34 THE CARAVAN
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before describing his political awakening and the
1984 Sikh massacre.
His awareness of the event deeply impacted his
and his friends’ political outlook. Jagmeet became
loosely involved in the Sikh Activist Network,
a social-justice group founded by his younger
brother, Gurratan, and Gurratan’s best friend.
The group organised around a variety of issues,
but 1984 was central to their work. When Kamal
Nath—a prominent Indian politician from the
Congress party, who allegedly helped organise
the anti-Sikh violence—visited Ontario in March
2010, Gurratan organised a protest. Speaking over
the phone this January, he told me that he and
Jagmeet saw Nath’s invitation as “an affront to us
as Canadians.”
“We pride ourselves on standing up for human
rights and speaking out against injustice,” Gur-
ratan said. “Seeing complacency by our elected of-
ficials in that respect really prompted us to say we
need politicians who are not afraid to speak truth
to power.” The Sikh Activist Network decided it
needed an ally in government. Jagmeet, with his
legal background and charisma, was a natural
choice.
For many of Canada’s young, second-generation
Sikhs, awareness of the violence in India has been
politically and religiously transformational. “They
are growing up in the legacy of 1984,” Michael
Nijhawan, a York University sociologist who stud-
ies Canada’s Punjabi diaspora, said. “This looms in
the background.” Anger over the atrocities and the
subsequent lack of justice—none of the high-level
politicians purportedly involved in organising
the massacre have been convicted—also became
a vehicle for other, Canada-specific concerns, in-
cluding disproportionate targeting by police, hate
crimes and unflattering racial stereotypes.
“They reframe it more in terms of the griev-
ances they have as second-generation immigrants
in a Canadian society where they’re racialised by
the mainstream,” Nijhawan said.
These issues are hardly unique to Sikhs, and
have been central to the rise of identity politics
across a much broader spectrum. “They’re con-
nected to other movements, around Palestinian
issues or what have you,” Nijhawan said.
Mo Dhaliwal, a strategist for Singh’s campaign,
argued that the rise in minority activism in Can-
ada in recent years stems from people of colour,
born and raised in the country, demanding equal
recognition. “What you’re seeing is a broad-based
decolonising of people,” Dhaliwal told me. “I think
this is prevalent across all cultures in Canada.”
He was heartened by the current trajectory of
Canadian politics, with the historically disadvan-
taged finding increasing success. Naheed Kurban
Nenshi, a Muslim, presently governs the city ofCalgary. Kathleen Wynne, the premier of Ontario,
is gay. And now Jagmeet Singh, a turbaned Sikh,
heads Canada’s third-largest party.
Jagmeet became the leader of the New Demo-
cratic Party in part by signing up new members
from minority groups. But his decision to launch
his political career under the NDP’s auspices
also relates to Indian politics. When Kamal Nath
visited Ontario, the leader of the NDP at the time,
Jack Layton, was one of the few Canadian politi-
cians to endorse Gurratan’s protest. “The voices
of a great many Indo-Canadians from all across
the country have been very clear,” Layton said of
Nath’s invitation. “They are especially hurt by the
presence in Canada of a man who allegedly organ-
ised anti-Sikh pogroms.”
Jagmeet mounted his first political campaign
the year after Nath’s visit, in 2011, narrowly losing
a vote to represent a federal parliamentary district
that no New Democrat had ever won. Soon after
that, he triumphed in a provincial legislative elec-
tion.
In many ways, Jagmeet and the NDP are a
natural fit. It was, after all, the CCF—the NDP’s
main predecessor—that helped Sikhs gain the
right to vote. The party is further to the left than
Canada’s other two major parties—the governing,
centre-left Liberals and the nominally right-wing
Conservatives. The NDP’s constitution describes it
as coming from “democratic socialist traditions,”
working through “farmer, labour, co-operative,
feminist, human rights and environmental move-
ments, and with First Nations, Métis and Inuit
peoples”—the country’s indigenous population—
“to build a more just, equal, and sustainable
Canada.”
At the same time, Jagmeet is something of an
outlier in the history of the party, which was
founded in 1961 when the CCF merged with
Canada’s largest trade union. The NDP has tradi-
tionally been focussed on working-class economic
issues, and it has never performed as well among
South Asians as the Liberals or Conservatives.
Singh’s focus on identity politics is in many ways a
departure from this history. “Institutionally, it is a
big step for Canadian Sikhs,” Balpreet said.
This was evident in Jagmeet’s campaign for the
NDP leadership, largely managed by younger, pro-
gressive activists who were nonetheless electoral
neophytes. Jagmeet was said to have turned down
help from more experienced party hands. Jus
Reign, whose comedy has made him a YouTube
sensation, made Jagmeet’s earliest campaign vid-
eos. In one of these, Jus Reign conducts an inter-
view with Singh that is part satire, part serious—
complete with references to the iconic Canadian
donut chain Tim Horton’s and the all-white 1990s
American television sitcom “Full House.”opposite page:
On 1 October 2017,
Jagmeet was
elected to head
Canada’s New
Democratic Party—
becoming the first
non-white, non-
aboriginal member
of a minority to lead
one of the country’s
three main political
parties. The NDP has
44 of the 338 seats
in Parliament.