44 THE CARAVAN
model minority · reportage
now India’s ambassador to the Maldives, told me,
“It would not be appropriate for him to comment
on issues relating to India-Canada relations.”
More recently, Jagmeet has angered Indian
officials with his statements on the arrest and
alleged mistreatment of Jagtar Singh Johal. A
Scotland-born British citizen, Johal was arrested
while visiting Punjab in November 2017. Pros-
ecutors and police said he was involved in the
targeted killings of Hindu nationalists. His lawyer
dismissed this, and said he has been subjected to
police torture. The UK prime minister Theresa
May told reporters her government was “pursu-
ing the case and watching what is happening with
concern.” Jagmeet tweeted that the torture al-
legations against “Indian authorities” are “deeply
chilling & requires immediate attention.” Thukral,
of Amarinder’s office, told me, “Jagmeet has also
unleashed a baseless campaign against us with his
open support for Johal.”
Canada’s next general election is scheduled for
the latter half of 2019. The Indian government
would likely prefer a Canadian leader who does
not have Jagmeet’s critical stances. But, Subrama-
nian told me, “I don’t think the Indian government
will interfere in a major way in the Canadian elec-
tion.” Canada is not a major world power, and re-
ceives only so much Indian attention, and the two
countries’ relationship is now much more focussed
on trade and commerce than the diaspora.
Yet, for many Punjabis, discord between
Canadian Sikhs and Indian officials is of major
concern. Punjab receives a good chunk of India’s
overseas remittances, which have been especially
beneficial for rural communities. In Thikriwala,
residents proudly showed me a large new house
financed in part, they said, by the emigrant son
of the family who owned it. Sandhu—who has a
child in Canada and hosts a radio show for the
diaspora—worried that the Punjab government’s
failure to understand Canadians’ concerns about
1984 could drive a wedge between Sikh popula-
tions. This lack of cohesion is “leading to a very
new kind of mini-Punjab emerging abroad which
is alienated from their home country and their
home state,” he said. “A stage may come when the
twain may not meet.”
There is already evidence of a breach. In Janu-
ary, 96 gurdwaras in the United States announced
that they were banning Indian officials fromentering their premises. They joined a dozen or so
Ontario gurdwaras that had just issued a similar
ban.
A press release from the Sikh Coordination
Committee East Coast, one of several US groups
involved in the ban, said that the decision had
been driven by the Indian government’s failure to
reckon with 1984 and the rise of Hindu national-
ism. “There’s been a lot of injustices that have been
done to Sikhs, and the Indian government has
done nothing,” Harjinder Singh, a spokesperson
for the SCCEC, told me. “This is one way to convey
the message to the Indian government.”
In follow-up interviews with me, the group also
said that India’s attitude towards politicians such
as Jagmeet had been an important factor. “The
concern is Punjab chief minister Amarinder Singh,
he’s blamed Mr Jagmeet Singh, he said that he’s
a Khalistani,” Himmat Singh, one of the SCCEC’s
coordinators, said. Harjinder told me that North
American Sikhs were frustrated by “false propa-
ganda” from India against Jagmeet.
But even in Canada, not all Sikhs are as protec-
tive of Jagmeet. He has alienated many older Sikh
Canadians with memories of the 1980s. Intra-Sikh
divisions exist within North America itself, and
the concerns of Punjab’s politicians get vocalised
by Sikh Canadians too. “I see people who I know
are of the older generation who are focussed
on the issue of Khalistan and—particularly in
Vancouver—the Air India bombing,” Naveen Girn,
who works in the office of Vancouver’s mayor,
said. “It’s easy for people outside of Vancouver to
be romanticising about Khalistan and the freedom
movement. It’s not romantic here. It’s real.”
Yet for the 37-year-old Girn and many younger,
politically involved Canadian Sikhs, the question
of whether Jagmeet himself is a “Khalistani” is at
best an aside.
“I don’t know if he is or not,” Girn told me. “It
doesn’t really matter to me.” What does mat-
ter, he said, was Jagmeet’s outreach to different
groups, his charisma and his insistence—in both
his positions and his appearance—that he can be
many things at once: an LGBTQ ally and a person
of colour, a labour-rights activist and an environ-
mentalist, a Canadian and a Sikh.
“He challenges people to look at him as a multi-
faceted person, a person who can have different
points of view, a person who can be a South Asian
and not just care about freedom issues in India,”
Girn said. “That’s what the issue is.”“he got elected in the NDP pool,” Nijhawan, the
York University sociologist, told me. “That in and
of itself is quite a powerful statement.”
Jagmeet’s victory was historic not just because
he is from a visible minority. He was the first NDP“There’s been a lot of injustices that
have been done to Sikhs, and the Indian
government has done nothing,” Harjinder
Singh, a spokesperson for the Sikh
Coordination Committee East Coast, said.