Although Buddhists make up more than 70% of Sri Lanka’s population, a Hindu nationalist group in the country’s northern Jaffna peninsula has begun using a political vocabulary that would be familiar thousands of kilometers away in India.
In 2023, Siva Senai, a Hindu nationalist organization, wrote to then-Sri Lanka president Maithripala Sirisena warning of “Love Jihad,” a conspiracy theory popularized by Hindu nationalists in India, which claims that Muslim men deliberately marry Hindu women to convert them to Islam to alter the country’s religious balance. In Sri Lanka, Siva Senai has used the claim to demand action against what it describes as the conversion of Hindus by Muslims and Christians, and to push for anti-conversion legislation.
A December 2025 report by the Washington-based Center for the Study of Organized Hate (CSOH), Contours of Emerging Hate in Sri Lanka, found that Hindu nationalist organizations have been expanding their presence in Sri Lanka since 2016. The report documents their use of social media to circulate narratives about religious conversion, demographic threats, and the alleged persecution of Hindus, while also tracing connections to Hindu nationalist groups and media platforms in India.