29model minority · reportageFEBRUARY 2018tion. On the face of it, they constitute
a “model minority”—hard working,
peaceful and politically well repre-
sented. There are currently four Sikhs
in the federal cabinet. The community
can boast of several cultural celebrities,
such as the comedian Jasmeet Singh,
or “Jus Reign,” and the Instagram poet
Rupi Kaur. Jagmeet’s elevation to the
leadership of a federal party is an-
other confirmation of the community’s
achievements.
But Canada has a chequered history
with its Sikh diaspora, replete with
racist policies and actions. The rela-
tionship between Canadian Sikhs and
Punjabi Sikhs is also fraught. Salman
Rushdie, who moved from India to the
United Kingdom as a teenager, fa-
mously wrote that emigrants’ “physical
alienation from India almost inevitably
means that we will not be capable of
reclaiming precisely the thing that
was lost: that we will, in short, create
fictions, not actual cities or villages, but
invisible ones, imaginary homelands.”
Canadian Sikhs are no exception.
Canada was a hotbed for Sikh reli-
gious separatism during the 1980s and
1990s, when a number of Sikhs advo-
cated for the creation of an independent
Sikh homeland in the Punjab called
Khalistan. The movement for a “Sikh
nation” was violent, as was the Indian
government’s clampdown against it.
The differences it sowed—between
Sikhs and the Indian government, but
also among Sikhs themselves—have
never been fully reconciled. Many
Sikhs in Canada, especially younger
ones, remember those years very differ-
ently from Sikhs in Punjab, who had to
contend directly with the violence.
Jagmeet has brought many of these
divisions back to the fore with his state-
ments and acts. A sharp critic of the
Indian government, he advocated for
many years to declare the 1984 massa-
cre—thousands of Sikhs were murdered
following the assassination of the
Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi—
a genocide. In a controversial interview,
he revealed a crack in his carefully
managed image when he declined the
chance to denounce the Canadian Sikh
widely considered responsible for the
bombing of Air India Flight 182, the
world’s second deadliest plane attack,
behind only 9/11. And when asked if
he supports an independent Sikh state,
he has spoken in broad terms about his
enthusiastic support for the right to
self-determination.
Jagmeet’s activism around 1984 has
helped make him popular among left-
leaning Canadian Sikhs, who see his
stance as illustrative of his—and their—
broader embrace of human-rights
and social justice. Jagmeet’s public
outreach to marginalised groups,
particularly the LGBT community, and
his strong positions on labour laws and
tax reforms, are also part of his project:
creating a broad coalition that includes
social-justice activists, young progres-
sives and what Canada calls its “visible
minorities”—non-white, non-aboriginal
citizens—that will, if all goes according
to plan, deliver him to the post of prime
m inister.
It will not be easy. To become Cana-
da’s first leader from a visible minority,
Jagmeet will need to defeat the Liberal
Party’s Justin Trudeau—the popular
current prime minister—and win over
voters still sceptical about open dis-
plays of religious identity. Although he
has turned the difficult history of Sikhs
in both Canada and India into a rallying
point for a politics that declares itself
against discrimination of all forms,
his stances have alienated certain
older Sikhs and sharpened differencesbetween Sikhs in the two countries.
These, taken with his icy relations with
the Indian government, have troubling
implications for both states. The rep-
resentation of Jagmeet as a youthful,
exciting social-justice activist has made
him into an international icon. But his
positions have also dredged up painful
elements of Canada’s past and shown
that, despite its progressive Western
reputation, identity politics can have a
dark side.the first sikhs to visit canada were
Punjabi soldiers travelling across North
America after Queen Victoria’s 1897To become Canada’s
first leader from
a visible minority,
Jagmeet will need
to defeat the Liberal
Party’s Justin
Trudeau—the popular
current prime
minister—and win over
voters still sceptical
about open displays of
religious identity.jacques langevin / sygma / getty images