Celebrating Diwali and Confronting Crime: Calgary's South Asian Community
Two stories define this period for Calgary's South Asian diaspora: a joyful coming-together for Diwali and Annakut at the BAPS mandir, and a sober community town hall confronting extortion and organized crime that has been targeting Sikh families across Alberta.
🎉 BAPS Brings Calgary Together for Diwali and Annakut 2025
The BAPS Swaminarayan Sanstha community in Calgary gathered to observe two of the most significant events in the Hindu religious calendar: Diwali, the Festival of Lights, and Annakut, the tradition of devotional offering held the day after Diwali. The Calgary celebrations were part of BAPS's global network of annual events marking this season across hundreds of mandirs worldwide, drawing families, long-time devotees, and newer arrivals together for prayer, spiritual discourse, and shared festivity. Diwali holds deep religious and cultural resonance as a commemoration of the triumph of light over darkness, knowledge over ignorance, and good over evil — themes expressed through the lighting of diyas, devotional singing, and communal gathering. Annakut, meaning mountain of food, involves the preparation and offering of hundreds of vegetarian dishes as an act of gratitude and collective devotion. In the BAPS tradition, these dishes are prepared by community volunteers in an act of seva, or selfless service, that is itself considered a form of spiritual practice. For Calgary's growing South Asian population, events like Diwali and Annakut serve as anchors of cultural continuity, particularly meaningful for children and young people building their connection to heritage in a diaspora context far from the subcontinent. The Calgary mandir has functioned for many years as a gathering point for the Swaminarayan community across Alberta, providing regular satsang, youth programming, and humanitarian outreach alongside its major annual celebrations. The 2025 festivities brought together recent arrivals and long-established community members, reinforcing the bonds that connect different waves of South Asian migration to a shared tradition and a shared home in Calgary. [1]
🤝 Calgary Town Hall Confronts Extortion and Organized Crime Targeting the Sikh Community
Members of Alberta's South Asian community — predominantly from the Sikh community — gathered at the Venice Banquet Hall in northeast Calgary on December 14, 2025, for a high-profile town hall on extortion, organized crime, and violence that has been disproportionately targeting Sikh families. The event was organized by the World Sikh Organization of Canada, the Sikh Federation, and the Dashmesh Culture Centre, and drew municipal, provincial, and federal elected officials alongside a large community turnout. The Calgary gathering was one of a series of coordinated town halls held across Canada at the same time, with parallel events in Brampton, Ontario, and Surrey, British Columbia, reflecting the national scope of a problem that communities have been confronting with increasing urgency. Jaskaran Sandhu, Alberta regional president of the World Sikh Organization of Canada, described the situation directly. Criminals have been terrorizing the community through extortion schemes, connections to organized crime networks, and targeted violence. We all know someone, we are all one or two degrees separated from someone who has been directly impacted by the violence, he told the gathering. His words drew immediate recognition from an audience many of whom came with personal connections to the issue. Alberta's Justice Minister, speaking at the event, indicated the province is planning to establish a dedicated cybercrime task force in response to the digitally facilitated dimensions of extortion that have made these schemes particularly difficult for communities to resist and for law enforcement to trace. The town hall provided a direct line of communication between community members and elected representatives, a form of civic engagement that attendees described as long overdue. The Calgary event placed Alberta's Sikh and South Asian community at the centre of a national conversation about safety, organized crime, and the responsibilities of government toward communities under threat. [4]