Dosanjh became first Indo-Canadian premier
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At about 4 p.m. on Friday, Feb. 8, 1985, Ujjal Dosanjh left for the day from his law office on Victoria Drive. He was heading home for a dinner that he and his wife, Raminder, were hosting.
In the weeks and months before, Dosanjh had taken a courageous, but unpopular, stand in the Indo-Canadian community. At a time when a vociferous group was organizing on behalf of a separate Sikh country of Khalistan in Punjab, India, Dosanjh had come out against violence and intimidation. By taking a stand in public, he received threats by phone and in the mail.
As Dosanjh was about to get into his car on that winter day, a man walked toward him. The man had an iron bar, spiked with a metal bolt. He swung and hit Dosanjh in the skull several times. It took 80 stitches to close the wound and left him with a permanent scar. His right hand was broken in several places as he tried to deflect the blows.
Dosanjh said he wasn’t going to be silenced by the attack.
“There is nothing that will stop me until I achieve my goal of seeing peace and harmony in our community,” he told reporters from a hospital bed at Vancouver General Hospital later that evening.
While Dosanjh continued to be a target of intimidation by Khalistanis for years afterwards, his profile outside of the Indo-Canadian community rose considerably.
He successfully won his first seat for the NDP in Vancouver-Kensington in 1991. Four years later, Premier Mike Harcourt appointed him attorney general, where one of the big challenges he faced was the Gustafsen Lake Standoff.
In 2000, Dosanjh became premier of B.C., the first Indo-Canadian to become head of a provincial government in Canada. Later, he was a federal health minister.
Dosanjh’s journey from India to Canada started in his ancestral village of Dosanjh Kalan. As a 17-year-old wearing a turban, he emigrated in 1964 to England, where he learned to speak English by listening to BBC Radio. Four years later, he left the U.K. and arrived in South Vancouver. His first job was working on the green chain in a sawmill.
A graduate of the University of B.C.’s law school, Dosanjh worked with the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, where he helped lay the groundwork for the Canadian Farmworkers Union. Dosanjh gave legal help to farm workers, many of whom were immigrants from Punjab like him.
“Why should my story matter?” he asked in his memoir, Journey After Midnight: India, Canada and the Road Beyond. “It does not seem important in the larger scheme of things. But our own stories always matter to us, and to the generations that follow. Merging with the stories of so many others, they give meaning to our lives and to the lives of nations.”