New NDP leader owes explanation to the public
Dodging of interviewer’s query throws his moral judgment and leadership into question, says Kokulan Mahendiran.
In Jagmeet Singh, the New Democratic Party has found a young, visible-minority leader to replace its aging establishment figurehead. Singh seems to be the very epitome of an energetic and multicultural Canada — with a few extra drops of panache.
In a world in which a viral video has the same impact as a thousand masterfully planned and executed political ads, the internationally popularized clip of Singh reacting in a calm and positive manner to a rather belligerent protester all but guaranteed him victory in the NDP’s leadership contest. With his widely covered candidacy and recent victory, he has completely reinvigorated his ailing party.
With morale among Canada’s left wing approaching “orange crush” proportions, some may be thinking nothing can impede them in their road to 24 Sussex Drive (or perhaps Rideau Cottage). After all, having gotten through the leadership campaign with help from a swooning media along with ceaselessly positive social media coverage, Singh managed to arrive at CBC’s Power and Politics Monday without the slightest blotch to speak of.
The spotlight cast on major political leaders, however, has been known to have a way of uncovering what might have otherwise remained outside the public realm. It took but a single question, albeit one that had to be repeatedly asked, for the glimmering sheen that surrounded Singh’s very person to immediately vanish.
Terry Milewski, the interviewer, posed what most Canadians watching may have assumed to be an entirely softball question. Would Singh condemn the hero-worship of a man responsible
To have repeatedly dithered on such a simple yet meaningful question cannot simply be overlooked as an innocent gaffe.
for the largest mass murder in Canadian history? Despite repeated attempts at trying to garner a straightforward answer, Singh dodged the question. Instead, Singh began to speak about Hindu-Sikh relations — along with a great deal of other tangential rhetoric.
At the very end of the interview, when directly asked “so you won’t denounce those posters of Parmar?” Singh, avoiding answering the question, replied, “I don’t know who was responsible, but I think we need to find out who was truly responsible.” This despite the terrorist in question, Talwinder Singh Parmar, being widely considered, including by a B.C. judge in a 2005 case, as having been the mastermind of the bombing of Air India Flight 182. Parmar was killed by Indian police in 1992.
If Jagmeet Singh is more concerned with the appeasement of some hard-line elements of the Canadian Sikh community than with roundly condemning the architect of such an atrocious act of mass murder, he clearly does not possess the leadership qualities required to lead this country. If Singh himself believes that Parmar is a man who should be honoured as a martyr despite having orchestrated the deaths on June 23, 1985 of 329 people (of whom 268 were Canadian citizens) on Air India Flight 182, then he does not possess the moral qualities required to lead this country.
To have repeatedly dithered on such a simple yet meaningful question cannot simply be overlooked as an innocent gaffe. While he condemned the Air India bombing itself, his avoidance of an opportunity to condemn its mastermind was wilful and unrelenting. One wonders whether this was the reason he had initially refused to come for the interview without being provided the questions in advance (a demand which, to its credit, was not conceded by the CBC).
The New Democratic Party would be well advised to either elicit an apology or an appropriate clarification out of Singh, and if one of those is not forthcoming, to elicit his immediate resignation from all leadership roles. Canadians cannot and should not be led by a man who can’t bring himself to say there is something amiss in the veneration of a terrorist.