The right-angle-bent equilateral cross, which has been revered for millennia in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism as a sacred sign of peace and good fortune, was also widely used by Indigenous people all across the world.
However, in the West, this sign is sometimes compared to Adolf Hitler's Hakenkreuz, also known as the hooked cross, which is a sign of hatred that conjures up the horrors of the Holocaust and Nazi Germany. White nationalists, neo-Nazi organizations, and vandals have all used the image of Hitler to incite fear and hatred.
The demand to restore the Swastika as a sacred sign has gotten stronger over the past ten years as the Asian diaspora has increased in North America. Elders from the Native American tribe, whose ancestors have traditionally utilized the symbol as part of healing rites, are joining these minority spiritual communities.
Deo feels that a sacred symbol shouldn't require her or people of other faiths to make a sacrifice or an apology just because it is frequently confused with a corrupted version of the symbol.
That is terrible to me, she declared.
Others, though, find it incomprehensible to consider that the Swastika might be redeemable.
According to Shelley Rood Wernick, managing director of the Jewish Federations of North America's Center for Holocaust Survivor Care, Holocaust survivors in particular risk re-traumatizing when they see the sign.
Wernick, whose grandparents met at a camp for refugees in Austria after World War II, noted that trauma is known for shattering a person's sense of security. The symbol known as the Swastika represented the idea of a whole people being destroyed.