A man has been charged with a hate crime after a video of his rant against a Hindu customer at a California Taco Bell last week went viral.
On the evening of August 21, Krishnan Iyer went to pick up an online order for his son at a Taco Bell store in Fremont, California, when he was verbally abused and attacked for his religion by another customer, a video showed.
The man insulted Iyer's appearance and issued a string of insults against Hindus, the eight-minute clip showed.
Singh Tejinder, 37, of Union City, was charged on Monday with a hate crime in violation of civil rights, assault, and disturbing the peace by offensive language, the Fremont Police Department announced in a news release.
"At the conclusion of this incident, it was determined one male used extremely offensive and hurtful language toward the other male," the department said, noting that after reviewing the footage, it was evident that one man was making "religious slurs and derogatory comments."
Tejinder is currently on probation with a petition to revoke the probation.
Iyer responded to the news that Tejinder had been charged by thanking law enforcement officials on Twitter.
"All love No Hate!" he wrote.
In an interview with ABC 7 San Francisco, Iyer said that Tejinder was "hell-bent on picking up a fight" and that he wanted Iyer to engage.
In an interview with The Washington Post, he said "it was very abundantly clear to me that he was trying to stir the pot and try to push his agenda."
"I didn't have any reason to react to him. I do a lot of meditation and yoga, and that gave me a sense of perspective that his soul was in distress," he added.
It comes amid growing concerns that "Hinduphobia" is on the rise in the United States.
Researchers at the Network Contagion Lab at Rutgers University-New Brunswick published a report last month that suggests hate speech directed toward the Hindu community is on the rise across multiple social media platforms.
According to the report, titled "Anti-Hindu Disinformation: A Case Study of Hinduphobia on Social Media" white supremacist and 4chan genocidal Pepe memes about Hindus are being shared prolifically within extremist Islamist web networks online.
Researchers analyzed one million tweets, and found that Iranian trolls disseminated anti-Hindu stereotypes to fuel division as part of an influence campaign to accuse Hindus of perpetrating a genocide against minorities in India.
"There is, unfortunately, nothing new to the bigotry and violence faced by the Hindu population," John J. Farmer Jr., director of the Miller Center and the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University–New Brunswick, said in a statement. "What is new is the social media context in which hate messages are being shared. Our prior work has shown a correlation between the intensity of hate messaging over social media and the eruption of real-world acts of violence."
Newsweek has contacted Taco Bell for comment.
Update 8/30/22 6:50 a.m. EDT: This article was updated with comment and context.
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