Rupa Subramanya: I’m Stuck Between the Woke Left and the Nativist Right

During the last few months of 2023, a Hindu temple in the Toronto suburb of Brampton, Ontario, erected a statue of the Hindu demigod Hanuman. The 55-foot statue, which looms over its neighborhood, was built on grounds owned by the temple, paid for with private funds, and violated no building codes.

I’m a Hindu myself—an immigrant from India who came to Canada in 1998 to attend college. I became a journalist and later a Canadian citizen, eventually gaining a reputation as a reporter and conservative-leaning commenter. Like many of my fellow conservatives, I decried government overreach on Covid-19 policy responses, criticized the government of Justin Trudeau, and covered the excesses of the progressive left. I believe passionately in property rights, the rule of law, and the importance of free expression.

So I was shocked when I saw the torrent of outrage the Hanuman statue ignited among many Canadian conservatives, some of whom I had long viewed as friends. 

The gist of their anger was that as the Black Lives Matter movement spread across North America, “anti-racism” protests in Canada led to the removal of statues of prominent historical figures on the grounds that they were racist. It infuriated them that after seeing a statue of Sir John A. Macdonald, the country’s first prime minister, taken down, they were now supposed to accept a statue of some Hindu demigod worshipped by people in India.

As Ben Bankas, a Toronto-based comedian, put it on X, “Explain to me how this statue is okay in Canada but Sir John A. Macdonald is not.”

I had publicly opposed the removal of public statues—not just of Macdonald but American founding fathers like Thomas Jefferson, whose statue had been taken down in New York. When a Macdonald statue was toppled by activists in Hamilton, Ontario, in August 2021, I wrote, “If you’re ok with the illegal toppling of these statues it means two things: a) you don’t believe in the rule of law, b) you don’t believe in Canada.”

And I defended Canada against the ridiculous progressive accusation that it was an irredeemably racist nation. “Canada,” I wrote in the National Post in June 2021, “is one of the most tolerant countries on the planet, and one which I am proud to call home.” 

All of which was why seeing my fellow conservatives attack a statue put up on private property that honored my religion was devastating. I had met some of these people while reporting on the 2022 truckers’ protest in Canada. Back then, I had proudly defended their right to oppose vaccine mandates. Was I no longer acceptably “Canadian” to them because I was a Hindu who had immigrated 30 years ago? Another critic of the Hanuman statue wrote, “If you’re not fighting to defend Canadian culture & Canadian people then you’re honestly not helping.”