SANSAD has grown out of a North American organization, called Non-Resident Indians for Secularism and Democracy (NRISAD) that was established in 1993 following the attack on the 17th- century mosque, Babri Masjid, in Ayodhya, India by Hindu communalist forces on December 6, 1992. Following several years of work opposing communal violence in India and the development of support networks opposed to such violence within the Indian diaspora in North America NRISAD exhausted itself. However, the Vancouver branch of the organization recognized through its practice that the concerns of NRISAD in regard to minorities and human rights were not specifically Indian but South Asian and had to be reformulated for the South Asian diaspora as a whole. This was realized with the formation of SANSAD in Vancouver, BC, in 2000.