On September 20, the Indian government, in the context of the rising diplomatic tension with Canada, put out an advisory warning about “growing anti-India activities and politically-condoned hate crimes” and the “deteriorating security environment in Canada”.
The advisory seemed to refer to a conflict-ridden and lawless country, and not to Canada, ranked the third safest country in the world. Soon, panic calls and messages came from families and prospective immigrants to Canada.
A similar kind of advisory was issued a year ago, with similar kinds of responses. This had led a Hindu right-wing affiliated website then to declare that “Canada is officially unsafe for Indians in general and Hindus in particular” because of Khalistani attacks.
Now, even some Indo-Canadian politicians, like the Hindu MP from Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party, Chanda Arya, raised this fear among Hindu-Canadians after a condemnable video from a Khalistani extremist was posted, asking them to go back to India.
He was scathing in the criticism of his own government for allowing the “glorification of terrorism or a hate crime targeting a religious group … in the name of freedom of speech and expression.”
This is a narrative that is quite solidified in large sections of the Indian media/social media, which uncritically amplify government messages and propagate fake news or one-sided narratives. Therefore, people in India believe that there are marauding mobs of Khalistani extremists threatening the life and limb of Hindus and Indians in Canada.
What is the reality, then?
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The past year saw some dozen Hindu temples defaced with anti-India and pro-Khalistani graffiti by alleged separatists, a separatist rally which featured a float celebrating the assassination of Indira Gandhi, and posters which named Indian diplomats as killers.
These are indeed causes for alarm. Yet, unlike the narrative in India, perpetrators have been arrested wherever they are identifiable (here and here), hate incidents were condemned by the highest government functionaries (here and here), the police and the political leadership, and reassurances given on diplomatic protection under the Vienna Convention.
Nevertheless, Canadian critics themselves had rightly called for, without compromising freedom of speech, the need for Canadian authorities to crack down more proactively on threatening hate speech, as was done recently by taking down posters.
A tableau that celebrates the assassination of Indira Gandhi was part of a parade in Brampton, a city in Canada, on June 2, 2023. Photo: Screengrab via Twitter
Other critics, who have been victims of Khalistani extremism themselves, even while arguing against the notion that “Canada is soft on violent Khalistani activities”, have – again, rightly – called on the Trudeau government to denounce Khalistani extremism categorically, and also, not to pander to what is a small minority amongst the Canadian Sikhs with acts like softening the language on Khalistani extremism in the government report on terrorism.
There may well be additional measures the Canadian government should take so that its soil is not used to hatch terrorism elsewhere, like the horrific 1985 Air India bombing.
The Canadian incidents also have to be read in the context of the vandalism of temples in Australia, actual physical attacks (unlike in Canada) on the Indian high commission in the UK (which led Times Now to ask if Rishi Sunak’s Britain is “the new haven for Khalistanis”) and two attacks on the Indian consulate in America (whose perpetrators are yet to be arrested).
What do Canadian government statistics tell us about the safety of Indians and Hindus? The police-reported hate crimes do not have a separate victim/perpetrator category for Indians, Hindus or Sikhs, who are instead subsumed under the ‘South Asian’ ethnicity and “other religion” (not Jewish, Muslim or Catholic) categories.
These statistics (which are available only until 2021) will give some, if not a definitive, indication of the threats that Indians/Hindus face. After the COVID-19 pandemic, like in many other countries, there has been a substantial increase in hate crimes in terms of ethnicity.
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But this has been mainly accounted for by the nearly five-time increase in crimes faced by East/Southeast Asians. Hate crimes against South Asians (not just Indians) doubled in 2021 compared to 2019, but still constituted only 9.5% of all ethnicity-motivated hate crimes in Canada, representing an increase from 7.6% in 2017 (South Asians make up 7% of Canada’s population).
Blacks faced the highest percentage of ethnicity-motivated hate crimes at 37%, when their population share is only 4%.
Under religion, there has been no real increase in total hate crimes during 2017-2021. The “other religion” (Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, etc.) category saw around 7% of the religious hate crimes in 2021, roughly the same percent as their population. Here, Jews faced a staggering 55% of hate crimes, despite being only 1% of Canada’s population (in 2017, Muslims faced 41% of the crimes with a population of only 4%).
Similar kinds of statistics emerge elsewhere. In the US, anti-African American hate was the highest and of which there were 200 times more incidents than of anti-Hindu hate. Even Sikhs were “128 times more likely to be victims of hate crimes than Hindus.” Anti-Hindu hate, with 10 cases, was at the bottom, coming in at 34th out of 35 communities.
In England, 40% of religious hate crimes targeted Muslims, despite their being only 6.5% of the population (in England and Wales), while Jews, at 0.5% of the population, were the second-most commonly targeted! And in Australia, Jews were the most targeted despite again being a minuscule population.
In Canada, hate crimes constituted 0.1% of two million police-reported crimes in 2020, and 56% of the hate crimes in 2021 were non-violent crimes like general mischief, mischief in relation to a place of worship, and public incitement of hatred.
Amongst South Asian victims (2011-2020), 1% faced a major physical injury. Because of the difficulty of identifying a perpetrator, non-violent hate crimes are cleared at a much lower rate than violent hate crimes.
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While Indians and Hindus can legitimately ask the Canadian state for the better enforcement of its laws when it comes to hate incidents, what has obfuscated reality since the rapid rise of Hindu nationalism is the drastically inflated, propagandist-media-driven sense of victimhood amongst Hindus, including in the West.
Thus, “Hinduphobia” becomes virulently pushed by diaspora Hindu nationalist groups to not just describe acts of genuine hate against Hindus, but to deflect attempts of caste critique (betraying their Brahminical/upper-caste nature) or the criticism of Hindutva political ideology – representing the fusing of Hindu supremacism with the state (which has seen hate speech by the highest government functionaries and produced grievous violence against minorities in India).
This manifests in the organised castigation of the recognition of caste-based discrimination in schools and state laws in North America. Bizarrely, the argument is that officially acknowledging caste discrimination “demonises” Hinduism.
A stark example of how the legitimate Hindu demand for protection against hate is conflated with an imagined Hinduphobia is seen in the case of the response to Toronto-based Indian filmmaker Leena Manimekalai, who had depicted Goddess Kali as smoking and holding an LGBT flag in her film Kaali.
She was subjected to a torrent of hate messages and death/rape threats. FIRs were filed in multiple Indian states until the Supreme Court of India protected her from arrests. Ironically, Manimekalai was celebrating Kali by drawing upon folk imaginations of an inclusive goddess who drinks, eats and smokes with the most marginalized people.
Crucially, Canadian institutions/universities hosting the film distanced from it and issued apologies, thus failing to safeguard the freedom of expression enshrined in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Arya, Trudeau’s Hindu MP, who is now rightly seeking action against Khalistani hate speech, had then termed Manimekalai’s work as “Hinduphobic”, “anti-Hindu” and “anti-India.” As Manimekalai put it, “people like Chandra Arya in powerful positions validated and even encouraged the organised hate crime of unleashing thousands of tweets with death/rape threats, filthy abuse, and slander in the name of religious sentiments.”
The same organised hate campaign, on a much larger scale, was seen in the targeting by Hindu nationalist groups of an online academic conference criticising the Hindutva political ideology in which scholars from 50 American and Canadian universities participated.
Faced with death and other threats, many participants withdrew. The most popular (and pro-government) news channel in India dangerously called the conference as an “intellectual cover for the Taliban”. One million emails were sent to university officials to prevent academics from participating or to seek their dismissal.
This was an unprecedented attack on academic freedoms, which are vigorously protected in Canadian and Western universities. Otherwise, too, academics researching Hindutva face severe harassment in Canada and elsewhere.
Thus, the current officially-sanctioned Indian portrayal of a besieged Hindu minority seeking protection against Khalistani violence in Canada is closely tied to Hindu nationalist myth-making.
This nationalism curbs even nonviolent freedoms of expression in India and outside, and demonises movements like the overwhelmingly peaceful Sikh farmer protests as Khalistani, evoking the pain of the 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom. It is oblivious to the fact that democratic referendums are legal in Canada, whether it is that of Khalistan or Quebec, and that even the burning of the national flag or the Bible is not illegal in Canada.
Also Read: How Hindu Nationalism Enables India’s Slide Into Inequality
Despite these freedoms, the Canadian government itself, unlike the Indian media narrative, has not recognised or supported the Khalistan referendum.
Canadian activists/scholars themselves seek to expose the colonial legacy of white supremacy in citizenship, or the “systematic biases” of Canadian criminal law, which, for example, stigmatises Islamist-inspired extremism far more than white far-right extremism.
And the Canadian government itself acknowledges that despite multiculturalism and social equality, “people living in Canada are not always treated equally” and that “Indigenous peoples and visible minorities generally report feeling less safe” than the white population.
What is needed is a relentless fight against all kinds of extremism and hate, irrespective of any race or religion. But this will be seriously hampered if groups who claim victimhood are themselves purveyors of hate/violence and do not subscribe to democracy.
Just a few hours after the Indian government advisory on the politically-condoned hate crimes in Canada, a BJP lawmaker stood up in the Indian parliament to call an opposition Muslim MP a pimp and a terrorist, to guffaws from the seniormost ruling party ministers. Soon after, he was “rewarded” with an important party responsibility.
This is the same ruling party that has, for the first time in India’s history, an elected parliamentary lawmaker who is undergoing trial on terrorism charges.
Could there be a more tragic irony?
Nissim Mannathukkaren is with Dalhousie University, Canada and tweets @nmannathukkaren.
