Hate crimes will rise in America, says Vijay Chattha.
With elections just a week away, a group of South Asian people have brought out a video requesting their family members not to vote for Republican Party candidate Donald Trump.
The two-minute video released on Thursday features a group of writers, actors and artists of South Asian descent like Arjun Gupta, Sheetal Sheth, Nisha Ganatra, Sonal Shah and Utkarsh Ambudkar requesting their family members to revise their decision to vote for Donald Trump, if they had decided to in the first place.
Vijay Chattha, the executive producer of the commercial, decided to work on the project after having multiple conversations with elder members of his family who said they would be voting for Trump as they have had always voted for Republican candidates.
“This is just something that really motivated me and some other friends of mine, we kind of all came together to do this,†Chatta told Fusion.
The video is a mix of monologues, moments from Trump’s campaign, and visuals of racial attacks against Indians. At one point, there is a comparison to Adolf Hitler.
“You came to the United States so that you could have a better life,” Sheth says in the video. “Right now, our country is at a crossroads.”
Recently Trump camp had also released a video in an attempt to woo Indian American voters.
According to Pew Research Center, about 65 percent of Indian Americans are Democrats or have a lineage to the Democratic Party. Another survey conducted recently suggests that 78 percent of Indian Americans have an unfavorable view of Trump or they didn’t know anything about the candidate. But, a small segment of the community under the banner of Republican Hindu Coalition (RHC) is supporting Trump.
Chattha said that hate crimes in America will rise if Trump is elected.
“I think it feels like there’s more and more of these racial divides that come up like whether it’s how kids are talking in school about people of other backgrounds, whether they’re Latino or Muslim,†he told Fusion.
“This to me is trickle down racism and I feel that if he gets elected and you look at the number of hate crimes reported in America I feel like we’re going to see a multiplier effect on that,†he added.
The makers of the video entitled #VoteAgainstHate are on a mission to spread it across the US.