Indian man forced to remove Ganesha idol from home by realtor for shocking reason: 'We felt uncomfortable'

Imagine being forced to remove a simple religious imagery from your own home to help with it's sale. That's what an Indian man in Texas had to do, as per the orders of his realtor. The Indian man named Ravi Vavilala, who had to remove a Ganesha idol from his home said Celina, is one of the fastest-growing areas in Texas when it comes to housing the Indian community.

Thus, his family moved from Charlotte, North Carolina to the area in 2023.

A few months later, Vavilala shared that he was diagnosed with stage four cancer and lost his job because of that. Eventually, he made plans to sell the home they had been living in. Shockingly, things didn't go as planned. The man recalled how a buyer's party visited his house and left within five minutes. When he contacted the realtor to figure out the reason, he found that the buyers were uncomfortable with the Lord Ganesha idol placed in his home.

“We felt a little uncomfortable because they were saying that there is so much religious stuff and personal stuff still there. We realised that we have to make our home very generic to attract all kinds of people,” he said. Eventually, he had to move the Ganesha idol to a nearby storage unit. Despite this, in three months, he received no offer for his house and was forced to sell it at a loss.

Texas: The anti-Indian hub

The incident was reported by Bloomberg in a story covering Trump's visa crackdown that triggered Texas's housing bust.

It focused on the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area citing how 20 companies had moved from California to Texas in the past decade, bringing with them an influx of South Asian employees. With the rise of anti-immigrant and anti-Indian rhetoric among Americans who blamed Indians for their job, housing and other losses, they began to refer to the phenomenon as 'Indian invasion'. Ever since the onset of the second Trump administration, this rhetoric has been circulated far and wide.

From city council meetings to social media attacks, Indian Americans have been having a hard time in the country. As per a recent survey by Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, many Indians reported experiencing bias, online racism, personal harassment and discrimination in public. According to it, since the start of 2025, one in four Indian Americans has been called a slur. It also noted how much of the online hate was directed at Indian communities invoking Hindu symbols, traditions or religious references. The report described US as the "epicentre of anti-Indian digital racism"Incidents such as the one with Vavilala, reinforce the existence of such discriminatory rhetoric, propagated by policies and politics.