The difficult conversation we need now: Anti-Māori racism in the upper-caste, upwardly mobile Indian community

The same Indian community organisations that mobilised quickly around a haka performed at the Tainui regional kapa haka competition have been almost entirely silent on the sustained anti-Māori political project advanced by ACT MP Parmjeet Parmar. Mohan Dutta argues that this asymmetry is not accidental — it is what the model minority script trains us to perform, and it is time for our community to have a much harder conversation.

There is a particular asymmetry in how anti-racism is being performed in Aotearoa right now, and the haka–apology cycle around Che Wilson and Parmjeet Parmar throws it into sharp relief.

The same Indian community organisations, lobby groups, and outlets that have mobilised quickly and articulately around the haka performed at the Tainui regional kapa haka competition — securing an emailed apology from Wilson, a follow-up apology from Te Pae Kahurangi, a planned reconciliation hui in Waikato, op-eds, statements from PAPARA, columns by Louisa Wall and Liam Rātana, and sustained coverage in Awaaz, RNZ, Newsroom, and The Spinoff — have been remarkably quiet about the sustained, on-the-record racist attacks on tangata whenua and Te Tiriti carried out by the very ACT MP at the centre of this story.

This essay is not an indictment of the haka.

The haka must be read in the context it emerged from — a sustained colonial assault on Te Tiriti, on Māori political expression, on Māori spaces in education, carried out by a settler political project that has weaponised an Indian-origin MP as its frontwoman. To extract the haka from that context and treat it as a free-floating act of "racism against Indians" — equivalent in kind and weight to, say, "Kill All Indian" graffiti outside a Papatoetoe school or Shane Jones's "butter chicken tsunami" — is to perform exactly the kind of decontextualisation that lets settler colonial violence disappear from the frame. Haka has long been a register of political challenge, including challenge that names and confronts those who attack tangata whenua. That is its tradition and its right.

At the same time, the specific stereotypes the performance reached for — the mimicked accent, the head movements, the bindi gesture, the prayer hands, the "curry-eating" line, the "go back to your land of poverty" trope — invite honest dialogue. These are tropes that circulate in white-dominated Aotearoa to dehumanise Indians, including Indians who stand in solidarity with Māori. Their use in a haka aimed at Parmar risks landing on those Indians too, and the conversation Wilson, the Council of Sikh Affairs, and Te Pae Kahurangi have begun about that is a conversation worth having. Reading the haka in its colonial context does not require us to be uncritical of every device it deployed. It requires us to refuse the move that lifts the haka out of context altogether and reframes the entire affair as Māori-on-Indian aggression.

What has gone almost entirely unsaid in the rush to perform that reframing — and what the same organisations now demanding apology have conspicuously failed to say — is the much longer story of what Parmar herself has said and done, the colonial project she advances, and what our community's silence about it reveals about us.

The Parmar record we are not talking about

Parmar's record on Māori and Te Tiriti is not a matter of subtle dog-whistling. It is a sustained, public political project.

In May 2025, as a member of the Privileges Committee, ACT sought formal advice on the range of penalties — explicitly including imprisonment — that could be imposed on Te Pāti Māori MPs Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke, Rawiri Waititi, and Debbie Ngarewa-Packer for performing the Ka Mate haka during the first reading of David Seymour's Treaty Principles Bill. The idea that Māori MPs might be jailed for performing haka in the House — for resisting, on the floor of Parliament, a bill that sought to unilaterally rewrite the constitutional foundation of this country — was advanced as a serious option for which official advice should be obtained. This is not a fringe procedural footnote. It is a request for state coercion against Māori political expression in the most powerful chamber in the country.

In June 2025, Parmar drafted a member's bill to end what she calls "race-based university policies." She has gone after the University of Auckland's compulsory Te Tiriti and indigenous knowledge course for first-year students, framing it as a financial imposition on students — particularly international students — and arguing they should be paid back for having taken the Treaty of Waitangi and te ao Māori courses. She has attacked Māori scholarships, designated Māori and Pacific spaces, and entrance pathways for Māori students as "race-based discrimination." She has positioned the very policies designed to address two centuries of structural exclusion as themselves the discrimination problem.

This is the playbook of white-grievance politics, performed in brown skin. It denies the historical violence of colonisation, recasts redress as injustice, and weaponises a flattened language of "equality" against the very people the existing structure systematically disadvantages. That it is being performed by an Indian-origin MP — who can be deployed as cover against the charge that this is a white settler agenda — is precisely what makes it rhetorically valuable to ACT. Parmar is not incidental to the ACT project. She is its ethnic alibi.

The asymmetry of community response

Now consider how Indian community organisations and Indian-focused media in Aotearoa have responded to these two strands.

The haka generated, within days, multiple statements, multiple apologies, multiple meetings, a planned reconciliation hui, and sustained coverage. Quite right. But where were these same organisations when ACT was floating imprisonment for Māori MPs? Where were the press releases when Parmar attacked compulsory Te Tiriti education? Where were the calls for hui, the demands for apology, the columns of harm felt? Where was the Council of Sikh Affairs — or any of the Hindu, Gujarati, Punjabi, South Indian, or pan-Indian community bodies who have pushed Parmar's framing of being personally wronged — saying clearly: Parmar does not speak for us; her attacks on tangata whenua are not what our community stands for; we will not have our identity used as a shield for anti-Māori politics?

That silence is not accidental. It is the product of a particular political economy of grievance — one in which our community has learned, very precisely, when to speak loudly and when to disappear.

We speak loudly when we are positioned as the wronged minority in a frame that costs us nothing and gains us recognition, sympathy, and proximity to power. We disappear when speaking up would require us to confront the racism within our own ranks, or to stand beside tangata whenua at the point where solidarity actually has a price.

The framing picked up across the recent media cycle — the haka was racialised, the Sikh community was hurt, an apology was secured, reconciliation is planned — leaves the broader anti-Māori racism in the Indian community itself entirely unchallenged. It is a frame that lets us perform victimhood without ever interrogating perpetration. It lets us extract apology from Māori without ever offering one to Māori. It lets us name a single racist haka while normalising a sustained legislative assault on Māori rights, conducted in our name, by a politician we have refused to call out.

What caste, class, and the model minority script are doing here

The reason this asymmetry exists has to be named structurally, not just morally.

Most middle- and upper-caste Indian migrants to Aotearoa arrive with a deeply internalised hierarchy that we rarely examine. Caste teaches us that hierarchy is natural, that privilege is earned through merit, and that Indigenous peoples — the Adivasi back home, Māori here — are obstacles to development rather than peoples with prior, unceded sovereignty over the lands we now inhabit. The postcolonial Indian education system, dominated by STEM and shaped by Brahminical ideology, gives us almost no critical vocabulary with which to interrogate any of this. We arrive here pre-trained as model minorities: practiced at performing the respectable, hardworking, family-oriented, upwardly mobile migrant who deserves a seat at the white settler table.

The model minority position is not just a stereotype imposed on us. It is a script we actively perform, because it works. It gets us scholarships. It gets us professional jobs. It gets us into the property market. It gets us political representation in parties like National and ACT. It gets us, eventually, an MP like Parmar — whose entire political utility is that she can perform our community's "good migrant" credentials while voting against the rights of tangata whenua. The model minority script is the ladder we have climbed; calling out Parmar would be sawing off the rung beneath us.

And so when we do build relationships with tangata whenua, those relationships are, too often, instrumental. We turn up at pōwhiri when it benefits our institutions. We use kupu Māori in our taglines and grant applications. We pose for photos with iwi leaders at delegations and trade visits — including the Māori delegation that recently travelled to India to "explore business opportunities and deepen cultural ties." We mobilise the language of biculturalism and Te Tiriti when it secures us cultural capital, recognition, or funding.

But when it comes time to actually stand by tangata whenua — to call out an Indian-origin MP demanding imprisonment for Māori parliamentary expression, to defend compulsory Te Tiriti education against an Indian-origin MP attacking it, to publicly say not in our name — we are nowhere to be found.

If our solidarity were real, Parmar's attacks on Te Tiriti and her advocacy for state punishment of Māori MPs would have generated as much organised community response as the haka did. They have not. That tells us what our solidarity actually is: a transactional aesthetic, picked up and put down according to what it costs us.

The everyday racism we will not name

The bigger problem, of course, is not just Parmar. Parmar is a public condensation of a much wider attitude that runs through our community, and that we will not honestly name.

Anti-Māori racism is rampant at our dinner tables, in our chai gatherings, in our temple committees, in our WhatsApp groups, in our parents' conversations about which neighbourhoods are "safe" and which schools are "good." We repeat tropes about Māori crime, Māori "laziness," Māori "benefits," Māori "privilege" — tropes that map almost identically onto the casteist tropes our families used in India about Adivasi and Dalit communities. We resent every public investment in Māori-led services as something taken from "us," while never accounting for the fact that our entire presence here is conditioned by a settler colonial dispossession we have inherited and benefit from.

We project our own daily experiences of racism in a Pākehā-dominated society downward, onto Māori, in order to position ourselves higher in the racial pecking order. This is the double game the model minority script trains us to play: cry racism upward when it secures us recognition, and reproduce racism downward to secure our position. Parmar's politics are simply this double game elevated to legislation.

The frame the media keeps reinforcing

The current media frame — the haka was racialised, the Sikh community was hurt, an apology was secured, reconciliation is planned — is not wrong on its own terms. But by treating the haka as an isolated incident of racialised mockery rather than as a (clumsy, harmful, badly executed) protest against a sustained anti-Māori political project, the framing severs cause from response. It allows the political grievance that motivated the haka — Parmar's record on Māori MPs, on Te Tiriti, on Māori and Pacific spaces, on compulsory Treaty education — to vanish from the frame entirely.

What remains is a story about a Māori man apologising to an Indian community for hurt feelings, with no parallel demand that Indian community organisations name, condemn, or even acknowledge the politics that produced the response in the first place.

This serves Parmar very well. It serves ACT very well. It serves the broader settler political project of dismantling Te Tiriti by manufacturing a "two minorities in conflict" story that obscures who the architects of the dismantling actually are. And it lets our community — the one that has produced and platformed Parmar — completely off the hook for the politics we have enabled.

An invitation to honest dialogue

This essay is, in the end, an invitation.

To the Council of Sikh Affairs, to the New Zealand Indian Central Association, to the Hindu Council, to Awaaz, to the Indian-origin commentators and community leaders who have spoken out about the haka with such fluency: I am asking us to apply the same fluency, the same urgency, the same moral seriousness, to the much larger problem of anti-Māori racism in our own communities.

I am asking us to publicly disavow Parmar's attacks on Te Tiriti, on Māori MPs, on Māori students, on compulsory Treaty education. I am asking us to begin an honest conversation about caste, about our investments in upward mobility, about our investments in performing model minority, and about how those investments produce politicians and policies that harm tangata whenua in our name.

I am asking us to recognise that we are settlers on this whenua. Our presence is conditioned by Te Tiriti, whether we have read it or not. The compulsory Te Tiriti education that Parmar attacks is the bare minimum gift that this country offers us — a starting point for learning how to live here with integrity, rather than as the next wave of beneficiaries of an unfinished colonial project.

If we will not do this work — if we will continue to organise around grievances that cost us nothing while staying silent on the politics that cost Māori everything — then we should be honest about what our anti-racism actually is. It is not solidarity. It is not justice. It is the careful, calibrated self-advocacy of a community that has learned to perform victimhood as a route to power, while leaving the deeper architecture of settler colonialism, and our place within it, entirely intact.

We can do better than this. The haka cycle has shown that our community can mobilise quickly and articulately when it wants to. The question now is whether we are willing to mobilise that same capacity in the much harder direction — toward tangata whenua, toward Te Tiriti, toward our own racism — when there is no apology to be extracted, no recognition to be gained, and no reconciliation hui at the end of it.

That would be the beginning of solidarity.

Everything short of it is performance.

Mohan Dutta is Dean's Chair Professor of Communication and Director of the Centre for Culture-Centred Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE) in the School of Humanities, Media and Creative Communication at Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa Massey University. His research and teaching explore the intersections of community organising, Indigenous rights, migrant rights, and global justice.