9th September 2021 – A united Hindu community gathered outside University of Toronto today afternoon to protest against university’s involvement in the controversial anti-Hindu conference ‘Dismantling Global Hindutva’.
The protest was supported by many Hindu organizations including Hindu Forum Canada, Canada Hindu Volunteers, Indo-Canadian Kashmir Forum and Canada Hindu Schools. The protestors demanded that the university should refrain from promoting and endorsing the upcoming conference starting tomorrow.
A series of emails have been written to the university in this regard by concerned community members. However, the university is going ahead with supporting this conference citing freedom of speech and academic learning in order to pursue truth and disseminate knowledge. The university has confirmed that several professors will be engaged in this conference in their academic capacity and it remains committed to principles of advance learning and critical dialogue.
The conference has been a contentious issue in the past couple of weeks since its announcement. Several Hindu groups have questioned the timing of the conference, the fact that the organizers have chosen to remain anonymous, no call to papers and have called it an agenda driven event to create divide among the Hindu community. The conference has been accused to target Hindu students at the university level and could potentially harm those Hindu students who would not conform to organizers’ view on Hindus, Hinduism and Hindutva.
In response to this conference, there are two separate conferences being organized.
