NEW YORK (RNS) — The BAPS Melville Mandir has been a prominent, peaceful place of worship and festivals for Long Island’s growing Hindu community since 2016.

Early Monday (Sept. 16), that peace was interrupted with the discovery of graffiti spray-painted on the temple’s signage and driveway that read “Hindustan Murdabad,” meaning “Death to India,” “F*ck Modi” and “Modi is a terrorist,” referring to the Indian prime minister scheduled to visit on Sunday. 

The vandals left “threatening messages” sometime between 7 p.m. Sunday and 6:30 a.m. Monday, according to the Suffolk County Police hate crimes unit.

“We strongly promote peace, harmony, equality, selfless service, and promote universal values of Hindus,” said Girish Patel, national coordinator for BAPS Public Affairs. “That something like this would happen is a direct way of saying, ‘I hate Hindus.’”

The Indian Consulate General is in touch with BAPS leadership, which represents the largest sect of Hindus in the U.S., and has raised the matter with U.S. law enforcement authorities for “prompt action against the perpetrators of this heinous act,” it said in a statement.

On Monday afternoon, local lawmakers and clergy members from surrounding synagogues, churches and mosques lent their support and offered prayers at a news conference outside of the mandir.

U.S. Representative Tom Suozzi, at podium, addresses an assembly to call for peace at the BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir Hindu temple in Melville, New York, on Monday, Sept. 17, 2024. (Photo courtesy BAPS)

“We strongly condemn these acts and pray for peace amongst all communities,” said the BAPS Public Affairs team in its Appeal for Peace statement. “We also offer our deepest prayers for those who perpetrated this crime to be released of their hatred and to see our common humanity.”

This incident comes after a thread of temple vandalizations that have occurred in the past year across North America. Perpetrators have damaged property at mandirs from California to New York, including statues of prominent Hindu figures such as Mahatma Gandhi. And this past July, a BAPS mandir in Edmonton, Canada, was similarly defaced.

Suhag Shukla, executive director of the Hindu American Foundation, hopes to help law enforcement agencies understand what an anti-Hindu hate crime can look like.

What these attacks have in common, said Shukla, is their rhetoric in the spray paint. The words are anti-Indian government and anti-Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and often, she said, explicitly support the Khalistan movement: an extremist, separatist movement led by Sikhs to create the independent state of Khalistan in Punjab, India. 

“At a very superficial level, (law enforcement is) just seeing, you know, one set of Indians attacking another,” she said. “But let’s look at the target. If there is a group that is advocating for a separate state in the Indian subcontinent, why are they attacking Hindu temples? What does BAPS have to do with a separate theocratic state?”

Shukla’s organization remains in talks with Hindu community members to track incidents of vandalism. At least five cases have occurred in the past year, a trend she called disturbing. Categorizing and collecting this specific hate-crime data has been a challenge at the federal level, but Shukla hopes relationships between temples and law enforcement are strengthened before a crisis, not after.

“BAPS being one of the largest and most visible Hindu institutions has become essentially the front line, because they’re so well known,” she said, adding that the Hindu American Foundation provides temples with important safety and security information as needed. “Now, there’s far greater awareness about the responsibilities that these mandirs have to their members.”

Patel, a longtime Nassau County resident, has been attending the Melville mandir for almost a decade and was heavily involved with planning the temple more than 20 years ago. Though he had heard about other temples being vandalized, Patel “never expected anything like this to happen” in his quiet, mostly middle-class town.

“I was just thinking, ‘Did we say something or do something wrong that would have triggered this?’” he said. “But nothing had happened, so we were completely clueless. But the point is, that it was an attack on Hindus.”

Patel agrees with Shukla that it is of note BAPS in particular was attacked, even though there are several Hindu places of worship in Long Island that are “even closer” to the venue that Modi will appear at this Sunday.

BAPS’ strong international presence, and its vital tenet of service for the community, is what lends itself to allyship with people across faiths and ethnicity, Patel said. Many different groups and individuals have expressed support for the temple since the attack, including local, state and federal officials as well as representatives from local Jewish, Muslim, Christian and Hindu congregations. 

U.S. Reps. Ro Khanna and Shri Thanedar raised concerns on X about the mandir’s attack. Another congressman, Nick LaLota of Long Island, also extended his support for the BAPS community, just days after attending New Jersey’s BAPS Robbinsville Mandir, the largest Hindu temple in the United States. 

“While we continuously take measures to safeguard our places of worship and ensure a secure environment, incidents like this are deeply concerning,” said Lenin Joshi, BAPS volunteer in Robbinsville. “It creates anxiety and fear among devotees. No one should be afraid to visit a place of worship in the United States.”

The Long Island mandir is working closely with Suffolk County police, which has pledged to continue patrolling the area with increased surveillance methods, especially for services this upcoming weekend, during which it is common for people to come and go often.