Last month, the Government of Canada made the unprecedented move of expelling six diplomats linked to India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for ties to criminal activities on Canadian soil, including extortion, coercion, and even murder. India quickly denied such links and responded by ordering six Canadian diplomats to go home including the acting high commissioner.
The decision to expel the six diplomats from Canada came a year after national headlines were made by the killing of prominent British Columbia Sikh community leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar, for which Prime Minister Trudeau himself ended up accusing the BJP of unlawful involvement.
What many might not know is that the BJP, which has dominated Indian politics for a decade, is the political arm of a much older, perhaps even more consequential, parent organization called the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a paramilitary group founded in 1925 that has consistently called for the persecution of India’s religious minorities, including Sikhs, Christians, Dalits, Muslims, and others. Early RSS ideologues cited European fascists like Adolf Hitler as a positive model. India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself is a life-long RSS member, as are many BJP officials.
As the Bridge Initiative at Georgetown University notes, “the RSS has been at the forefront of promoting Hindu-nationalism in India,” and is accused of inciting “violence against India’s Dalit-Bahujan community, including hate crimes against Muslims, lynchings of Dalits, and pogroms against religious minorities.”
While today’s RSS has attempted to distance itself from its past activities, the evidence is overwhelming that this is not the case.........