On 4 April 2025, Georgia became the first state in the United States of America (US) to introduce a bill on anti-Hindu discrimination and Hinduphobia. The bill, SB 375, seeks to define the term Hinduphobia as a “set of antagonistic, destructive, and derogatory attitudes and behaviours towards Hinduism.” It has received bipartisan support from Republican and Democrat Senators, in view of the rising hate crimes against the community. However, the bill’s failure to clearly define ‘Hinduphobia’ and its exclusive focus on Hinduism without reference to other religions raises constitutional concerns about vagueness and viewpoint discrimination.

The bill’s definition of Hinduphobia does not mention the threshold at which the speech or behaviour becomes actionable. This omission paves the way for arbitrariness under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Men of common intelligence, so the test goes, cannot be required to guess at the meaning of the enactment.

In Kolender v. Lawson, the US Supreme Court stated that the void-for-vagueness doctrine requires that a penal statute define the criminal offense with sufficient definiteness that ordinary people can understand what conduct is prohibited and in a manner that does not encourage arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement. The lack of a clear threshold for the definition of Hinduphobia could lead to chilling legitimate speech including any critique of caste hierarchy or extremist political ideologies associated with Hinduism. Genuine expressions of dissent by activists could be misallocated as Hinduphobic.

Furthermore, the resolution’s emphasis on a particular religious group is in violation of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause, which forbids the government from taking measures that unjustly give preference to one religion over another. The most prominent test for determining whether the government has unconstitutionally supported a religion was referred to in Lemon v. Kurtzman. In the three-pronged Lemon test the government laws should (1) have a nonreligious purpose, (2) have a predominantly nonreligious effect, and finally (3) not create an “excessive entanglement” between government and religion [para III]. The law may be struck down if it fails to meet one of these criteria.

However, with growing criticism, this test was replaced by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s non-endorsement test. The non-endorsement test asks whether government action amounts to an endorsement of religion, creating a perception in the mind of a reasonable observer that the government either endorses or disapproves of the religion? It was applied in Lynch v. Donnelly to determine if a holiday-display could be construed as the government’s endorsement of a specific religion.

Similarly, Georgia may seem to endorse a specific religious viewpoint by recognising “Hinduphobia” without addressing discrimination against other religious groups in the state. No parallel resolutions recognising Islamophobia, antisemitism or anti-Sikh hate have been passed despite such discrimination being well-documented. Existing federal laws already provide redressal mechanisms for religious discrimination, and while the bill does not diminish existing protections, it is still exclusionary in nature. Other religious communities will remain protected in principle, the selective codification of “Hinduphobia” has the expressive effect of placing certain forms of discrimination on a higher pedestal than others. The danger is not in what the bill implicitly removes, but what it implicitly prioritises.

While it is important to prohibit and address religious discrimination, it should not be at the cost of free speech and neutrality. One identity must not be privileged over another. Rather than introducing a new term in its Code, Georgia must strive to create an all-inclusive framework to shield all religious communities from any kind of hate or prejudice. That is what religious neutrality would look like in a constitutionally plural society.