SAN FRANCISCO (Diya TV) — A new campaign, titled #VoteAgainstHate, has been organized and launched by a group friends who brought together South Asian actors and artists—including writer Nisha Ganatra (of Transparent and Better Things), Sonal Shah (Scrubs), D’Lo (comedian and writer), and Utkarsh Ambudkar (The Mindy Project).
It was launched Thursday with the hopes of aiming to persuade their parents and elders to not vote for Donald Trump on Election Day.
Some 65 percent of Indian Americans are Democrats or lean toward voting Democrat, according to the PEW Research Center, and another recent poll found that 78% of Indian Americans either have an unfavorable view of Trump or didn’t know anything about him. However, Trump’s recent appearance at an event hosted by the Republican Hindu Coalition, and a Trump campaign ad released this week targeting Hindu Americans suggest he’s still pursuing at least a small part of the Indian American community.
The #VoteAgainstHate campaign calls on all Indian Americans to reject Trump, even if they don’t support Hillary Clinton.
Vijay Chattha, an entrepreneur by trade, is the executive producer of the campaign. He called on family and friends to work on the project after having multiple conversations with older relatives who said they’d be voting for Trump because they’d always voted Republican.
“This is just something that really motivated me and some other friends of mine, we kind of all came together to do this,” he said.
Chattha is most worried about the possible impact of trickle-down racism if the billionaire real estate mogul is elected president, he said. That to me is the most scary part of the rhetoric and the type of people that he is emboldening through this campaign,” he said.
“I think it feels like there’s more and more of these racial divides that come up like whether it’s how kids are talking in school about people of other backgrounds, whether they’re Latino or Muslim.
“We just saw a school in Windsor California—northern California, Sonoma County, I think it’s a Spanish emerging school, there was graffiti put on it a few days ago that said, ‘Build the wall higher’ on the wall of their school. This to me is trickle down racism and I feel that if he gets elected and you look at the number of hate crimes reported in America I feel like we’re going to see a multiplier effect on that.”