Today, a cofounder of Indians Abroad for Pluralist India, Gurpreet Singh, was back in Holland Park in Surrey doing what he's done before: protesting the Indian government's discriminatory Citizenship Amendment Act.

Singh, who's also a Georgia Straight contributor, wasn't about to censor himself after hearing what sounded to him like a threat from a local Hindu nationalist.

According to Singh, the man was among a group of people who repeatedly heckled him and other panelists who were discussing the legislation at a forum at UBC on February 25.

Singh said that the man approached him afterward, mentioning that Singh had once asked "inconvenient questions" of a controversial Hindu preacher, Sadhvi Rithambra. This occurred at the Surrey Hindu temple in 2002.

The man then told Singh that he was able to save himself back then, but this time he wouldn't be able to.

Singh said that UBC security officials were so concerned that they ended up escorting him and the elderly president of Indians Abroad for Pluralist India, Parshotam Dosanjh, to their car.

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In his columns on Straight.com and other websites, Singh has emerged as one of Canada's leading critics of India's bullying Hindu nationalist Bharatjiya Janata Party, which is led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. 

Singh is not only deeply troubled by the rising number of attacks on minorities in India since Modi rose to power in 2014, he's also appalled by the collective silence of the Canadian media and the vast majority of Canadian politicians.

Only when Hindu extremist mobs started openly attacking Muslims in Delhi last week did many Canadians wake up to the magnitude of Islamophobia in India.

One of the few politicians who's consistently raised his voice has been NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh. And he did it again this week after Gurpreet Singh was threatened.

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What happened in Delhi this week was a smaller-scale version of a horrific pogrom against Muslims in the western state of Gujarat in 2002 when Modi was its chief minister.

Here's how widely admired Delhi writer Arundhati Roy described the Gujarat massacre in one of her essays in the recent book My Seditious Heart:

"The genocide began as collective punishment for an unsolved crime—the burning of a railway coach in which fifty-three Hindu pilgrims burned to death. In a carefully planned orgy of supposed retaliation, two thousand Muslims were slaughtered in broad daylight by squads of armed killers, organized by fascist militias, and backed by the Gujarat government and the administration of the day.

"Muslim women were gang-raped and burned alive," Roy continues. "Muslim shops, Muslim businesses, and Muslim shrines and mosques were systematically destroyed. Two thousand were killed and more than one hundred thousand people were driven from their homes." 

In that same essay, she reports that the Ahmedabad commissioner of police, P.C. Pandey, was promoted by Modi to become director general of police.

Like in Gujarat, police stood by in Delhi as Muslims were being attacked in broad daylight.

One of Modi's chief henchmen back then was Amit Shah, who later rose to become the president of the BJP and is now Modi's home minister.

Shah is also the politician who shut down the Internet in Kashmir and jailed civil-society activists and politicians after revoking Article 370 of the Indian constitution giving this Muslim-majority region special status.

Many Canadians don't understand that there is currently a counter-revolution underway in India.

It's ultimately aimed at overturning the monumental achievements of the country's founders.

That includes Mahatma Gandhi, first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, and a key author of the constitution, Bhimrao Ambedkar, a scholar and jurist who was also the leader of the so-called untouchables.

They all shared a view of India as a secular state in which everyone would be free to practise their faith without discrimination.

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On the other side in this debate in the 1940s were members of the Hindu paramilitary organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, and Hindu nationalist writer Veer Savarkar, the former president of Hindu Mahasabha. Savarkar coined the term "Hindutva", which is a malignant form of Hindu political extremism that leads some of its followers to attack minorities.

Back in the 1940s, RSS leaders and Savarkar openly admired how Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini were able to inspire such nationalist devotion among their followers. And Savarkar compared India's Muslims to Germany's Jews.

The Hindu extremists' central point back then, as now, is that India is fundamentally a Hindu nation. This is their viewpoint even though people have been practising Islam in the country for centuries. India is also home to Christians, Sikhs, Jains, and Zoroastrians, as well as people of other faiths.

It was an RSS man, Nathuram Godse, who assassinated Gandhi in 1948. Savarkar was charged in the conspiracy but was later acquitted.

Modi was also an RSS member and is an open admirer of Savarkar. Shah became interested in politics while a member of the student wing of the RSS.

Gurpreet Singh knows in his heart and in his mind that the current leaders of India want to destroy the very idea of India as envisaged by such leading lights of democracy as Mahatma Gandhi, Nehru, and Ambedkar.

According to Singh, their long-term goal is to create a theocratic Hindu regime in what's now the world's largest democracy.

Because he speaks out about this, he was theatened.

That's why anyone who admires either Gandhi, Nehru, or Ambedkar should pay attention to this story.

All of us, from the Canadian prime minister to the premiers to city councillors, should feel a duty to condemn the actions of those who want to shatter what these three 20th-century giants—Gandhi, Nehru, and Ambedkar—were able to do in India.

And that was to create a country founded on the principles of equality, a free and open media, democracy, and freedom of religion.