‘Disheartening to see right-wing Indian Americans’: Comedian Nimesh Patel on a divided diaspora

A few minutes into his first Netflix special Buy the Dip, comedian Nimesh Patel gets the room chanting: “H-1Bs! H-1Bs!” while making a joke about immigrants in the US. He then asks whether any visa holders are in the audience. When a few people cheer, Patel cuts them off humorously. “Stay quiet man,” he says. “It’s too hot right now, the fuck’s wrong with you?”.

In a year when Indians have become a prime target for America’s anti-immigrant right wing, Indian American comedian Nimesh Patel is having a moment. The comedian, known for delivering his punchlines with a laid-back, stoner vibe, has long taken a serious, introspective look at Indian American identity, politics and culture.

He has stood out as someone who has shown the other side of the Indian American diaspora through jokes about his father, who immigrated to the US in the 1970s and ran a liquor store in New Jersey.

After the release of his Netflix special, Nimesh Patel spoke to Scroll to discuss his ideological disagreements with the diaspora and why he believes it could use a little more self-awareness about its politics and its religion.

Nimesh Patel, 40, hails from Parsippany in New Jersey, a town with a large Indian diaspora population. He was a pre-med finance graduate from New York University and considered a career in healthcare before working a series of jobs in finance while doing stand-up comedy at night.

For years, he was a regular at Comedy Cellar, one of New York’s best known stand-up comedy clubs before he was discovered by Chris Rock in 2015. Rock asked Patel to join the writing team for the Oscars. Patel became the first Indian American writer on the popular Saturday Night Live television show, where he spent one season and earned an Emmy nomination.

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A decade later, his latest special titled Buy the Dip, his most Indian show yet, is making waves on Netflix after it was released in September. The name Buy the Dip is stock market terminology from his former finance career about buying a failing asset in the hope it goes up in value.

It is in part a dig at US President Donald Trump, who in April 2025 urged his followers to buy stocks hours before announcing a pause on his tariffs that sent the market soaring.

Patel discusses the Indian American diaspora intensely in the special. He occasionally brings up the side of the diaspora that is not wealthy and is working long hours to work off debt. It is a picture of the diaspora that is not often showcased in popular media, Patel said.

“I don’t think that story’s really been told, at least articulated in that sense, because we’re all really known as these planners and these type A people,” said Patel. “I’m aware that we are the richest, quote-unquote, ‘minority,’ but we’re also the group with the largest gap in our incomes.”

He added: “You have your South Asians that run Microsoft and Google and Adobe and all, and you also have the South Asians that deliver Uber and DoorDash.”

This year, many Indians on H-1B visas are facing an uncertain future in the US, a climate not helped by Republicans complaining that foreigners are displacing Americans. In the interview, Patel referred to the Vice President JD Vance calling H-1B holders “foreign indentured servants”.

“I do think, from my bird’s-eye view of it all, that [the H-1B debate] is a scapegoat for America’s problems,” Patel said. “We, as a country, tend to put Band-Aids on gunshot wounds, and then charge $2,000 for that Band-Aid.”

He said that anti-immigrant views are aired by people pushing partisan politics with very little self awareness. “The H-1B programme coming into existence is no doubt in part corporate America wanting cheaper labour,” Patel said. “It’s a problem that is easily scapegoated by the most visible minority taking ‘advantage’ of the H-1B programme and that is Indian people.”

Throughout the interview, Patel also felt compelled to respond to the rise in anti-South Asian sentiment, particularly in videos and online commentary coming from the US. A recent report found that anti-South Asian hate rose by 240% on X (formerly Twitter) from January 2024.

Last month, the situation reared its head when a 19-year-old working at a Taco Bell was arrested for allegedly planning a mass shooting at a Hindu temple outside Chicago. The surge in racism is likely to push some Indian Americans away from the Republican party after the community’s swing toward Donald Trump in 2024.

“It is crazy to see the rise,” said Patel. “I mean, it’s not crazy, I fully understand it, but it is disheartening to see the rise of the right-wing Indian, especially in America, given our relatively short history in this country, and how privy we’ve been to witnessing how America operates, and yet we still play victim to it or play into the system.”

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In Buy the Dip, one of the prime targets is Federal Bureau of Investigation director Kash Patel, a Gujarati immigrant and a Trump loyalist who has become one of the representatives of the right wing Indian American. In some ways, Democrats like New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who also has Gujarati roots, are trying to win back the less wealthy Indian Americans who have been drifting from the party, with a politics that speaks to how unaffordable America has become.

Asked whether it was possible to draw Indian Americans into a left-wing coalition, Nimesh said he couldn’t speak to Mamdani’s intentions but voiced his support for the New York mayor’s policies. “I do feel [Zohran] is a fantastic representative of a voice of reasonable South Asian Americans who align a lot more with his view of the world than the capitalist shills that we have representing us otherwise, like Vivek Ramaswamy,” Patel said.

He added: “If Zohran makes it cool and appreciable to not care about money and care about other people, then maybe over a generation or two, we will start to feel that way. I think a lot of Indian people forget that we come from Nehru and Gandhi, and they’re both flawed figures, obviously, but their dream wasn’t, you know, a fully capitalist, oligarchic society where, you know, people are enslaved in practice, if not in name, you know?”

While Kash Patel and Vivek Ramaswamy are frequent targets of Patel’s comedy, he holds off on making jokes about Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Buy the Dip. In the special, he tells the audience that making fun of Hindus (or any religion for that matter) is against the law in India, punishable by up to three years in jail.

“I purposely left out super-specific religious jokes. I was asked to,” Patel told Scroll. “Netflix is a global business… It’s [Netflix’s] platform. You have to play by their rules.”

That restraint is unusual for Patel, who has never been shy about drawing the ire of Hindu nationalists, in India and the US. Some of his most viral sketches are breezy retellings of the origin stories of Hindu gods like Ganesh and Hanuman.

He has also famously taken on BAPS, the Hindu sect behind a big Hindu temple in New Jersey that came under scrutiny after Dalit labourers alleged that they had been trafficked and paid less than the minimum wage.

“Those jokes are reflections of my views of society,” Patel said. “They’re not just jokes about those things. When I make fun of Hinduism, it’s in the context of: Hindus are, like, so powerful in this world and so angry, let me cut them down a peg.”

He elaborated: “My favorite comedians have always had a political position, but their political position wasn’t always obvious. You know, whether it be Chris Rock – I mean, Chris Rock is fairly obvious, but – Patrice O’Neal, you know, those guys always had a societal stance, and you always knew what they felt about what the fuck was going on. And that was it. What the fuck is going on in America, you know?”

Patel is hopeful there is also a large part of the Indian American diaspora that is fine with jokes about his religion, even if it is not as vocal as his right-wing critics online. “Everywhere I go, if I make religious jokes, people will tell me after that they had a problem with it,” Patel said. “In Hinduism, it says, ‘Don’t be mad at anybody.’ You know? And then you go ahead and get really mad. I don’t understand that. I don’t know if people have that self-awareness. The younger people are often like, “Say whatever you want” and that gives me hope.”

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• Indian Americans
• Donald Trump
• Kash Patel