Washington, Oct 24: A 21-year-old Indian American student journalist in Texas says the conservative higher-education outlet Campus Reform has ended his role as a correspondent after he publicly said he voted for a Democrat to protest anti-Indian bigotry, a case that has become a flashpoint in the debate over rising hostility towards Indian Americans on the American right.
Vasant Bhatt, a political science student at the University of Houston, announced the move in a post on X on Friday.
"I exercised my constitutional right to vote according to my conscience, spoke out against anti-Indian bigotry, and refused to toe the Republican Party line. My participation in Campus Reform's correspondent program has now been terminated," Bhatt wrote.
"Losing a place in a program will not make me retract my beliefs or abandon my community," he said.
Campus Reform has not commented publicly on Bhatt's claim. Its online profile page for Bhatt, which described him as a "Senior Correspondent", no longer appears among the site's author listings.
Bhatt drew attention earlier this month when he said he had voted for Democrat James Talarico over Republican Ken Paxton in Texas's US Senate race, saying he was disgusted by the xenophobia and attacks on Indian Americans' identity.
Bhatt's Campus Reform biography said he previously interned with Senator Ted Cruz's re-election campaign and worked with the Texas Youth Summit, which it described as one of the largest gatherings of young conservatives in the state.
Suhag Shukla, executive director of the Hindu American Foundation, criticised the far-right attacks on Bhatt in a personal post on X, linking them to the climate that preceded the foiled plot at a Hindu temple in Aurora, Illinois.
Campus Reform is a project of the Leadership Institute, a conservative non-profit based in Virginia that trains young activists.
The episode comes amid a wider row over anti-Indian rhetoric in American politics, including the attacks on Indian American candidates ahead of the November 3 midterm elections and online abuse targeting Indian H-1B workers. Indian American lawmakers have said such rhetoric is spilling into violence, citing the Aurora temple plot.
Texas has one of the largest Indian American populations in the country, concentrated in the Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth areas.
--IANS