Since the 1990s Hindu, Buddhist and Jain organisations in Europe, North America and Australia have pressed a single point: that legislation and journalism should call the Nazi emblem the Hakenkreuz or the hooked cross, and reserve swastika for the sign that a billion people still use. The argument is not that the Nazi use should be softened or set aside. It is that using one word for both hands the appropriators a permanent victory over a sign they did not originate and do not use.
The dispute has produced concrete outcomes. When Germany proposed an EU-wide ban on Nazi symbols during its Council presidency in 2007, the Hindu Forum of Britain campaigned against the drafting on exactly this ground, and the proposal was dropped. In Canada, Bill C-229 of 2022 proposed prohibiting the display and sale of listed hate symbols and named the swastika among them; the Coalition of Hindus of North America, Canadian Hindus for Harmony, Vishwa Jain Sangathan Canada and others filed submissions to the justice committee arguing that the naming criminalised a sacred sign, and the bill's sponsor undertook to substitute hooked cross. Buddhist, Hindu and Jain organisations in Canada subsequently endorsed a ban on Nazi symbols framed in those terms, which is the shape the settlement has generally taken: the ban is supported, the naming is contested. The distinction has since become reasonably common in Canadian and North American legislative drafting and remains rare in the press.
Two objections are put to the campaign and both deserve stating. The first is that a symbol means what its viewer takes it to mean, so that a swastika sprayed on a synagogue is not made less threatening by the sprayer's intentions or by anybody's etymology. That is correct, and no serious advocate of the distinction disputes it. The second is that some of the campaigning has come from Hindu nationalist organisations pursuing a wider political programme, which is also true, and which does not settle whether the underlying point is right.
What can be said without difficulty is this. The sign is in continuous religious use, by more people than it was ever used against. It was taken up by a party that gave it a different form and called it by a different name in its own language. Both of those are facts, they are true at the same time, and an account that suppresses either one is a worse account than an account that carries both.