UNITED STATES, March 24, 2022 (NBC News by Sakshi Venkatraman): During Nikhil Mandalaparthy’s senior year of high school in 2015, the local Hindu temple in his hometown was vandalized. Spray-painted in red on the outside of the Bothell, Washington, worship and cultural center were the words “Get Out” — alongside a symbol that was almost familiar to the temple’s patrons: a swastika. But the mark used to terrorize Mandalaparthy’s community was different than the swastikas he had grown up seeing in religious contexts. It was sharp and at a 45-degree angle, what he recognized immediately as a mark of Nazism and white supremacy. The swastika, when softer, non-angled, left-facing or decorated with dots, has a very different meaning in the iconography of several Asian religions, where it has been ingrained for thousands of years. From Stone Age drawings in 10,000 B.C. to carvings in the ancient Greek city of Troy, swastikas were used on virtually every continent as a symbol of good fortune.
The swastika has a particularly strong presence in Hindu, Buddhist and Jain communities across the world. In paintings and sculptures, it can be found on the palms of the Buddha’s hands, on Jain and Hindu temples, and in designs in the traditional powder art form of rangoli. But beyond that, it pops up regularly in everyday life — on taxicabs, food packages and clothing in countries such as India, Japan, Nepal, China and Sri Lanka. But as the Asian diaspora continues to grow, the two versions of the swastika have begun to meet more frequently in the West. The religious symbol, meaningful to communities in their art and worship, is often confused with the hate symbol twisted by the Nazis into a mark of white supremacy. National reckonings about race, religion and ethnicity in the last few years have brought conversations about racism and xenophobia to the fore. And a renewed effort by some leaders to ban the swastika has been met with questions from Asian communities who say there need to be exceptions.
Much more of this in depth article here: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/south-asian-americans-complicated-relationship-swastika-rcna18599