The War They Never Chose
From Britain to Australia, Hate Goes Global. Multiculturalism Under Siege as Streets Turn Battlefields. What began as riots is now a coordinated assault on migrants, and democracy itself. 35 million Indians abroad are now targets in a war they never chose. The diaspora is under siege.
Blood on the streets of London. Over 150,000 far-right protesters descended upon Britain’s capital on September 13, 2025, in a visceral display of anti-immigration rage that left 26 police officers injured and democracy itself under assault. This wasn’t just another protest, it was a declaration of war against multiculturalism, organized by convicted far-right extremist Tommy Robinson and representing the largest mobilization of xenophobic sentiment in modern British history.
The shocking scale of this demonstration, with police making 25 arrests as protesters attacked officers with projectiles, marks a dangerous escalation from street-level violence to mass political mobilization. What began as isolated incidents has metastasized into a coordinated assault on immigrant communities that now threatens the very fabric of liberal democracies worldwide.
The Numbers Don’t Lie: A Statistical Nightmare
The data reveals a terrifying trajectory. Immigration-related demonstrations have exploded from representing just 3% of all protests in 2024 to an unprecedented 27% in 2025,a nine-fold increase that signals societal breakdown. This isn’t gradual social change; it’s a rapid-fire transformation of Western political discourse into something unrecognizable.
Britain’s descent into anti-immigration chaos began with the 2024 riots that saw over 1,800 arrests and more than 300 police officers injured, spanning 29 demonstrations across 27 cities. The violence wasn’t random, it was methodical, targeting mosques and asylum seeker accommodations with military-like precision. Despite only 32,000 of the 111,084 asylum applicants being housed in hotels, the hotel system became a lightning rod for national rage, proving that facts are irrelevant when hatred reaches fever pitch.
Global Contagion: When Hate Goes Viral
This isn’t a British phenomenon; it’s a global epidemic. Australia has witnessed far-right protests turning violent across multiple cities, specifically targeting South Asian migrants with racist rhetoric and misinformation. Poland erupted with anti-immigration demonstrations in over 80 cities simultaneously. The United States faces its own reckoning with mass deportation protests involving thousands of demonstrators nationwide.
The pattern is unmistakable: Western democracies are experiencing coordinated attacks on immigrant communities that transcend national borders. Social media algorithms have weaponized misinformation, turning isolated grievances into international movements of hate.
India’s Diaspora Under Siege: 35 million Lives in the Crosshairs
For India, these developments represent an existential threat to its global diaspora. With 35.4 million non-resident Indians and People of Indian Origin living abroad, a population that has tripled from 6.5 million to 18.5 million between 1990 and 2024, Indians form the world’s largest overseas diaspora and are increasingly in the crosshairs of anti-immigration violence.
The Australian experience provides a chilling preview of what’s coming. Indians constitute Australia’s second-largest migrant group after the UK, with approximately 840,000 Indian-born residents as of June 2023. Yet the Indian-born population has surged to 916,330 by June 2024, an increase of nearly 150,000 in a single year. This rapid growth has made Indians prime targets for anti-immigration fury, despite attorney Jordan Tew’s assertion that Indian migrants are “helping Australia thrive,” not overwhelming its economy or services.
The targeting of Indians isn’t coincidental, it’s strategic. As skilled professionals dominating tech, healthcare, and business sectors, Indians represent everything that anti-immigration movements oppose: successful integration, economic contribution, and cultural influence. When Australia’s net overseas migration rose from 187,000 in 2014 to more than 445,000 in 2024, Indians became scapegoats for housing crises and economic anxieties they didn’t create.
The Economic Lie: Scapegoating Success
The cruel irony is that the communities being targeted are often the most economically productive. Indian diaspora communities consistently outperform local populations in education, entrepreneurship, and tax contributions. Yet facts become irrelevant when political movements require enemy populations to blame for systemic failures.
The hotel accommodation system in the UK, housing asylum seekers, became a symbol of government failure rather than humanitarian necessity. Anti-immigration movements deliberately conflate different categories of migrants: asylum seekers, skilled workers, and students, to maximize public anger and obscure the economic benefits of migration.
Democracy Under Assault: When Protests Become Pogroms
What we’re witnessing transcends normal political protest. The progression from 2024’s riots with over 1,800 arrests to 2025’s mass mobilization of 150,000 protesters represents the mainstreaming of extremist ideology. When convicted criminals like Tommy Robinson can organize the largest political demonstrations in British history, democratic institutions have failed catastrophically.
The violence isn’t spontaneous,it’s organized. The targeting isn’t random, it’s strategic. The timing isn’t coincidental,it’s coordinated across multiple democracies simultaneously. This represents a fundamental threat to the multicultural foundations of Western societies.
The Point of No Return
The September 2025 London demonstration marks a watershed moment. Anti-immigration sentiment has evolved from fringe extremism to mass political movement, from isolated violence to coordinated assault on democratic values. With Indians representing 6% of global migrants and concentrated in the very Western democracies now turning hostile, the implications extend far beyond immigration policy.
For India’s diaspora, the message is clear: decades of successful integration, economic contribution, and cultural enrichment count for nothing when democratic societies abandon their values. The global war on migration has begun, and 35 million Indians living abroad have become enemy combatants in a conflict they never chose to join.
The question isn’t whether this trend will continue, the data guarantees it will. The question is whether Western democracies will retain enough moral clarity to recognize that their war on immigration is ultimately a war on themselves.
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