American economist and social scientist Steven Durlauf stood up for Indian-origin scholar Soumita Shukla against anti-India hatred on social media. Soumitra Shukla, a research fellow at Harvard Business School’s Artificial Intelligence Institute, made an observation on the increasing hatred targeting Indians on X but became a target himself as his post went viral and social media users asked him to leave the US. It was then that Durlauf said that the very presence of Shukla in the US shows why immigrants are crucial to American science and that he was ashamed of the un-American behavior that Shukla had to witness.“The amount of anti-Indian hate on this platform is truly sickening. People need to stop worrying about jobs being “stolen” and look deeper within as to why they have such rotten souls to wish the worst on others,” Shukla’s first post that started the row read. His post was in reaction to tha prevalent X narrative that Indians steal jobs in the US.‘Get the f*ck out of my country,’ Shukla was told several times. “I want to rent a hotel room and buy gas and vape juice from Americans not invaders. It’s not that hard to understand. Go home,” one wrote. “It’s ironic that you consider people wanting Indians to go back to India as “the worst.”Probably some soul-searching to be done there on your end, bud,” another wrote.“Lecturing American citizens about their concerns that foreign nationals are undermining their economic opportunities is a bold move,” another hate comment read.As almost all of the responses to his X post was negative, hateful and were asking him to get out of the US, Durlauf said Shukla is one of the rising stars in inequality resrach in the US. “As such, he epitomizes the overwhelming contemporary importance of immigrants to American science. I am ashamed that he has to suffer from the bigoted filth against Indians that has exploded in this country, ranging from anonymous cowards on X to public officials. Reprehensible and profoundly un-American,” the economist wrote.
Not the country I arrived at first in 2010, says Shukla
Shukla thanked Durlauf for his support and said he found it difficult to “stay out of it” as the anti-India attacks are open. “Thank you so much for the very kind words @sndurlauf and your support. I have found it very difficult to stay “out of it” when there has been an open attack on Indians with blessings from the top. I agree, it is indeed un-American and not the country I arrived at first in 2010,” he wrote.This was not saved from trolling either as people mocked ‘inequality research’ and called for the deportation of both Shukla and DurlaufShukla, a Green Card holder, came to the US in 2010 for his BS in Economics and Mathematics from the University of Minnesota. He did his MPhil and PhD in Economics from Yale.
