Lecture halls at Canadian and American universities have become battlegrounds for critics and defenders of Hindu nationalism, punctuated by threats of violence and even death. Temples of Sikhs and Hindus in Canada and Australia have been defaced with slogans harking back to India’s timeless divisions. Parades in two North American cities have featured displays celebrating episodes of brutal sectarian violence in India.
The Canadian government’s startling accusation that Indian government agents were behind the professional-style killing of a Canadian Sikh separatist in Vancouver has focused attention on the growing tensions within the vast Indian diaspora, reflecting divisions in India that have been fuelled by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s brand of Hindu nationalism.
Modi’s Hindu-first policies and increasing intolerance of scrutiny have spilled over into Indian communities worldwide, intensifying historical divisions among Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and different castes. They have played out in city councils, school boards, cultural celebrations and academic circles.
“Before 2014, when Modi came to power, you didn’t see these kinds of divisions in the Indian diaspora in Canada — not at all,” said Chinnaiah Jangam, an associate professor of history at Carleton University in Ottawa and an expert on caste-based discrimination.
Stephen Brown, the chief executive of the National Council of Canadian Muslims, said: “What you’ve seen is a contagion effect.”
Modi and his party, the BJP, came to power in 2014, espousing Hindutva that critics say has fuelled rising violence and discrimination against India’s religious minorities, about 20 per cent of the population.
Fears that tensions in India are spreading to diaspora communities have translated into greater scrutiny over the overseas activities of the BJP, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS, India’s leading far-Right, Hindu nationalist organisation; and even Indian diplomats.
Under Modi, the RSS has become increasingly active overseas in countries with large Indian diasporas, said Dhirendra K. Jha, an Indian author who has followed the organisation for decades.
In Canada, two long-established, RSS-linked associations, the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (Hindu Self-Reliance Association) and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council), are mobilising support for Modi and his Hindu-first policies through educational, cultural and social activities, according to experts as well as a recent report published by the National Council of Canadian Muslims and the World Sikh Organisation of Canada.
Officials at the two organisations did not respond to requests for interviews.
Malavika Kasturi, a historian at the University of Toronto and an expert on Hindu nationalism, said that the two groups and others that “hide under a variety of different fronts” form a network backing Modi’s Hindu-first agenda in Canada.
“What they do have is a common agenda which is to crack down on all dissent,” Kasturi said. “So any critique of Hindutva is called Hinduphobia. Any critique of Modi is called Hinduphobia.”
Modi has tapped into a “very deep-seated psychology” among members of the diaspora who “want to recover a lost pride in the rise of a great civilisation that has been wronged” through colonisation, said Meera Nanda, an Indian historian researching the impact of Hindutva in the US.
But Ragini Sharma, president of the Toronto-based Canadian Organisation for Hindu Heritage Education, said critics were using Modi’s political agenda to portray Hinduism as intolerant.
Her organisation opposed the Toronto District School Board’s recent decision to recognise that caste-based discrimination exists in its schools, saying it would “demonise” the Hindu community. It is lobbying the Canadian government to recognise Hinduphobia, a term used by Hindu activists in recent years.
“There is this bogey of Hindu nationalism that is being applied to innocent people,” Sharma said.
Hardeep Singh Nijjar — the Canadian Sikh leader whose killing now lies at the centre of a diplomatic clash between Canada and India — championed the creation of Khalistan, a separate homeland for Sikhs carved out of the state of Punjab.
After becoming the leader of the most important gurdwara in British Columbia in 2019, Nijjar criticised Modi’s Hindu-first policies as an attempt to “convert all of India into believers of Hinduism”, said Gurkeerat Singh, a close associate of Nijjar’s.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada has said that Indian government “agents” gunned down Nijjar in June, basing his accusations on intelligence gathered by Canada and shared by the US. India has denied any involvement in the killing of Nijjar, whom it labelled a terrorist in 2020.
The killing has alarmed academics who say they have been targeted by Hindu extremist supporters of Modi since he became India’s leader.
Jangam, the associate professor at Carleton University, who has researched caste-based discrimination and violence in India, said he had faced death threats from Hindu extremists in Canada.
He has been accused of giving India and Hinduism a bad image, Jangam said, adding that he was the first tenured academic in Canada from the Dalit community.
“No one ever bothered about so-called Hindu identity before” in Canada, Jangam said of the years before Modi’s rise to power. “It’s a shock for me how people have transitioned from being normal, ordinary people into Hindu fundamentalists.”
A talk he gave on caste discrimination in Toronto in 2019 was disrupted by upper-caste Hindu hecklers who told him to go back to India, Jangam said.
One of the organisations opposing the talk was the Indo-Canadian Harmony Forum, saying it lacked balance. The group’s chairman, Praveen Verma, said Modi had elevated India’s global standing.
“India has come on the world stage, and I feel the Indian community is proud about that,” said Verma, a career diplomat who served as India’s ambassador to Yemen and Guatemala before retiring in Ontario.
Harassment of certain scholars has had a negative effect on scholarship in India, said Harjeet Grewal, an expert on Asian religions at the University of Calgary.
Academics avoid sensitive topics, he said. “We see less and less focus on religion and society in India in American, Canadian and UK universities.”
Divisions within the Indian diaspora have expressed themselves in other ways. Descendants of the historically oppressed Dalit community have led a push to ban caste discrimination, pitting them against upper-caste Hindus in Toronto, Seattle and California. Tensions and violence among Indian immigrants have ruptured communities once heralded as models of integration, like Leicester, England.
New York Times News Service