The othering of brown people is a serious problem in the West. But there’s another insidious issue at play in Canada.PUNIT PARANJPE/AFP/Getty Images
Khushy Vashisht is a Toronto-based freelance journalist.
In June, when nearly 300 people died in Ahmedabad’s tragic Air India crash, I naively believed it would be a moment where people around the world – especially in multicultural Canada – would band together to offer each other solace and strength in the face of unthinkable loss.
Instead, it became yet another opportunity for many to spew vitriol.
In the comments of social-media posts about the crash, many made cruel remarks. “It’s a start, there are 1.46 billion people in India, so we only need around 6 million more planes!” read one of many like-minded comments under an X post of the popular 6ixBuzzTV account. Others declared, without any evidence, that the Canadian who died on board wasn’t actually Canadian.
I remember telling my mother, who moved here from India more than two decades ago, about these remarks. She simply turned to me and said in Hindi: “I knew people didn’t like us, but I didn’t know they hated us this much.”
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Unfortunately, over the last few years, Canada has seen a sharp rise in anti-South Asian hate. According to Statistics Canada, police-reported hate crimes against the demographic increased by 227 per cent between 2019 and 2023. A June report by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) found that X posts containing anti-South Asian slurs increased by more than 1,350 per cent from 2023 to 2024.
And the Canadian Anti-Hate Network reported that far-right communities both on- and off-line have made South Asians – specifically Sikh people – their latest targets, after a Sikh man had his turban ripped off his head in Scarborough, Ont., and another had his turban knocked off while he was spat on in Peterborough, Ont. Much of the hatred has been attributed to an incorrect belief that South Asians are to blame for inadequate housing and a lack of job opportunities in Canada.
The othering of brown people is a serious problem in the West. But there’s another insidious issue at play in Canada: Many South Asians are stoking the flames of hatred against each other, too.
Growing up, it was near impossible not to hear the tales illustrating the many ways that South Asians don’t get along with one another. The conversations about infamous regional, religious and everything-in-between rivalries are unavoidable: Pakistan vs. India, Bangladesh vs. Pakistan, Hindus vs. Muslims vs. Sikhs, and absolutely everything about the discriminatory caste systems. It didn’t matter that we were in a country thousands of kilometres away from the region: Our differences were not only brought over here, but re-enacted here, too.
Today, we see some South Asians targeting and extorting our own small businesses. We see clashes between subgroups at our places of worship, including Hindu temples and Sikh gurdwaras; indeed, the World Sikh Organization of Canada‘s statement about last year’s attacks noted that anti-Sikh hate was coming from both right-wing hate groups and Indian nationalists. We hear hypocrisy from a generation of older immigrants disparaging international students, or dismissing their challenges as being far lighter than what they experienced back in their day.
South Asians in Canada have long found kinship within their own ethnocultural communities. My father often tells stories about how it was other South Asians who helped him integrate into the country when he arrived in 1999, facing economic instability and profound homesickness while navigating a new language and new society together.
Yet so many of our people prefer to find community only with those who are part of their specific tribe. And so instead of operating as one diaspora in solidarity, we often create fissures amongst ourselves.
What’s more, those who hate us can’t tell us apart, anyway. The ISD report highlighted a representatively abhorrent post from a member of the white-supremacist group Diagolon: “You’re Sikh, which is the same as Hindu and Pakistani and Bangladeshi to us because you all look, sound and smell the same.” Hate groups don’t care about the regional differences of their targets; they only see that we are different. What happened to the Afzaal family in London, Ont., four years ago, could have happened to any of us.
Rather than pointing fingers at one another on the basis of baggage from back home, we need to remember who we once were: brothers and sisters separated only by lines on a map. If we hate each other, we only help do the work of those who hate us.
It’s time that we as a diaspora have a hard conversation about how we can talk to people from different religions and backgrounds without seeing only our differences. By talking, we can break away from the ill-informed caricatures so many of us have created of one another in our heads. But for a community that prides itself on maintaining traditions, this conversation is the most difficult thing to start. Indeed, any mention of change in front of extended family instantly gets me dismissed as the “Westernized child” who’s strayed far from home.
South Asia is far from a monolith. We have dozens of different and beautiful subcultures ingrained into our land. But rather than share the best parts, we too often choose to focus on what we see as the worst. Coming to Canada gave us all a chance to start over; instead, too many of us are throwing that away to perpetuate generational wounds. That only benefits those who already hate us.
South Asian Canadians don’t have to forget our history. But we do have to work together to move past it so that it doesn’t define our life here – if not for us now, then for future generations.