SAJJAN’S TROUBLE IN INDIA
Sikh community eyes his stumbles
In what should have been a soft PR exercise, Harjit Sajjan’s first trip to India as Canada’s defence minister has gone from being an electoral victory lap in his birth country to a slog on Ottawa’s apology circuit. The trip has brought into question his integrity as a leader, diminished his venerated standing before military personnel and even dulled his image within the Sikh community.
During a speech in Delhi, Sajjan veered off-script and deliberately inserted a line about being “the architect” of Operation Medusa, a largescale 2006 Canadian offensive in Afghanistan. It was a false statement: in Kandahar, where Sajjan served three tours while a reservist, he was a mid-level officer providing intelligence.
In the House of Commons, the minister looked weary from repeating contrition for the battlefield boast, but failed to provide an explanation.
It’s not unusual for Canadian immigrants to flash their success when they return to their homeland — Sajjan also made a visit to his birth village in the Punjab on this trip.
Had it been Sajjan’s only embellishment of his operational role, this errant speech could have been written off as typical politician’s selfaggrandizement. However, he also stated this alternative fact in an interview in 2015.
While this controversy has hogged the spotlight in Canadian media, it was not the only trouble spot arising from his first visit back to India in 14 years. The minister’s tour, particularly of Punjab, was notably bumpy. The chief minister of the state, Capt. Amarinder Singh, and his cabinet, refused to meet with Sajjan.
Singh alleged that the minister and his father, Kundan Sajjan, a former executive of the World Sikh Organization (WSO), are both Khalistan sympathizers. At the height of the Punjab conflict in the 1980s, the WSO espoused the formation of an independent Sikh state.
The allegation against the minister is baseless and seems motivated by Singh’s bitterness at the Trudeau government. The Canadian government did not permit Singh to campaign last year among Canada’s one million-plus South Asians, forcing Singh to cancel the Canadian leg of his North American tour. The Punjab chief minister’s rebuff, however, did little to help Sajjan’s mandate of advancing Canada-India relations, or of re-energizing stalled CanadaIndia free-trade talks, first launched in 2010.
However, Sajjan’s most agonizing moments during the week-long trip may have been in his circumspect responses to questions about the Ontario provincial government recently passing a motion recognizing the 1984 Delhi killings of Sikhs as an act of genocide. By some counts, as many as 30,000 Sikhs were killed by Hindu mobs in a four-day murderous frenzy. In 2011, SurreyNewton MP Sukh Dhaliwal was the first MP to petition for the recognition of the 1984 killings as an act of genocide, receiving support then from Navdeep Bains, now the minister of innovation.
The failure of the Indian government to prosecute the government officials who organized the mobs has been a source of much pain for Sikhs worldwide for the past three decades. Sajjan, however, distanced himself from the motion.
In a stumbling response, he highlighted it was brought forward by a private member of the Ontario legislature (Harinder Malhi), insinuating the motion was politically motivated. He further added that this was not his position as a member of the federal Liberal government. Sikhs who were hopeful Canada’s most recognizable cabinet member would help resolve this long outstanding social justice issue were clearly disappointed in these answers.
Left in the wake of Sajjan’s India trip are gnawing questions about how much of his cultivated image as Canada’s “badass” minister is truth and how much is hyperbole.
After all, why would he distance himself from a social cause as glaring as the Delhi killings? And why would a veteran break the military code to boast and take credit for the sacrifices of other soldiers?
After nearly 18 months in office, it seems all we have learned about the first term MP from Vancouver South is that it’s hard to gauge where Sajjan the soldier ends and the politician begins.