(RNS) — Mira Trivedi, 15, grew up surrounded by the swastika. Her family hung it around their home for holidays. A priest drew it on her newborn cousin’s forehead. Her family members wore jewelry with the symbol.
To Trivedi, who is Hindu, the swastika always signaled its auspicious Sanskrit meaning: well-being, good fortune and peace.
So when her eighth grade social studies teacher said the swastika was a hate symbol representing Hitler’s genocidal antisemitism, Trivedi went up after class to explain that the Nazi symbol was not the swastika but the Hakenkreuz, a German word meaning “hooked cross.” The swastika, which is usually slightly different in appearance, is a devotional symbol in South Asian religions, including Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism, she said.
Trivedi hoped for a lightbulb moment after her spiel, but the teacher said only higher ups could implement changes about what’s taught about the symbol. “That’s what started my whole journey,” Trivedi said.
She presented her case to the vice principal, principal and board of education at her central New Jersey school in May 2025. “I was sweating through the entire meeting, I was so nervous,” she said. But the effort paid off, and she convinced the school board to educate 35 teachers about the difference between the symbols.
In recent months, a small but growing contingent of Hindu students across the country like Trivedi have successfully pushed for curriculum changes and education about the difference.
The conflation between the swastika and the Hakenkreuz emerged in the 1930s, but the presence of the swastika in Germany dates back to the late 1800s, said Baijayanti Roy, a lecturer and researcher on interactions between India and Nazi Germany at Goethe University Frankfurt in Germany. During this era, Germany’s Theosophists and Buddhists, who revered Indian philosophy, used the symbol to represent appreciation.
But at the turn of the 20th century, the racist and antisemitic völkisch movement co-opted the swastika to signal Aryan German heritage, Roy said. The proposed design for the fledgling Nazi party’s flag arrived in front of Hitler bearing a mirrored version of the swastika. Hitler approved the design, with one exception: Due to his hatred of Indians, whom he perceived as bastardized Aryans, he replaced the swastika with the “Hakenkreuz” by changing the tilt and removing the four dots and flourishes that typically, but not always, adorn the swastika.
Thus was born a new symbol, stripped of dharmic roots, to represent the Third Reich.
From then on, the Nazis referred to the symbol only as the Hakenkreuz. While some leaders of the Indian independence movement like Subhas Chandra Bose sought tactical military alliances with Hitler, Hitler maintained his animosity towards South Asians as he set into motion the murder of 6 million Jews.
When American media mistakenly described the swastika as a Nazi symbol in the 1930s, the misconception pervaded the American psyche.
“I think it’s very important that young people are told that the swastika has a very positive meaning, but it has been taken and used as a racist symbol,” Roy said. “The swastika does not have any negative connotations, whereas the Hakenkreuz stands for evil.”
But as immigration and globalization increased — and as concerns about antisemitism have ebbed and flowed — the obfuscation has led to fear and confusion about the swastika as a hate symbol.
Members of the nonprofit Coalition of Hindus of North America have sought help from its leaders, as some have panicked after being reported as neo-Nazis by well-intentioned neighbors and coworkers, said Pushpita Prasad, CoHNA’s chief communications officer.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, workers who glimpsed swastikas in their Hindu colleagues’ homes via Zoom would sometimes report them to human resources. Neighbors, seeing swastikas drawn for Hindu festivals, sometimes called the police. The ensuing investigations were usually dropped once the context became clear. But especially for immigrants with visas, “it was a very shaky, unpleasant experience,” Prasad said.
It’s an example of what scholars have called a context collapse, said Susan Benesch, director of the Dangerous Speech Project, part of the Center for the Study of Organized Hate, a Washington, D.C., group dedicated to preventing and combating hate. “You have people who are existing in two different normative communities and the two sets of norms collide,” she said.
Many Hindu students across the United States have witnessed and experienced that context collapse. Trivedi said her Hindu neighbors store away devotional objects bearing the swastika whenever guests of non-dharmic faiths visit to avoid painful misunderstandings.
Saisha Vyas, 15, grew up seeing her family draw swastikas on new cars, denoting good fortune. But when her uncle had to take his car back to the dealership, she said the workers called the police on him.
And Priya Bakshi, 17, often longed to wear a sentimental swastika-inscribed necklace to school, but it was banned in her Maryland county. “It’s infringing on our First Amendment rights,” she told RNS. “We cannot express our religion.”
Vyas and Bakshi, who are both Hindu high schoolers in Maryland’s Howard County Public School System, decided to campaign in their school district for a distinction between the swastika and the Hakenkreuz, emphasizing the intention with which they’re displayed.
After months of preparing educational material, they convinced the school board in February to ban the Nazi Hakenkreuz instead of the swastika, changing the rules for nearly 50,000 students in the district.
All three students RNS spoke with said they are sensitive toward the violence and fear that many of their peers, especially Jewish students, associate with the swastika. “There have been cases where the Hakenkreuz has been drawn to bully students in my school,” Bakshi said. “I don’t want to be mixed in with the bullies. That’s why I was very, very conscious about how I talked about it.”
Still, they faced challenges. Trivedi became known among her classmates for her campaign. “One kid decided to draw the symbol on my notebook when I stepped away from my desk for a moment, and right underneath that symbol, ‘Nazi’ was written,” she recounted.
But moments of support have vastly outnumbered the antagonism, the three students said. Bakshi said her Jewish friends have been particularly receptive, and she and Vyas met with Jewish groups. “I think they realized that we are trying to help their community as well,” she said, suggesting that the misconception gives the Nazis ongoing power over a symbol and religious practice they despised. “When people come together with genuine empathy, I think it really does help bring everybody in the circle closer together.”
The fundamental question at the heart of the campaign harkens back to the landmark 2003 Supreme Court case Virginia v. Black, which considered whether states could ban cross burning. The case determined that its legality depended on whether the act was done in order to intimidate, Benesch explained. This same distinction can be made about whether a Hakenkreuz is scratched in a school bathroom or a highway overpass, versus a swastika depicted on a Hindu student’s bracelet or in a devotional painting in one’s home.
“None of this stuff is easy,” Benesch said of context clashes. “Even though the collision can often be unpleasant at the time for both parties, in the long run, it can be a very salutary form of public education.”
The students’ successful campaigns over the past two years were built on a smattering of past examples. In 2021, after the Oregon Department of Education heard feedback from Hindu students as well as Native American students who used the whirling log to signify well-being and protection, the statewide policy was edited to refer to the Nazi symbol as the Hakenkreuz.
CoHNA has also campaigned for similar policy updates in Virginia, New York, California, Canada and other regions, Prasad said.
The students hope to formalize the distinction at the state level, and they believe that their recent victories can herald a wider student movement to distinguish the two symbols. Several classmates have signed on to their campaigns. And across the country, their peers have held discussions in Hindu student groups, written essays on the subject and initiated their own dialogues with teachers.
“I want them to see what we’re doing and feel like they can do the same,” Vyas said. “I can also speak up at my school. I can also speak up in my county. I can make an impact for my own culture.”
