A century of Hindu-nationalist paramilitary organising, and what it means that its chief is coming to Canada.

RSS sources confirmed to ThePrint in mid-2026 that Sarsanghchalak Mohan Bhagwat plans to travel to the United States and Canada later this year as part of the Sangh's centenary outreach. The itinerary is not yet finalised. The invitations reported so far originate from diaspora "socio-cultural organisations, universities and other institutions," not from the Canadian federal government. This distinction matters: a centenary outreach tour is designed to convert private invitations into public legitimacy.

Any university auditorium, cultural centre, or civic hall that hosts him without scrutiny converts a private invitation into public legitimacy. A photograph at a respectable venue and a quote in friendly press become evidence, at home, that an organisation whose ideological lineage traces to a text praising the Holocaust was welcomed on Canadian soil without challenge.

This is not an isolated event. It follows a documented pattern of activity. Canada-India relations remain strained following the 2023 killing of Sikh activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar, an act Canadian intelligence has linked to agents of the Indian state. In early 2026, Sikh Federation Canada publicly criticised Ottawa's continued engagement with Indian security officials, citing credible reporting on Indian foreign interference and ongoing threats to Sikhs in Canada, the same community whose 1984 massacre the RSS's own press did not condemn (see Exhibit 07).

This is not a matter of speculation. Canada's Foreign Interference Commission has reviewed CSIS documents that describe a Government of India objective aimed specifically at Sikhs. A March 2024 top-secret CSIS briefing states that influencing Canadian elections and nomination races is one of the ways the "Hindu-centric" Government of India directs Canadian policy toward its own interests, a strategy that, in the briefing's own words, includes "countering the influence of Sikhs in Canadian politics."

The same documents describe specific tactics: attempts to align Canadian politicians with pro-Indian-government positions through public statements and responses to parliamentary votes, clandestine financial support for favoured candidates, and interference in nomination contests. A 2020 internal memo lists the collection of Canadian political information, monitoring of dissidents inside Canada, and the use of clandestine sources to influence media among the methods used.

Then-Acting CSIS Director Vanessa Lloyd's own briefing named India the second-most active state actor conducting foreign interference in Canada. Former CSIS Director David Vigneault's assessment went further, describing India's use of what the brief calls cognitive warfare, a deliberate strategy combining psychological operations with cyber tools, and concluding that the Government of India will likely keep promoting a pro-India, anti-Khalistani narrative in Canada through those same techniques.

This is happening to elected officials and community members living in Canada now, not to abstract dissidents elsewhere. It is the direct backdrop against which Bhagwat's tour should be read.

The RSS does not operate in Canada under its own name. Its overseas arm is the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS), which established its first Canadian branch in Toronto in the 1970s. CTV News reported in 2023 that 17 chapters operate across Canada under the HSS name, registered as tax-exempt charities, promoting yoga classes and cultural events, with some Ontario chapter addresses correlating to public schools.

The 2020 dispute over the Islamic call to prayer showed how that network intersects with Canadian public life. During the first COVID lockdown, cities including Mississauga, Brampton, Toronto and Hamilton granted temporary noise-bylaw exemptions so mosques could broadcast the adhaan briefly during Ramadan while places of worship were closed. Ravi Hooda, then a School Council Chair with the Peel District School Board, responded on social media that the decision opened the door to "Separate lanes for camel & goat riders" and laws "requiring all women to cover themselves from head to toe in tents." The Canadian Anti-Hate Network identified him publicly and reported that he had volunteered with the HSS. He was removed from his school board position and terminated by RE/MAX.

What followed matters for a Canadian audience. As Foreign Policy documented, when the Canadian Anti-Hate Network called out the post, dozens of pro-Indian-government accounts, many carrying the eight-digit username strings characteristic of bot networks, mobilised to Hooda's defence, converting a local Ontario school board story into a coordinated international campaign within hours. Academic research published in The Conversation, based on interviews with councillors in Toronto, Mississauga, Brampton and Hamilton, later confirmed that the noise generated by the broadcasts was a non-issue. The objection was never about decibels.

Canadian academics who study this movement have paid a direct price. A CBC News investigation in April 2022 spoke to 18 Canadian academics who reported harassment ranging from abusive emails to death and rape threats after criticising Hindu nationalism. Most refused to be named, citing fear of escalated harassment, denial of visas to India, and danger to relatives there. Professor Chinnaiah Jangam of Carleton University, one of Canada's first tenured Dalit academics, and Professor Malavika Kasturi of the University of Toronto, who described a "Hindutva army" of email threats, spoke on the record. The Breach subsequently documented that the Indian government has cancelled more than 100 Overseas Citizen of India cards over the past decade, cutting critics off from family and homeland, and that pressure from Hindu nationalist groups succeeded in getting a critical lecture cancelled at a Canadian university.

In October 2024, the Government of Canada expelled six diplomats linked to India's ruling BJP over ties to criminal activity on Canadian soil, including extortion, coercion and murder. India denied the links and expelled six Canadian diplomats in response, including the acting high commissioner. That expulsion came a year after the killing of British Columbia Sikh community leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar, over which the Prime Minister publicly accused agents of the Indian state of involvement.

Writing in Open Canada in November 2024, Steven Zhou identified the mechanism already available under Canadian law: under Canada's Anti-Terrorism Act, an organisation need only commit terrorism somewhere in the world to be listed as a banned entity in Canada. The conduct does not have to occur on Canadian soil.

The supporting record is not historical. In February 2020, roughly 40 Muslims were killed by mobs in New Delhi while protesting the BJP government's citizenship laws. Human Rights Watch found that "top BJP leaders dangerously derided the protestors, and some openly called for violence against them," and reporting in The Caravan recorded RSS members confirming they had deliberately taken part in the violence. Separately, Monu Manesar, a member of the Bajrang Dal, the youth wing of the RSS affiliate Vishwa Hindu Parishad, livestreamed himself attacking Indian Muslims and was arrested as the prime suspect in the murder of two Muslim men in Haryana.

In 2024, twenty-five South Asian organisations in Canada, including Hindus for Human Rights, the Canadian Council of Indian Muslims, and Canadians Against Oppression and Persecution, wrote jointly to the Prime Minister asking that the RSS and its affiliates be designated as hate groups or far-right extremist entities. Then-NDP leader Jagmeet Singh separately called for a ban on the RSS in Canada. Earlier, in November 2022, seventeen civil society organisations objected after a sitting Member of Parliament raised the Bhagwa Dhwaj, a flag associated with the RSS, at the Peace Tower on Parliament Hill for Hindu Heritage Month.

Weeks before Operation Blue Star, on 14 February 1984, BJP leader Harbans Lal Khanna and members of Hindu right-wing organisations publicly destroyed a model of the Golden Temple and a picture of Guru Ram Das at Amritsar railway station, a calculated provocation months ahead of the actual military assault on the shrine.

L.K. Advani said as much himself. In his autobiography, My Country My Life, he wrote that "Indira Gandhi's wavering policy, lack of firm action, and the tendency to seek partisan political advantage aggravated the problem in Punjab. With her credibility, both at home and abroad, at stake the Prime Minister was ultimately forced to use the military to liberate the Golden Temple." Advani's own word for the assault on Sikhism's holiest shrine was "liberate." Punjab Congress leaders Charanjit Singh Channi and Partap Singh Bajwa later cited that same passage to argue that the BJP and RSS bore equal responsibility for both Blue Star and the riots that followed, and called on the BJP to apologise the way Congress had. Delhi Assembly member Avtar Singh Kalkaji put the accusation more bluntly still: "If Advani would not have instigated Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, Blue Star would not have happened and she would not have been killed." The RSS's own magazine, Organiser, has pushed back directly, arguing the BJP only pressed for a resolution to the crisis in Punjab and never called for military action, and that Congress has misread Advani's account to serve its own politics.

When the assault came in June 1984, multiple contemporaneous reports say RSS members distributed sweets to celebrate it.

Months later, when mobs massacred somewhere between 3,000 and 17,000 Sikhs nationwide after Gandhi's assassination, the RSS's own affiliated press stayed conspicuously quiet about the killing, while its internal writings praised Gandhi's "firmness." Fourteen FIRs filed at Delhi police stations after the pogrom name 49 people belonging to the BJP and RSS.

The clearest statement of the RSS position on 1984 comes from the RSS itself. On 8 November 1984, Guru Nanak's birthday, with the killing barely subsided, senior RSS whole-timer and ideologue Nana Deshmukh circulated a document among shakha members nationwide titled Moments of Soul Searching. It was published weeks later in the Hindi weekly Pratipaksh, edited by George Fernandes, later India's Defence Minister, under the headline "Indira Congress-RSS collusion." The English translation is by Professor Shamsul Islam, formerly of Delhi University.

The document opens by canonising the woman whose assassination triggered the massacre. Deshmukh called Indira Gandhi "a great martyr" and "a great lady," writing that she alone "could keep the country united." He described Operation Blue Star, the army assault on the Golden Temple, as an action that "had become necessary to protect the sanctity of the religious places."

He then characterised the pogrom itself as "a direction-less and improper expression of the hurt, anger and feeling of loss of her followers," and added the sentence that defines the document: "It is a different matter whether this is right or wrong."

Responsibility, in Deshmukh's account, rests with the victims. Because Sikh leaders had not condemned a statement by Giani Kripal Singh quickly enough, he wrote, "the already angered common and unimaginative people took it as correct that the Sikhs celebrated the death of Indira Gandhi. Because of this belief, selfish elements could succeed in making the common people become violent against the hapless Sikhs."

He reserved his stated disappointment for Sikhs who defended themselves. He was "deeply pained" that "rather than displaying such tolerance and patience at some places they have retaliated against the crowd with arms," and wrote that if "reactive armed action by Sikhs is even partly true then they have not been able to evaluate the situation correctly."

The document closes by attacking Sikh religious identity itself. Deshmukh argued that "conversion of Sikh religion into Khalsaism is a much later event" engineered by British imperialists to "cut the Sikhs off from their Hindu environ," that the Khalsa was "designed as an armed hand to defend Hindu community and its traditions," and that the five Ks are "unfortunately today... being projected as basic and necessary forms of Sikh religion." At no point does the document mention RSS cadres protecting a single Sikh.

When Punjab's Sikh farmers led the year-long protest against India's 2020 farm laws, Hindutva-aligned commentators and BJP figures did not argue policy, they branded the protesters "Khalistani terrorists" and "urban Naxals" en masse, a framing amplified across friendly television and social media through the protest's duration.

After the breach of barricades at Delhi's Red Fort in January 2021, that campaign escalated into open threats. A BJP MLA from Uttar Pradesh, Abhijeet Singh Sanga, tweeted a warning invoking Modi's willingness to go further than Indira Gandhi ever did. A prominent right-wing account went further still, posting a direct threat that the 1984 massacre would be "dwarfed" by what could come next, an explicit invitation to imagine violence against Sikhs on a larger scale than the last pogrom.

Sikh communities noticed. In British Columbia, residents told Global News in February 2021 that India's communication blackouts and mass arrests around the protest site were "moving in the same direction" as the run-up to 1984, a fear rooted in the specific historical pattern of demonisation preceding mass violence, not a vague anxiety.