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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\u2019s timeless divisions. Parades in two North American cities have featured displays celebrating episodes of brutal sectarian violence in India.<\/p>\n
The Canadian government\u2019s startling accusation<\/a> that Indian government agents were behind the professional-style killing<\/a> 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 fueled by Prime Minister Narendra Modi\u2019s brand of Hindu nationalism.<\/p>\n Mr. Modi\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n \u201cBefore 2014, when Modi came to power, you didn\u2019t see these kinds of divisions in the Indian diaspora in Canada \u2014 not at all,\u201d said Chinnaiah Jangam<\/a>, an associate professor of history at Carleton University in Ottawa and an expert on caste-based discrimination.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Stephen Brown, the chief executive of the National Council of Canadian Muslims<\/a>, said, \u201cWhat you\u2019ve seen is a contagion effect.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Modi and his party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P., came to power in 2014, espousing a Hindu nationalist agenda called Hindutva that critics say has fueled rising violence and discrimination against India\u2019s religious minorities, about 20 percent of the population.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Mr. Modi\u2019s government has adopted laws and policies discriminating against religious minorities as some of his supporters have carried out killings and acts of violence against them, often with impunity. But criticism from Western nations seeking closer economic ties with India and a geopolitical counterweight to China has been muted.<\/p>\n Fears that tensions in India are spreading to diaspora communities have translated into greater scrutiny over the overseas activities of the B.J.P.; the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or R.S.S., India\u2019s leading far-right, Hindu nationalist organization; and even Indian diplomats.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Under Mr. Modi, the R.S.S. has become increasingly active overseas in countries with large Indian diasporas, said Dhirendra K. Jha, an Indian author who has followed the organization for decades. The B.J.P. is considered the political wing of the R.S.S., which helped kick off the political career of Mr. Modi, who is still a member.<\/p>\n In Canada, two long-established, R.S.S.-linked associations, the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh<\/a> (Hindu Self-Reliance Association) and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad<\/a> (World Hindu Council), are mobilizing support for Mr. Modi and his Hindu-first policies through educational, cultural and social activities, according to experts as well as a recent report<\/a> published by the National Council of Canadian Muslims and the World Sikh Organization of Canada<\/a>.<\/p>\n Officials at the two organizations did not respond to requests for interviews.<\/p>\n Malavika Kasturi, a historian at the University of Toronto and an expert on Hindu nationalism, said that the two groups and others that \u201chide under a variety of different fronts\u201d form a network backing Mr. Modi\u2019s Hindu-first agenda in Canada.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat they do have is a common agenda which is to crack down on all dissent,\u201d Ms. Kasturi said. \u201cSo any critique of Hindutva is called Hinduphobia. Any critique of Mr. Modi is called Hinduphobia.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Modi has tapped into a \u201cvery deep-seated psychology\u201d among members of the diaspora who \u201cwant to recover a lost pride in the rise of a great civilization that has been wronged\u201d through colonization, said Meera Nanda, an Indian historian researching the impact of Hindutva in the United States.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n But Ragini Sharma, president of the Toronto-based Canadian Organization for Hindu Heritage Education, said critics were using Mr. Modi\u2019s political agenda to portray Hinduism as intolerant.<\/p>\n Her organization opposed the Toronto District School Board\u2019s recent decision to recognize that caste-based discrimination exists in its schools, saying it would \u201cdemonize\u201d the Hindu community. It is lobbying the Canadian government to recognize Hinduphobia, a term used by Hindu activists in recent years.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cThere is this bogey of Hindu nationalism that is being applied to innocent people,\u201d Ms. Sharma said.<\/p>\n Hardeep Singh Nijjar<\/a> \u2014 the Canadian Sikh leader whose killing now lies at the center of a diplomatic clash between Canada and India \u2014 championed the creation of Khalistan, a separate homeland for Sikhs carved out of the state of Punjab.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n After becoming the leader of the most important Sikh temple in British Columbia in 2019, Mr. Nijjar criticized Mr. Modi\u2019s Hindu-first policies as an attempt to \u201cconvert all of India into believers of Hinduism,\u201d said Gurkeerat Singh, a close associate of Mr. Nijjar\u2019s.<\/p>\n Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada has said that Indian government \u201cagents\u201d gunned down Mr. Nijjar in June, basing his accusations on intelligence gathered by Canada and shared by the United States<\/a>. India has denied any involvement in the killing of Mr. Nijjar, whom it labeled a terrorist in 2020.<\/p>\n The killing has alarmed academics who say they have been targeted by Hindu extremist supporters of Mr. Modi since he became India\u2019s leader.<\/p>\n Mr. 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n He has been accused of giving India and Hinduism a bad image, Mr. Jangam said, adding that he was the first tenured academic in Canada from the Dalit community, once known as the untouchables.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cNo one ever bothered about so-called Hindu identity before\u201d in Canada, Mr. Jangam said of the years before Mr. Modi\u2019s rise to power. \u201cIt\u2019s a shock for me how people have transitioned from being normal, ordinary people into Hindu fundamentalists.\u201d<\/p>\n 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, Mr. Jangam said.<\/p>\n One of the organizations opposing the talk was the Indo-Canadian Harmony Forum<\/a>, saying it lacked balance. The group\u2019s chairman, Praveen Verma, said Mr. Modi had elevated India\u2019s global standing<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cIndia has come on the world stage, and I feel the Indian community is proud about that,\u201d said Mr. Verma, a career diplomat who served as India\u2019s ambassador to Yemen and Guatemala before retiring in Ontario.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Harassment of certain scholars has had a negative effect on scholarship on India, said Harjeet Grewal<\/a>, an expert on Asian religions at the University of Calgary.<\/p>\n Academics avoid sensitive topics, he said. \u201cWe see less and less focus on religion and society in India in American, Canadian and U.K. universities.\u201d<\/p>\n 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<\/a>, Seattle<\/a> and California<\/a>. Tensions and violence among Indian immigrants has ruptured communities once heralded as models of integration, like Leicester, England<\/a>.<\/p>\n The Toronto suburb of Brampton has become an epicenter of many of the tensions in the diaspora. Hindu temples have been vandalized with slogans championing Khalistan. A float<\/a> recreating the assassination of Indira Gandhi appeared in a Sikh parade.<\/p>\n When Brampton announced during the pandemic that mosques would be allowed to play the call to prayer on loudspeakers during Ramadan, a man identified as a member of the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh by the Canadian Anti-Hate Network<\/a> asked on social media whether that would lead to \u201cseparate lanes for camels and goat riders\u201d or women covering \u201cthemselves from head to toe in tents.\u201d The man was subsequently fired<\/a> from a nearby school council where he had been the chairman.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In Brampton, the Indian government has also been accused of directly interfering to defend Mr. Modi\u2019s policies or India\u2019s image in ways that have deepened divisions.<\/p>\n In 2017, Indian diplomats from the consulate general in Toronto pressed organizers of an annual cultural festival to cancel a pavilion devoted to Punjab, the only Indian state where Sikhs are a majority, or to fold it into the India pavilion, according to Brampton city staffers at the time.<\/p>\n \u201cThe organizers shared with us how they were getting phone calls and they were being harassed by the Indian consulate to shut this pavilion down,\u201d said Jaskaran Sandhu, an adviser to the mayor at the time.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The mayor wrote to Chrystia Freeland, Canada\u2019s foreign minister at the time, that \u201cthis type of unwarranted interference by Indian officials in a local cultural festival is shocking,\u201d according to a copy of the letter obtained by The New York Times.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Ms. Freeland told<\/a> the news media that \u201cinterference in domestic affairs by foreign representatives in Canada is inappropriate.\u201d<\/p>\n The Indian consulate in Toronto and embassy in Ottawa did not respond to requests for comment.<\/p>\n The Overseas Friends of the B.J.P., the international arm of Mr. Modi\u2019s party, has established a growing presence abroad to push its agenda, and is registered as a foreign agent in the United States.<\/p>\n In Canada, which does not have a foreign agent registry, the Overseas Friends of the B.J.P. of Canada was established in 2014<\/a> and changed<\/a> its name to the Canada India Global Forum<\/a> in 2018.<\/p>\n Dr. Shivendra Dwivedi, an anesthesiologist who has been the group\u2019s president since 2019, said its focus is trade and that, unlike affiliates in the United States and Europe, it did not have ties to Mr. Modi\u2019s party.<\/p>\n Dr. Dwivedi said attacks on academics were led by \u201cfringe elements\u201d and that \u201cthere was no place for that in Canada.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Still, he added, moves to have caste-based discrimination officially recognized were part of \u201ca movement to malign the country\u201d just as India has gained international prominence.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen I was growing up in Quebec, I was probably the only brown kid in my class,\u201d said Dr. Dwivedi, 64. \u201cAnd people would literally say, \u2018Hey, you know what? Aren\u2019t you lucky to come to Canada? At least you\u2019re not starving like they are in India.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Today, the balance between Canada and India has shifted, Dr. Dwivedi said.<\/p>\n \u201cThirty years ago, the Indian economy needed Canada,\u201d he said. \u201cNow it\u2019s a 180-degrees opposite. Canada needs India. India is the growing economic and military power, not Canada. We need them. They don\u2019t need us.\u201d<\/p>\n Sameer Yasir contributed reporting from New Delhi, and Yan Zhuang from Sydney, Australia.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n