Fact-Checking claims behind a letter for banning RSS and bar Dr. Mohan Bhagwat from Canada.
Rohan Giri
Read the McPherson-Kwan letter once, quickly, and it sounds urgent. Read it twice, slowly, and a different question starts to form. Two sitting Members of Parliament are asking three cabinet ministers to ban an 89,000-branch (Shakha) civic organization and personally exclude its 76-year-old spiritual head Dr. Mohan Bhagwat from Canadian soil. What did they attach to justify that? Four hyperlinks and the word “fascist,” used as though repetition were an argument.
That gap, between the size of the demand and the size of the proof offered for it, is the actual story here. Walk through it claim by claim and the gap doesn’t close. It widens.
An Adjective Standing in for an Argument
The letter’s opening sentence calls the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) a “fascist paramilitary organization.” It never returns to prove that claim. It doesn’t need to, because the sentence is doing the job a paragraph of evidence should be doing.
Here is what the RSS actually is, as a matter of public record. Founded in Bharat’s western state Maharashtra’s Nagpur in 1925 as a voluntary community service organization. Structured today as a cultural movement with elected office bearers, answering upward through district and provincial layers to a national council of roughly 1,400 representatives who review its functioning. It runs daily neighbourhood gatherings called Shakha, disaster relief programs, and education initiatives.
That is the architecture of a civic cultural movement. Calling it a paramilitary force doesn’t make it one, any more than calling Canada’s elected government a “regime” turns Parliament into a junta. Both moves borrow the vocabulary of atrocity and hope nobody asks for the receipts.
The Terrorist List That Already Exists, and Doesn’t Include the RSS
The letter accuses Dr. Mohan Bhagwat’s association with “listed terrorist organizations,” plural, unnamed. Canada actually publishes this list. It names Hamas, Hezbollah, ISIS, al-Qaida. It also names Babbar Khalsa International and the International Sikh Youth Federation, two terrorist groups whose Canadian file is not a matter of dispute. Public Safety Canada’s own description of the ISYF states it was responsible for a number of bombings, assassinations and kidnappings targeting Hindus, moderate Sikhs, and Indian government officials, working in coordination with BKI. BKI is the organization tied to the 1985 Air India Flight 182 bombing, which killed 329 people, 268 of them Canadian citizens.
The RSS appears on this list zero times. Not once, in any form, under any name.
So when a letter demanding a fresh terrorist listing invokes “listed terrorist organizations” as though the target already qualifies, it is worth asking a plain question. Which organizations actually sit on that list. And why does a letter about protecting Canadians from terrorism manage to avoid naming either group Canada has formally designated as one.
The vocabulary and terminology used are conventional progressive-Islamist talking points i.e., “fascist paramilitary,” “Hindutva extremism,” “genocidal rhetoric,” and “transnational repression.” There is no comparable urgency applied to actual Khalistani terrorist networks that have murdered Canadians, or to Islamist terrorism pipelines working within Canada.
One Word Carrying an Entire Accusation
The letter’s most severe assertion is also the most cautiously worded. Which is Nijjar’s killing. Before I get into their claims, let me tell you that Hardip Singh Nijjar was proscribed as a terrorist by Indian intelligence officials in 2020. As per official report he was top operative of the Khalistan Tiger Force (KTF) and was the mastermind behind a separate 2007 cinema bombing in Punjab, Bharat. Now, returning to their allegations, it says, in Nijjar’s killing, “reportedly” involved senior BJP leadership connected to the RSS. Read that sentence again. The whole accusation rests on a single adverb.
Canada’s own Foreign Interference Commission ran a formal public inquiry with subpoena power into exactly this territory. Its final conclusion on a state link to the killing was that no definitive link to a foreign state could be proven. The men actually charged in the killing are alleged to belong to a criminal network. Not the RSS.
Taking “reportedly,” running it through a finding that falls well short of the accusation, and landing on a demand to ban an organization and its members nationwide isn’t caution. It’s laundering.
A Citation That Doesn’t Say What It’s Cited For
The letter invokes “United Nations Human Rights experts” who supposedly called on Canada to protect Sikh Canadians from RSS threats.
The actual conversation concerned threats received by a specific individual Bhai Moninder Singh, a Khalistan supporter and national spokesperson for ‘Sikh Federation Canada,’ who is also an associate of Nijjar. This was issued weeks before the letter, and on the public record does not name the RSS as the source of those threats. If the primary text says otherwise, publish it. Citing a document nobody has quoted the relevant line from is not evidence. It’s a hyperlink doing cosplay as a finding.
The same problem sits under the letter’s claim about “considerable evidence of the RSS’s sphere of influence in Canada,” footnoted to a single advocacy report, not a CSIS assessment, not an RCMP finding, not a threat bulletin. Advocacy groups are entitled to publish advocacy. What two MPs are not entitled to do is attach the phrase “Canadian security officials know” to someone else’s campaign document.
The Visits Where Nothing Happened
The letter warns that Bhagwat’s presence “could lead to social disorder.” This is a testable claim, because Bhagwat has already made this exact trip, repeatedly, to countries with no shortage of scrutiny or free press to report what happened.
He addressed a gathering in the United Kingdom in 2016. He addressed the World Hindu Congress in Chicago in 2018, in front of roughly 2,500 delegates. He delivered the inaugural address at the 2023 World Hindu Congress in Bangkok. None of these produced the disorder the letter predicts for Canada. His most reported domestic engagement with a minority community, a 2022 visit to a New Delhi mosque and madrasa, involved him meeting the chief imam of the All India Imam Organisation and speaking with schoolchildren about their studies.
If disorder follows this man wherever he speaks, someone should be able to point to where it happened. Nobody has. The letter substitutes prediction for precedent because the precedent doesn’t cooperate.
A Party That Has Already Been Asked This Question
Here is the part missing from the letter entirely, and it belongs in any honest account of how Ottawa handles foreign extremism tied to South Asian politics.
Jagmeet Singh, who led the NDP through most of the period these two MPs built this campaign, has his own well documented history on exactly this file. As reported by CBC and the Globe and Mail, Singh spoke at a 2015 San Francisco rally staged in front of a large portrait of Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, the individual India holds responsible for the violence that preceded the Air India bombing. He appeared at a 2016 UK event where another speaker on the same stage endorsed violence to achieve an independent Khalistan. Asked directly by CBC’s Terry Milewski to denounce Talwinder Singh Parmar, the man widely identified as the mastermind of the 1985 bombing that killed 329 people, Singh’s answer was that he didn’t know who was responsible. He later walked that back and condemned the bombing outright, but only after years of being asked.
None of this proves anything about McPherson or Kwan personally. It does establish something the letter conveniently omits. The party demanding Canada apply a maximum evidentiary standard of suspicion to a legal Hindu civic organization with zero Criminal Code listings has, within living memory, had its own national leader decline for years to denounce the man behind Canada’s deadliest terrorist attack. If consistency mattered here, that history would appear somewhere in a letter about foreign extremism and Canadian security. It appears nowhere.
The 828,000 Canadians Who Didn’t Sign This
Statistics Canada’s 2021 Census counted roughly 828,000 Hindu Canadians. Almost none of them have any connection to Bhagwat’s travel itinerary beyond sharing a faith tradition with the diaspora institutions built around it. Two MPs calling the world’s largest Hindu voluntary movement “fascist,” in a Parliament that would rightly object to that word attached to any other faith community’s central cultural body, is not incidental language. It is the actual mechanism by which suspicion gets cast on a community that had nothing to do with any of this.
Hindu temples in Canada have been vandalised or attacked at least eighteen times since 2022, including a November 2024 clash in Brampton that hospitalised a police officer. That doesn’t appear in the letter either. Real threats, on every side of this file, deserve real scrutiny. On evidence. Not on the strength of an adjective chosen because it tests well.
What the Letter Actually Owes Anyone Who Reads It
Not belief in the RSS’s account of itself. Not silence about the real history of communal violence in Bharat, which is real and requires no charity to acknowledge. What it owes is the same standard Section 33 of Canada’s own Immigration and Refugee Protection Act already requires before anyone is declared inadmissible. Facts. Specific ones. For which there are reasonable grounds to believe they occurred. A slogan does not become an evidentiary record because it has been repeated across a multi year campaign.
Canada already has a real, listed, well documented extremist and terrorist threat sitting inside which Terry Mileski has reported many of the time. It has a Criminal Code number and a body count of 268 Canadians. Perhaps that is where an urgent letter to three ministers should have started.
It didn’t. That, more than any single claim inside it, is the thing worth sitting with.
(Author is a research scholar at Amity University, Gwalior, working at intersection of socio-political research and media analysis. His writing engages with contemporary public narratives through a research-driven and analytical lens)
Sources
- Public Safety Canada, currently listed terrorist entities: https://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/cnt/ntnl-scrt/cntr-trrrsm/lstd-ntts/crrnt-lstd-ntts-en.aspx
- Reporting on Canada’s 2025 Assessment of Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing Risks (BKI/ISYF funding): https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/top-headlines/khalistani-groups-receive-financial-support-from-canada-for-politically-motivated-violence-within-the-country-report/amp
- CBC News, Foreign Interference Commission final report, “no definitive link”: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/foreign-interference-final-report-1.7442817
- Statistics Canada 2021 Census, Hindu population figures (via Wikipedia’s sourced summary, since the direct StatCan table URL wasn’t retrievable in this session): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinduism_in_Canada
- CBC News, Jagmeet Singh and the 2015 San Francisco rally: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/jagmeet-singh-sikh-independence-rally-1.4575762
- CBC News, Jagmeet Singh and the Talwinder Singh Parmar question: https://www.cbc.ca/news/opinion/jagmeet-singh-1.4576838
- ThePrint, Bhagwat’s prior UK/Chicago/Bangkok visits: https://theprint.in/politics/rss-chief-mohan-bhagwat-set-to-visit-us-canada-later-this-year-as-part-of-sanghs-centenary-outreach/2972818/
- India TV News, Bhagwat’s 2026 US/Canada tour announcement: https://www.indiatvnews.com/news/india/mohan-bhagwat-to-embark-on-us-canada-visit-this-month-key-event-in-new-york-as-part-of-rss-global-outreach-2026-08-06-1050539
- NDP’s own press release on the McPherson-Kwan letter: https://www.ndp.ca/news/new-democrats-renew-calls-canada-ban-rss-and-deny-entry-its-chief