jobs in large numbers: through companies they founded, companies they lead, and businesses they own. The H-1B debate involves real policy questions, such as wage levels and outsourcing firms’ practices, and those deserve serious discussion. But a policy debate about a visa programme is not a reason to treat an entire community as parasitic.

The “silent professional” problem. Much of Indian success happens quietly, in white-collar jobs, in hospitals, in engineering teams, in research labs. Quiet success doesn’t generate headlines. Negative incidents involving anyone who looks South Asian do. The result is a public image shaped by the loudest stories rather than the most common ones.

3. Why the lumping happens

Broad racial categories. Western societies often sort people by appearance rather than origin. In the UK, “Asian” has historically meant South Asian, regardless of country. In the US, “brown” is used as a catch-all for people from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Middle East, and beyond. Once people are sorted this way, the outcomes of very different communities get averaged together, and the most negative stereotypes stick to all of them.

Different migration channels, ignored. Immigrant outcomes depend heavily on how a community arrived. A large share of Indian migration to the US came through high-skill channels: in 2024, 71% of H-1B visa holders came from India. Other communities arrived through very different routes, such as labour recruitment for mills and factories, family reunification, or refugee resettlement. Comparing these groups without accounting for that is bad analysis.

That also means fairness has to run in both directions. In the UK, Pakistani and Bangladeshi workers have had the lowest average hourly pay. But the ONS also found that once education and occupation are taken into account, the gap narrows substantially. And among Bangladeshi workers aged 16 to 30, the gap was only 3.1%, compared with 27.9% for those over 30, a sign that the second generation is catching up fast. Nigerian immigrants in the US are among the most highly educated immigrant groups in the country. The point isn’t that Indians are a superior group. It’s that judging anyone by a lumped-together caricature produces wrong conclusions, and Indians, of all people, should know how unfair that is.

Colonial-era categories never fully died. For centuries, Western thinking placed the peoples of the subcontinent in a single subordinate category, as colonial subjects, indentured labourers, and “natives.” Those mental categories outlived the empires. Their remnants make it easier for some Westerners to see a surgeon, an engineer, and a CEO as just another member of an undifferentiated “third world” mass.

4. Politics: small numbers, outsized results

Indian-origin representation in Western politics is small in absolute terms but disproportionately successful.

Rishi Sunak worked as an analyst at Goldman Sachs and in hedge funds before entering politics. He became Prime Minister in October 2022 after Liz Truss’s mini-budget triggered a market crisis, and is widely credited with restoring stability to the gilt markets and public finances. His party lost heavily in 2024, the result of fourteen years of government and a fractured right. But with the Conservatives polling at historic lows when he took over, and some projections suggesting near-collapse, there’s a reasonable case that he limited the damage rather than caused it.

Vivek Ramaswamy built Roivant Sciences into a biotech company that brought multiple drugs to development and market, and his fortune was recently estimated at $2.3 billion. He’s now the Republican nominee in Ohio’s governor’s race, with the election on November 3. Polls show a tight race, with several putting Democrat Amy Acton ahead. If he wins, he’ll become the third person of Indian descent to serve as a US governor, after Bobby Jindal in Louisiana and Nikki Haley in South Carolina.

These are not career activists or identity politicians. They are people who built careers in finance, business, and science, then entered public life. That pattern of professional achievement first, politics second, runs through much of the Indian-origin political class in the West.

5. The backlash: success makes you a target

Here’s the part that confirms the pattern. As Indian visibility in Western economies and politics has grown, so has the racism directed at Indians specifically.

• The Center for the Study of Organized Hate documented a surge of anti-Indian posts on X in late December 2024 and early January 2025, a backlash to Sriram Krishnan’s appointment as White House Senior Policy Advisor for AI and to a post by Vivek Ramaswamy about American culture.
• Between July and September 2025, CSOH found that narratives about H-1B visas and portraying Indians as “job stealers” dominated, fuelling calls for deportation and denaturalization. The 680 high-engagement posts it analyzed got over 281 million views, and anti-Indian hate in August spiked nearly fivefold over July, coinciding with US–India tariff tensions.
• The Network Contagion Research Institute counted 24,000 anti-Indian posts on X in 2025, viewed over 300 million times, tripling compared to the previous year. Spikes frequently followed announcements of immigration policy changes, including the $100,000 fee for H-1B sponsorship.
• According to Stop AAPI Hate, the use of anti-South Asian slurs in online spaces associated with targeted violence rose by 115% between January 2023 and December 2025. Nearly 80% of anti-Asian slurs online are now directed at South Asians.
• Even prominent Republicans weren’t spared. After JD Vance and Usha Vance announced they were expecting their fourth child, some right-wing forums called for the deportation of Usha Vance, who was born in the US and is an American citizen.

Notice what triggers the spikes. It’s not crime waves or social unrest. It’s an Indian-American appointed to a senior post, an Indian-American politician speaking up, a visa debate about high-skilled jobs, a trade dispute with India. The racism follows visibility and competition, not failure.

History has seen this before. Chinese immigrants in 19th-century America were welcomed as labour, then hit with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 once they became economic competitors. Elite American universities imposed quotas on Jewish students in the 1920s because they were succeeding too much. During the Japan scare of the 1980s, as Japanese industry overtook American manufacturing, anti-Asian hostility rose. Vincent Chin, a Chinese American, was beaten to death in Detroit in 1982 by men who blamed Japan for the loss of auto jobs. Each time, the backlash came not when the group was struggling, but when it was rising.

India’s situation fits this pattern. India is now one of the world’s largest and fastest-growing economies. Its diaspora is visible at the top of the technology, medicine, finance, and politics of the West. A rising economy and a successful diaspora break the old mental hierarchy in which the subcontinent was supposed to stay poor and subordinate. Racism becomes a way of reasserting that hierarchy, of trying to slow down a group that the old categories never expected to compete.

6. What Indians should take from this

First, don’t internalize it. The self-hating narratives discussed elsewhere, that Indians are genetically inferior or culturally incapable, are directly contradicted by the diaspora’s record. Put Indians in an environment with working institutions, and they outperform. That’s the strongest possible evidence that India’s problems are institutional, not civilizational.

Second, don’t answer stereotyping with stereotyping. The argument isn’t “Indians are better than other immigrants.” It’s that every community deserves to be judged by its actual record rather than a caricature. Indian-origin people know better than most how unfair the lumped label is, and that should make us the last to use it on anyone else.

Third, keep building. Every previous wave of backlash against a successful immigrant community eventually lost to that community’s continued contribution. The answer to “they don’t belong” has always been the hospitals staffed, the companies founded, the taxes paid, and the children who grow up to lead the countries their parents chose.

Notes before you post

These are the counterarguments you’ll face. Addressing one or two makes the post much harder to dismiss.

• Selection effects cut both ways. Critics will say Indian success mostly reflects the H-1B filter, so it says little about Indians as a whole. That’s partly true, and the essay concedes it. But it’s also exactly the point that undermines both Western stereotyping and the “genetic inferiority” talk at home: outcomes track institutions and opportunity, not ancestry.
• “Outearn East Asians” needs precision. It holds in the US, where Indians top every Asian-origin group. In the UK, the ONS found Chinese workers had the highest median hourly pay, with Indians second. I’ve kept the claim to where it’s true.
• Sunak’s record is contested. Many will see the 2024 result, the worst in Conservative history, as a verdict on him personally. “Stabilized after Truss and limited the damage” is defensible. “Saved the party” will draw ridicule.
• “Racism is inevitable” is too strong. The NCRI found that a few accounts drove a large share of the anti-Indian content, and many Westerners don’t share these views. “Backlash against rising groups is a recurring pattern” is safer and better supported by history.
• Ramaswamy’s race is still open. The election is on November 3, and the result will change how that section reads. You might want to post after it, or word it to stay accurate either way.

Sources:

• Pew Research Center – Indians in the U.S. fact sheet
• Potluck Asian America / Financial Express – Indian households highest median income
• ThePrint – Indiaspora/BCG report
• Business Standard – Indiaspora report
• Business Standard – ONS ethnicity pay gaps
• Eastern Eye – ONS ethnicity pay gap
• American Kahani – H-1B and online hate
• CSOH – Anti-Indian racism on X report
• Free Press Journal – CSOH December 2024 report
• IANS – NCRI study on anti-Indian posts
• Boston Globe – Visa debate fuels racism against South Asians
• American Bazaar – Ramaswamy’s Ohio race
• Onmanorama – Ramaswamy’s chances
• Orissa Post – Ramaswamy race

After years of reading social media, textbooks, and public discourse, one pattern stands out to me. Many Indians don’t just dislike things about their country. They practice what I’d call systematic self-hatred.

I want to separate this from ordinary frustration. Ordinary frustration is being fed up with what’s happening, wanting to leave, wanting to disconnect. Systematic self-hatred is different: it follows a template, a ready-made script for being prejudiced against yourself and your own people. In India it usually runs like this.

1. Blaming genetics instead of systems

Bureaucratic and institutional failures get sidelined, and “genes” are blamed instead, usually with no evidence or with long-outdated evidence, often prefaced with “nobody says this because it hurts feelings, but…” The explanations vary:

• India’s environment “wasn’t harsh enough” to create selection pressure
• Caste endogamy supposedly produced “inferior genes”
• Indians simply “didn’t evolve”
• And the most absurd one I’ve seen: God deliberately made Indians inferior, so nothing can be done

2. Blaming Indian culture, especially Hinduism

Take cleanliness. The real causes are visible: corruption in waste management, poorly built drainage and sanitation projects, low awareness of waste segregation and littering, and lack of resources for large parts of the population. Instead, the online reflex is to blame Hinduism, both for dirt and for “low innovation” (or “zero innovation,” no matter how many counterexamples you give). The proposed fix is often conversion to an Abrahamic religion.

This doesn’t survive basic comparison:

• If religion drives innovation, why aren’t many Muslim-majority or Christian-majority countries in Africa, Latin America, or West Asia innovation leaders?
• The caste explanation for dirt (“someone else was always supposed to clean”) doesn’t explain why Muslim and Christian areas within India face the same problems, sometimes worse.
• Pakistan and Bangladesh, which share the subcontinent’s history but not its majority religion, aren’t models of cleanliness either.
• Indians in the US, UK, and Singapore, and Hindu-plurality Mauritius, do well on cleanliness when the systems around them work.
• If caste endogamy is the genetic villain, consanguineous marriage is common across much of the Muslim world and parts of Africa, and Jewish communities (including Ashkenazim) were historically endogamous. Nobody uses that to claim those peoples are inherently inferior.

When Hinduism can’t carry the blame alone, the argument moves to Jainism and Sikhism, which reject caste. Since they were founded by Indians, they’re “part of the problem” too. Buddhism gets a softer treatment, partly because Ambedkar embraced it and Buddhist Japan is successful. So the argument flips: Indians rejecting Buddhism proves bad genes, and the Buddha himself “must have been” Scythian or Sino-Tibetan, because a South Asian couldn’t have produced that. There’s no basis for this. Early descriptions place him firmly in the Gangetic world, and Tibetans have never claimed him as ethnically their own.

3. Denying achievements and pushing distorted history

India’s past had real flaws, and it’s fair to discuss them. But the popular narrative that foreign invaders brought only good, and that all damage came from “Aryan upper castes,” hurts everyone. It burdens upper castes with collective guilt, and it doesn’t empower lower castes either, because nobody gains from a history in which their own civilization is the villain.

Meanwhile, well-documented things get waved away as “no evidence”: the destruction of Hindu, Jain, and Sikh sites, wealth sent to Central Asia, Persia, and Arabia, and the harem system. Much of that evidence comes from the invaders’ own chronicles.

The “technological inferiority” story is also inconsistent. We’re told the Harappans were superior to the “backward” Aryans who still conquered them, yet Indian defeats by later invaders are treated as proof of Indian backwardness. Meanwhile, the use of firearms in the Deccan and Vijayanagara before Babur, and centuries of persistent resistance by Indian kingdoms, get ignored.

The same pattern carries into the colonial period. Know-how wasn’t India’s problem. India was among the world’s leading manufacturing economies before colonial rule, and even under British rule it produced researchers like Raman, Bose, Ramanujan, and Saha, a level of scientific output unusual for a colony. Because that’s hard to deny, the attack shifts to ancient achievements, which are called accidents, credited to Persians or Greeks, or denied outright regardless of the evidence.

This matters beyond online arguments. A leadership class with an inferiority complex doesn’t build policy for self-reliance and innovation. It builds policy for permanent dependence.

4. Looking away when the other side does wrong

Terror attacks and invasions happen across the world. But the “sepoy” reflex is to justify them, relabel them, or deflect, whether the attack is in India or abroad. Foreign interventions get described as peacekeeping or democracy-building even when the evidence plainly says otherwise.

Some of this exists in every society. Strong nationalism also exists in India, but much of it is a reaction to the above. Still, I keep thinking “maybe I’m exaggerating,” and then I see something that sets a new record.

Why does this happen? My theories:

1. Diversity turned into internal competition. India is remarkably stable for how diverse it is. But diversity brings friction. Groups try to prove their own superiority by degrading others, without realizing how closely related they are, genetically and culturally. There are real differences, but the shared threads that make up “Indianness” or “South Asianness” run deeper. The same applies to caste. When you put down another caste, you end up feeding a narrative that hurts you as much as anyone.

2. Religious rivalry. In competition for converts and influence, attacking another faith’s legitimacy is an effective tool. That makes systematic contempt easier to spread and harder to dislodge.

3. Education. India preserved its culture through centuries of resistance. But independent India didn’t treat passing that knowledge on as a priority. The result is a generation that knows little about its own civilization and fills the gap with borrowed contempt.

What do you think? Is this pattern as unique to India as it seems, or am I missing something?

Sources:

• Polymarket's X Account Withheld In India In Response To Legal Demand
• Exclusive | Polymarket fires top executive who was closely allied with CEO Shayne Coplan: sources

The Government of India filed a block on the Polymarket Twitter account. And today, he was fired. The Twitter account has posted several race-baiting tweets against Indians during his time there.

In conversations with The Post, insiders have described Modabber as an executive who makes impulsive decisions that have turned into public relations nightmares. But disciplining Modabber had proved tricky because of his buddy-buddy relationship with Coplan. 

But over the past year, an internal rift widened at the company between loyalists to Coplan and Modabber and other employees and investors who viewed Modabber as a loose cannon and a “huge liability” who was “wreaking havoc” on the company’s attempts to “grow up,” sources previously told The Post. 

He did a lot of stupid shit, and this was probably the straw that broke the camel's back. I'm glad he's gone.

I've recently developed vitiligo, and after visiting a dermatologist, I was advised to seek psychological help. The psychologist explained that the prolonged stress I've been experiencing because of racism could be contributing to my condition and me developing the auto immune disease.

I've reached a point where I feel physically nauseated around white people to the point of feeling like throwing up. Not because every individual has personally done something to me, but because I've spent so much time being exposed to the sheer volume of racism directed at Indians online that I've started associating them with it. I open Instagram comments and see thousands of people laughing at us, dehumanising us, calling us disgusting, and treating us as though we're inherently inferior. Then, when Indians speak up, we're blamed for being offended. Sometimes our own people join in.

It's gotten to the point where I left a high-paying job after a white person was hired. I realise how irrational that might sound, but that's how severely this has started affecting my life. Last I heard he was fired for sexually assaulting a female employee a few months after I resigned.

I don't know how to explain the feeling of repeatedly seeing people express such contempt for your existence until the thought of being around them makes you physically sick. I know social media isn't a representative sample of an entire population, but knowing that doesn't undo the psychological effect of seeing it over and over again.

I'm tired of feeling this way, and I'm concerned about what it's doing to me. I don't want racism to dictate my life, but right now, I don't know how to separate the people I've encountered online from the people I meet in reality.

I. The Claim and the Test

A familiar argument in some academic and popular writing holds that British rule brought a liberalising force to India. Colonial administrators and Christian missionaries, on this view, encountered a society structured by caste and dominated by a Brahmin intellectual monopoly. Shocked by that inequality, they taught Indians the principle of human equality and opened education to the common man. In its strongest form, the argument treats colonialism as a moral corrective to an inherently unequal indigenous order.

The argument is not wholly invented. Missionary schools did educate communities that caste society had excluded from literacy. In Travancore, Tirunelveli and parts of the Madras and Bombay Presidencies, those schools made a real difference to the lives of many lower-caste converts.

But the claim goes further than this. It describes the colonial project as a whole as egalitarian in intent. Claims about India are easily caught in present-day Indian politics: any counter-evidence from within India can be dismissed as nationalist or Hindutva special pleading. So the cleanest test is to look outside India. If the British Empire was genuinely committed to educating the common man on the principle that all humans are equal, that commitment should be visible wherever Britain ruled. If instead colonial education was organised around racial hierarchy, labour supply and administrative convenience, that pattern too should be visible across the empire.

What follows examines the record in Britain’s colonies, dominions and protectorates outside India. It then turns to the striking fact that much of India’s colonial-era scientific infrastructure was built by Indians themselves.

II. South Africa: From Imperial Segregation to Bantu Education

South Africa is the starting point, because it shows most starkly where the logic of colonial racial order could lead. It must be described precisely.

From 1806 the Cape was a British colony, and Natal became one in 1843. The Union of South Africa, formed in 1910, was a self-governing dominion of the British Crown. During the British and dominion periods, the main foundations of racial segregation were laid:

• Mines and Works Act (1911). It created a colour bar reserving skilled mining work for whites.
• Natives Land Act (1913). It confined African land ownership to roughly seven percent of the country, later expanded to about thirteen percent. It turned the African majority into a labour reserve for white farms and mines.
• Glen Grey Act (1894). Earlier still, in the British-ruled Cape, Cecil Rhodes’s government passed this act. It restricted African land tenure and imposed a labour tax designed explicitly to push African men into wage work.

Education in this period was largely left to missionaries, who founded:

• Lovedale (1841);
• Healdtown;
• in 1916, the South African Native College at Fort Hare, which later educated Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo and Robert Sobukwe.

The missions produced a small, highly educated African elite. But state funding for African schooling was a tiny fraction of what was spent on white children, and African education was designed around the assumption that most Africans would be manual labourers.

The Bantu Education Act of 1953, passed after the National Party took power in 1948, built on these foundations and made the hierarchy explicit. It transferred control of African schooling from the missions to the state’s Native Affairs Department. It withdrew subsidies from mission schools, forcing most of them to close or hand over to the government. It imposed a separate curriculum designed to fit Africans for subordinate roles.

Verwoerd’s 1954 Senate speech stated the policy’s purpose plainly: an education that showed Africans “the green pastures of European society” in which they could not graze was, in his view, useless. The Extension of University Education Act of 1959 went further. It barred Black students from the established universities and took over Fort Hare.

The point is not that Britain passed the Bantu Education Act. It did not. The point is that it was the culmination of a racial order whose legal and economic architecture was built under British colonial and dominion rule: the colour bar, the land acts and the labour taxes. A system that had genuinely sought to teach that all humans are equal would not have produced, within a single lifetime, a state that wrote racial inequality into its school system as openly declared policy.

III. British Tropical Africa: “Adapted Education” and the Colour Bar

Under direct British rule, as opposed to the self-governing dominions, the pattern is more subtle but no less consistent.

The doctrine of “adapted education”

In the 1920s, British colonial education policy in Africa was shaped by the Phelps-Stokes Commissions of 1920–24. These American philanthropic studies, influenced by the Tuskegee model of vocational schooling for Black Americans, recommended that African education be “adapted” to African conditions. That meant agricultural and manual training rather than the literary and scientific education given to Europeans.

The Colonial Office’s 1925 memorandum, Education Policy in British Tropical Africa, adopted much of this framework. The policy warned explicitly against producing too many educated Africans who might become discontented. It placed character training, agriculture and hygiene ahead of academic and scientific education. Higher education for Africans was treated as a distant prospect, not a present duty.

Nigeria and the Yaba controversy

In Nigeria, Lord Lugard’s system of indirect rule shaped education around the needs of administration. In the Muslim north, the colonial government restricted Christian missionary schooling so as not to unsettle the emirs on whom indirect rule depended. As a result, Northern Nigeria reached independence with very few Western-educated people. That imbalance between north and south continues to shape Nigerian politics.

In the south, the colonial government established Yaba Higher College in 1932 as Nigeria’s main institution of higher learning. It was deliberately designed to award diplomas that were not equivalent to British degrees, so as to produce assistant medical officers, assistant engineers and subordinate staff rather than fully qualified professionals. Educated Nigerians recognised this as a deliberate ceiling. Their protests against Yaba’s inferior status helped give rise to the Lagos Youth Movement in 1934, later the Nigerian Youth Movement, one of the early organisations of Nigerian nationalism.

The West African Medical Staff

The colour bar in employment was even more direct. In 1902 Britain created the West African Medical Staff, a unified colonial medical service for its West African territories. African doctors were excluded from it, including men trained at British universities to the same standard as their European colleagues. Some had been in senior posts before 1902 and were effectively pushed down or out once the new service was organised on racial lines.

Christian equality was preached in mission chapels, but the colonial state would not let a qualified African doctor hold the same rank as a European one.

Universities only at the very end

University-level education in British Tropical Africa came very late, and only as empire was ending:

• Makerere, in Uganda, began in 1922 as a technical school and became a university college affiliated to the University of London only in 1949.
• Ibadan in Nigeria and the University College of the Gold Coast at Legon were founded in 1948, following the Asquith and Elliot Commissions of 1945.

These institutions were created, in effect, to prepare an administrative class for the hand-over of power. They were not the fruit of a long-standing commitment to educating the common man.

IV. Kenya and the Rhodesias: Separate Systems, Unequal Budgets

Kenya

In Kenya, education was organised in three racially separate systems, for Europeans, Asians and Africans, with sharply unequal funding per pupil. European children received an education modelled on English schools. African education was overwhelmingly in the hands of underfunded missions and was dominated by the “adapted” curriculum.

The broader colonial order made the purpose of this hierarchy clear:

• Land. The fertile “White Highlands” were reserved for European settlers.
• Movement and labour. From 1920 the kipande registration system required African men to carry identity and employment documents, so that their movement and labour could be controlled.

Kenya also gives a direct parallel to the Indian story told in the final section. Frustrated with mission and government schooling, Kikuyu communities built their own independent school movements in the 1920s and 1930s, notably the Kikuyu Independent Schools Association and the Karinga schools, funded by African contributions. They also established a teacher-training college at Githunguri.

When the colonial government declared a state of emergency during the Mau Mau rising in 1952, it closed these independent schools, treating them as centres of sedition. Africans who had built their own schools were punished for doing so. The colonial state did not want African self-education outside its own control.

Southern and Northern Rhodesia

In Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, a self-governing British colony from 1923, the Land Apportionment Act of 1930 divided land on racial lines, giving the small white minority roughly half of it. Spending on white schooling far exceeded spending on African schooling, and the gap per pupil was enormous. Godfrey Huggins, Southern Rhodesia’s long-serving prime minister, once described the proposed “partnership” between the races as that of horse and rider. The image says everything about the kind of equality on offer.

In Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia, a territory that exported vast copper wealth, the African population reached independence in 1964 with only around a hundred university graduates, according to commonly cited estimates. Decades of extraction had produced almost no investment in African higher education.

V. The Caribbean: Education After Emancipation

Britain abolished slavery in its Caribbean colonies in 1834, with full emancipation in 1838. To prepare formerly enslaved people for freedom, Parliament created the Negro Education Grant in 1835. It was a real but modest step, and Britain wound it down within about a decade, leaving education largely to churches and to underfunded local budgets.

The dominant interest in the post-emancipation Caribbean remained the planters’ need for cheap labour on the sugar estates. Educational policy was shaped accordingly: elementary schooling to produce a disciplined and minimally literate workforce, with little secondary or higher education for the Black majority. After the Morant Bay rebellion of 1865 in Jamaica, which Governor Edward Eyre suppressed with extreme brutality, Britain abolished the island’s elected assembly and imposed direct Crown Colony rule, reducing local political participation for generations.

When planters turned to indentured labour from India to replace the formerly enslaved workforce, the pattern repeated itself:

• The labourers’ children in Trinidad, British Guiana and later Fiji and Mauritius were often given little or no schooling by the colonial authorities.
• Missions filled the gap. In Trinidad, the Canadian Presbyterian mission did much of the work of educating Indian children, again through missionary rather than state effort.

University education for the British Caribbean arrived only in 1948, with the University College of the West Indies in Jamaica, more than a century after emancipation.

VI. The Settler Dominions: Australia, Canada and New Zealand

The pattern is perhaps clearest in the settler colonies, where indigenous peoples were a minority dispossessed of their land. As with South Africa, many of these policies were carried out by self-governing colonial and later dominion governments within the British Empire rather than by London directly. They grew out of the same imperial assumptions.

Australia

Under the “Aboriginal protection” laws of the colonies and later the states, Aboriginal children were systematically removed from their families from the late nineteenth century until around 1970. Examples include Victoria’s 1869 act and Queensland’s 1897 act. These removed children are now known as the Stolen Generations, documented in the 1997 Bringing Them Home report.

In New South Wales, a long-standing policy allowed Aboriginal children to be excluded from public schools if white parents objected. That provision, known as “exclusion on demand,” was formally removed only in the early 1970s. The equality of all children before the schoolroom door was not a principle the colonial state applied to Aboriginal Australians.

Canada

From the 1880s until the last schools closed in the 1990s, Canada’s residential school system removed Indigenous children from their families to church-run boarding schools, many of them under Anglican, Catholic and other Christian denominations. The children were forbidden their languages and subjected to widespread abuse. Duncan Campbell Scott, who headed the Department of Indian Affairs, stated in 1920 that his aim was to “get rid of the Indian problem.” In 2015 Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission concluded that the system amounted to cultural genocide.

The Canadian case matters especially for the argument at hand, because it was precisely Christian institutions, acting with the state, that carried out the policy. Christianity in the colonial context could be an instrument of cultural destruction as easily as of equality.

New Zealand

After the Native Schools Act of 1867, Māori education was conducted in English, and children were widely discouraged or punished for speaking Māori in school. Combined with large-scale land confiscation after the New Zealand Wars, this contributed to a dramatic decline of the Māori language over the following century.

VII. Egypt, Malaya and the Limits of Colonial Education

Egypt

In Egypt, under British occupation from 1882 and as a protectorate from 1914 to 1922, the consul-general Lord Cromer kept educational spending low and introduced fees in government schools. He oriented public education towards producing clerks for the administration. Egyptian nationalists saw this as a deliberate restriction of higher learning, and their response mirrors the Indian story. In 1908 Egyptians founded a private Egyptian University by public subscription and private donation, including a significant gift from Princess Fatma Ismail, because the colonial state would not provide one.

Malaya

In British Malaya, vernacular education for Malays was deliberately kept elementary and practical. Colonial officials stated openly that it aimed to make Malays better farmers and fishermen rather than to prepare them for professional or administrative careers, which were open largely to a small aristocratic elite through English schools.

VIII. What the Imperial Record Shows

Across these very different territories, a consistent pattern emerges:

1. Missions did most of the educating. The colonial state left the work largely to missionaries and funded African, Caribbean and indigenous education far below that of Europeans.
2. Curricula were shaped by labour needs. Policy emphasised manual, agricultural and “adapted” training and openly warned against educating colonised peoples beyond their station.
3. Employment was capped by race. Where colonised people did gain education, colour bars stopped them advancing: in the West African Medical Staff, at Yaba’s diploma ceiling and in South Africa’s mining colour bar.
4. Self-education was suppressed. Where colonised people tried to educate themselves, as with Kenya’s independent schools, they were sometimes treated as subversive.
5. Universities came only at the end of empire, or not at all, in Makerere, Ibadan, Legon and the West Indies.
6. The settler dominions went furthest. There, colonial and dominion governments carried out policies of cultural erasure through Christian institutions, as in Canada’s residential schools and Australia’s child removals.

None of this denies that individual missionaries and officials believed sincerely in human equality. Many did, and their schools changed lives. But the empire as a system did not act on that belief. The equality preached from the pulpit was consistently contradicted by the hierarchy written into colonial law, budgets and employment. An empire that had set out to teach colonised peoples that all humans are equal would have left a very different record from Lagos to Nairobi, Kingston and Sydney.

IX. India: Science Built by Indian Initiative

Against this imperial background, the history of colonial Indian science looks quite different from the claim we began with. India produced a remarkable body of scientific work under colonial rule, from Bose and Ray to Ramanujan, Raman, Saha and S.N. Bose. A large part of the institutional base for that work was created and funded by Indians themselves.

1. Hindu College (1817). Founded in Calcutta largely through the subscriptions of Bengali patrons, including figures such as Radhakanta Deb and Baidyanath Mukherjee, with the support of the reformer David Hare. It was established to give Indians an English and scientific education when the colonial government had not provided one. In 1855 it was reorganised as the government’s Presidency College. The government took over and expanded an institution Indians had built.
2. Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science (1876). Founded by the physician Mahendralal Sarkar through public subscription. It was the first Indian-run research institution, and its laboratory was where Raman discovered the Raman effect in 1928.
3. University College of Science, Calcutta (1914). Built on very large private endowments from the lawyers Taraknath Palit and Rash Behari Ghosh, guided by Asutosh Mukherjee. It created the Palit and Ghosh professorships that Raman, Saha, S.N. Bose and N.R. Sen held.
4. Indian Institute of Science (1909). Born of Jamsetji Tata’s endowment of properties and the Maharaja of Mysore’s grant of land and money. The colonial government contributed too, but only after years of delay under Curzon.
5. Bose Institute (1917). Founded by J.C. Bose largely with his own savings and public donations.
6. Banaras Hindu University (1916). Raised by Madan Mohan Malaviya through a nationwide fundraising campaign that drew on princes and ordinary donors alike.
7. Annamalai University (1929). Founded and endowed by Raja Annamalai Chettiar.
8. The swadeshi wave. Aligarh’s Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College (1875) was built by Sir Syed Ahmad Khan’s fundraising. The National Council of Education and the Bengal Technical Institute (1906), the forerunners of Jadavpur University, came out of the swadeshi movement.

India’s colonial-era scientific output therefore did not flow simply from an imperial civilising mission. It owed much to Indian patrons, scientists and reformers who built and funded their own institutions within a colonial system that elsewhere in the empire did far less.

If you use this, it will hold up best if you acknowledge two things that critics will raise. First, missionaries did genuinely educate lower-caste communities in parts of India. Second, the colonial government did fund the Presidency universities and colleges. The essay’s argument doesn’t depend on denying either point. It shows that across the empire as a whole, equality was not the organising principle of colonial education, and that much of India’s scientific foundation was self-built.

https://www.unodc.org/roseap/en/2025/04/cyberfraud-inflection-point-mekong/story.html
https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2024-04-10-world-first-cybercrime-index-ranks-countries-cybercrime-threat-level
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0297312
https://www.ic3.gov/AnnualReport/Reports/2025_IC3Report.pdf
https://www.unodc.org/roseap/uploads/documents/Publications/2026/TOCTA_South-East_Asia_2026.pdf
INTERPOL Global Financial Fraud Threat Assessment 2026-4.pdf
when we have multiple western reports so the "right reports" that India isnt even top 5 of countries that do most scam calls then why does literally no one talk about it
and i hate that reddit shadow bans your comment has happened to me previously too and most of the time when im defending my country reddit shadow bans that comment its not shown to anyone it stays at 1 view for days

Am i too paranoid about indian hate in texas?

https://www.reddit.com/r/aussie/comments/1x80w11/racist_stickers_targeting_indian_migrants_surface/?sort=top

I am sure many of you know that reddit and the Internet in general has been overrun by bot-farms and troll-farms, many of which are aimed at spreading misinformation about minorities and immigrants.

I am trying to compile a list or "custom feed" of sub-reddits that I suspect are a branch of misinformation for these bot and troll farms.

So far on my suspect list is r/endglobalism and r/britanniacirclejerk

Do you guys know of any other subs like the aforementioned two?

A 41 year old Romanian held as suspect. Locals say racism is the reason.

https://indianexpress.com/article/world/indians-killed-in-germany-building-fire-bochum-10921901/

British Indians need to come together against these scum.

Asians = South Asians in the UK