Oats hosts a critical discussion about Jagmeet Singh’s book, ‘Love & Courage: My Story of Family, Resilience, and Overcoming the Unexpected.’ (We’re not trying to mean — we promise! We’re just trying to understand why it is that the NDP remains committed to centrism, even while the electoral Left in the US and elsewhere is going through a resurgence.)

Episode transcript

Rimmy: My name is Rimmy.

Veronika: I’m Veronika.

Umair: And I’m Umair.

Rimmy: You’re tuning into Oats for Breakfast.

Veronika: Which is an eco-socialist podcast.

Umair: Based in Toronto.

Rimmy: If you haven’t done so yet, make sure to subscribe to the podcast. You can find us on any podcast platform including iTunes, Spotify, and Stitcher.

Veronika: You can support us by going to Patreon.com/OatsForBreakfast and becoming a patron.

Rimmy: In this episode, we’re going to be chatting about the NDP leader Jagmeet Singh’s vacuousness.

Veronika: As leftists in Canada, we’ve been wondering why the resurgence of Left politics that’s currently taking place in the US hasn’t been replicated in Canada. In other words, why is the NDP so committed to centrism?

Umair: In order to contribute to answering this question, we decided to read Jagmeet Singh’s book, which is called Love & Courage: My Story of Family, Resilience, and Overcoming the Unexpected. Much of our discussion in this episode is going to be based on our thoughts of that book.

Rimmy: So we can start off maybe by talking a little bit about the NDP.

Umair: Yeah, especially for our non-Canadian audience, maybe just the basics—like if we can even say what does “NDP” stand for.

Veronika: New Democratic Party.

Umair: And the NDP is historically our social democratic party. But increasingly not so much, right? Increasingly they are insistent on this stuff about electability and really trying to tamper down anything that would make them seem like they’re actually committed leftists. And so in rhetoric, they often seem very much like the Liberal Party of Canada. Though their policies can be more progressive—they kind of have to be since that’s the pole they have in our politics.

But okay, so what did you guys make of this book, Jagmeet Singh’s Love & Courage? It was released during the federal election campaign last year, so that was 2019.

Veronika: Is that what we decided to do instead of talking about like a platform?

Umair: Oooh, sick burn! That was the platform, “Love & Courage,” or that was the slogan –

Rimmy: And in this book, I liked how he just says that this slogan was created by an agency. This was something that they thought of as like part of his brand. So the idea of his brand and what brand the NDP should be, this is not something that is just coming externally – I think they themselves, that is how they see how you go about doing politics in the modern age.

Umair: Yeah, you brand yourself. I have that part here actually, where Jagmeet writes:

“A dear friend of mine who runs a creative agency had helped developed Love & Courage for the campaign, but for me, it was more than just a slogan. When my friend presented the idea to me, I felt those two terms captured more than just my motivation, more than just my journey – they perfectly encapsulated the lessons life taught me, my values, who I am, and the way I try to live my life.”

Rimmy: Wow, inspiring!

Veronika: Inspiring!

Umair: Yeah.

Rimmy: I think that basically encapsulates what the entire book is. It’s very much a PR fluff piece for him to push out before the election. I’m not sure who he is even reading this book. I don’t think it’s one of these books that—like an American politician, a big politician, it hits best-sellers. I’m not sure who is reading this outside of maybe political journalists. They’ll pick up some of elements from the book, and they’ll bring them out into newspapers, magazines, columns, and that’ll be part of the overall campaigning approach—Jagmeet trying to endear himself to the people. It is transparently a PR sort of piece.

Veronika: But not even really for his career in that sense. It really is more like personal sympathy, personal reliability, because you don’t really get a sense of politics when you read the book.

Umair: Yeah, there’s no politics.

Veronika: You just read about him, his journey, his “inspiring” journey.

Umair: It’s a memoir. But you would still think that he is a politician—he’s the leader of one of the political parties that’s contenting for power in the country. You would think that there would be politics in the book, but there really isn’t.

Rimmy: But I actually think that that is part of how he wants to frame himself. He’s the unwilling politician who’s just been doing good work on the side and now other people are like, “Jagmeet, you’re such a genuine guy, we need you is because you don’t want to be a politician.” And when he’s talking about these experiences, he always connects them to what will become – what will inform his politics later on. On all his personal stuff, he tries to impose life lessons that he learned. Whether it’s when he talks about when he decided to go from being called “Jimmy” to “Jagmeet”—he’s like, “Oh, I was always wanted to go against the grain.” Whatever he talks about, it’s always this relationship to between personal to with the political will become.

Umair: Yeah. The general tone of the book—and I think you’re right that it’s capture in the part of it that I just read—the book is like reading a long TED Talk. It’s like if a motivational poster was to be turned into a book. It’s just motivational-seeming rhetoric that lacks substance. And what it lacks especially, as we’ve been saying, is politics. It doesn’t tell the reader about what Jagmeet’s political convictions are or if he even has any. And what I came away with is that this guy doesn’t have any political convictions.

Rimmy: I think this is what has passed for—as a stand-in for—politics, over the past let’s say like decade.

Veronika: Yeah, reading what he’s writing, it’s almost what I would describe as a “politics of comfort”—where it’s not actually about justice, it’s not about political ideals, it’s about having some sympathy and deciding “I want everyone to feel comfortable and I don’t want the poor to be bad off. I don’t want them to have to suffer.” But then you’re not doing anything substantial about it.

“We can all agree that no one should go hungry. We can all agree that no one should be attacked for the sexuality or their race,” but then you don’t go any further. It’s just left at, “We can agree that people have dignity and we should protect that dignity. Let’s agree, love and courage.”

Umair: Love and courage.

Veronika: To that heckler out there, we love you.

Rimmy: I think leaving out some of the politics probably was purposely done as well. There is this idea—maybe an older idea now, coming from the 2000s—that this person is not explicitly political. They’re actually just coming out and struggling and then they realize afterward that, “Oh, now I need to go into politics.”

Umair: Well, should we go through a little bit of his story, just to bring our listeners up to speed on what the book covers?

Veronika: I think that makes sense.

Umair: So, Jagmeet is born in 1979, in Canada. His parents are here and he is the first child.

Veronika: The beginning is focused a lot on his parents, his physician father, and his journey. His father wanting to gain more financial security, is a recurring theme in those early chapters, and that’s kind of how he cushions the start of his book. The bringing of him into existence is characterized by his parents’ journey into Canada to make the better life for themselves.

Umair: It’s kind of like the story of any professional-class immigrant family. That’s the kind of thing my dad went through. He came here, he wasn’t able to find a job in his field right away. And so he had to wait a while and figure it out. And a similar thing happened with Jagmeet’s father and his mother adopted the role of being a stay-in-home mother and wife, even though very early on, she did work outside of the house while his dad was studying for the equivalency tests to get his license to practice medicine in Canada. He got his residency and they lived in St. John’s for a little while, and then eventually after that, they came to Windsor, Ontario, where Jagmeet spent most of his youth.

Veronika: He talks a lot too about his education and how he was encouraged by his parents to really pursue education, to always be studying. He went to a prep school and it’s real that he had a very bourgeoisie childhood.

Umair: He doesn’t present it in those terms certainly.

Veronika: Not those terms, but –

Rimmy: It’s slowly revealed, I guess, through the –

Veronika: The riding lessons and everything else. I don’t think he himself thought that he was living something so “upper” or different. And I think that is another theme that he reiterates throughout this book. It’s more of a message of inclusion rather than exclusion—and belonging and fitting in. And that again, I feel like it’s a substitute for his politics that he reveals constantly in his retellings of these stories from his childhood.

It’s about not feeling that you should be excluded for your sexuality, your gender, your race, or if you or your parent has a lower income. He discusses it in terms of belonging, and exclusion, and that everyone should feel like they belong. So he set the standard for kind of a normal feeling of inclusion, but he doesn’t really say how we should fit in or how we should feel like we belong, except that we should maybe be nice to each other, which I don’t even know if he says or it’s just implied.

Umair: Well, but just on his schooling: he went to school in the US. They lived in Windsor and he went to public school for a little while. But then eventually his parents enrolled him in what is known as the Detroit Country Day School. And we looked up the cost of this school, because Jagmeet doesn’t tell you in the book…

Rimmy: Though this is the ‘80s…

Umair: Yeah, he did it in the ‘80s and we know the costs today. So if you were to enroll your child in that school.

Veronika: If you want them to be the future NDP leader maybe.

Umair: Just for pre-school—for three and four year olds—a full-day pre-school program at the school costs you $20,000 a year, and then from grade 9 to 12—which is high school—the cost goes up to $32,000 a year. That’s a lot of money!

Rimmy: And I mean, what’s stressed is that his previous public school was full of white people. And this new school—which is clearly an upper-class school—that’s where there were all sorts of other ethnicities. And it was also a place where he says, “What my mom was most compelled by was how eager to learn these students were.” The ways its presented, it’s like this new kind of like utopia for him. But the strong class element is very much missing.

Veronika: He makes a comment like the only thing that you’d be bullied for is maybe not having the coolest shoes. I also remember him saying, “Yeah, I’d wait at 6:00 AM for the bus to take us there with other students whose parents were physicians.” So it’s all these upper class kids waiting to get on their bus to go across the border, to their fancy prep school where all they had to worry about was whether their shoes were cool enough.

Umair: But the way he presents it in the book—and I’m sure there’s something to this—is that the reason for him changing to this school was the bullying and harassment that he was facing as kid. And I’m sure he did face quite a bit because he was visibly Sikh…

Rimmy: … he wore the turban.

Umair: Or the patka, the smaller version of it. He would get made fun of and have a difficult time—get into lots of fights. And so that’s the explanation. I’m sure that played a part in it, but the fact that this is a really fancy school—the class dimensions of it are subdued.

He does well, I guess, in school. He’s a smart kid. He graduates and at first he wants to become a doctor but doesn’t really want to do that anymore, and then he eventually becomes a lawyer. And eventually he’s pulled into politics by his brother and one of his brother’s friends. But we can get to that part.

So I know we’ve all kind of reached the consensus that this book lacks substance, but there are a few things in here that I think are genuine. Like his discussion of his dad’s alcoholism, I thought was very heartbreaking.

Veronika: And I feel very good that he was confident and secure enough to discuss that because that would be so difficult to even put on paper and have everyone tap in to this past that you’ve had. Because there is so much stigma and shame around that. So I felt like that was his most humanizing and actually relatable moment where he discusses dealing with that in the book. And also, of course, the abuse he faced by one his sports coaches.

Umair: Yeah, by his taekwondo teacher. I think when he was 10 or 11, right? He was sexually assaulted, which is obviously really fucked up.

Rimmy: Those are like the few parts of the book—and I also think when you see his relationship with his siblings—that’s actually probably where the book is the strongest in making you sympathize with him. I guess maybe one question I have is after reading it—despite the fact that we’re approaching it from a negative kind of position or saying it’s clearly like a PR thing—but in the end, does it accomplish the task of making you like him more? Even if you don’t learn that much, you don’t learn anything about his politics, but is it something which you kind of like him more by the end of it or –

Umair: I personally don’t… I think you do learn about his politics. I think you learn that he doesn’t have any. But, yeah, I don’t know. I mean, it depends on what you’re looking for. If he’s trying to like be a relatable, personable, person—and I guess that’s what politicians want to try to do. Maybe he succeeded. I’m not the target, right?

Veronika: I mean, even George W. Bush, he starts doing paintings, he acts kind of silly in public and he actually managed to convince a lot of people that, “Oh, he’s just this sweet old man.”

Rimmy: The rehabilitation George Bush is on!

Veronika: So it’s hard to know, but I, again, I can’t figure out who the audience for this book really is, or even – it made me question who the NDP’s audience was. Because this book, it kind of transported me to being in high school. Not because learning about his school days made me nostalgic or anything, but more because it sounds like a book that was written between 2000 and 2010, or more specifically, 2008. It sounds like a book that would happen prior to Obama getting elected. The way he discusses these issues, it just feels so dated.

Umair: Yeah, “hope and change,” right?

Rimmy: I can imagine Jagmeet, it’s like November 2008 and he’s sitting there, watching TV, and he’s like, “One day, I can be Barrack Obama!” So much of this, even the way it’s written, it’s written continuously where it seems like there’s constant life lessons – he’s not even just saying that this happened and he’s thinking about it in that way after the fact. He’s describing it as if at that time, he’s like, “Oh, that was when I realized.” It’s like these dramatic moments which don’t seem—you know, I’m not sure if people in their actual lives that’s how they experience these moments. But it’s like this literary kind of approach where he’s giving himself – continuously trying to give himself an origin story. And the book ends with, “How I became Jagmeet.” And that’s the end.

Veronika: Yeah, “I signed my name Jagmeet Singh.”

Rimmy: Like it’s at the end of – if you watch the end of like the first superhero movie in a trilogy, the end of the first one would be like an “I am Spiderman”, and then the credits would come – and this is what he’s trying to make this book.

Veronika: I think moments like that in the book – they kind of pulled me out of the narrative a bit. Because I had to stop and question, is this the publishers being like, “We need a connecting thread for your life story, to try and sell it,” and it just felt very disingenuous.

Rimmy: Then that’s where – we talked about where was the book the strongest – this is where the book is the weakest, right? These transparent attempts to make these threads, right? Even the way that, what is it, love and …

Umair: Love and courage.

Rimmy: Love and courage. There are certain paragraphs where you can clearly tell like that—it’s like an undergraduate essay where you want to end the final paragraph with tadum line—and the entire paragraph is written so they can like incorporate “love and courage” in there.

Umair: And the other phrase he really likes to use is “we are all connected!”

Veronika: Yeah.

Rimmy: We are all connected, yeah.

Umair: Which is something I want to talk about – his depiction of Sikhism and his faith – but before that, I want to actually go back a little bit to talk about his dad’s alcoholism, just so that people have a sense of what that’s about. Because like we said, it’s quite heartbreaking. His dad’s a very successful psychiatrist and works his ass off, but then in his home life struggles with alcoholism and makes life hell for the rest of the family – throws things, yells things and is constantly in horrible moods and is abusive.

And so having to see that and having to support his dad – I mean, there is that discussion about having to be supportive while at the same time becoming increasingly removed from and getting angry at his dad. And especially his younger brother, Gurratan, had a very hard time and –

Rimmy: And for Jagmeet, he’s the oldest, so he obviously ends up bearing a lot of the responsibility of dealing with the situation more than his other siblings.

Umair: So eventually his dad actually loses his license to practice. At which point Jagmeet had to take on the role of being the main breadwinner in the family, right? They had to use up their savings and he was at in school at the same time, so that seems like it must’ve been quite difficult.

But I also want to say: the parts about his dad’s alcoholism, here too it lacks social and political content, which I was quite disappointed by. He portrays it as a kind of individual thing that his dad’s dealing with and he doesn’t situate it as part of a broader pattern within society and broader patterns within the Sikh community, where alcoholism among men is a very real epidemic.

Rimmy: And actually he – I also found this kind of funny as well – like the proxy of his dad’s sobriety or non-sobriety is how much he embraces the Sikh religion. He really associates the sobriety – when his dad is doing better – with the embracing of the religion and when he’s not doing well, it’s because he hasn’t embraced the religion enough. That tells you a lot about him and what the religion means to him.

Umair: Yeah. I mean he poses Sikhism as the solution, because Sikhism says you shouldn’t drink. And if my dad just followed –

Rimmy: He went off the path.

Veronika: And he even preludes that when he’s describing how his dad dressed and cut his hair. It was kind of like from that start, having his dad be the less faithful one – the one who maybe would always inevitably kind of fall off.

Rimmy: Yeah and if we talk about connecting it to broader problems – the people who are alcoholics in the Sikh community are not just the secular ones. This is among the even the most religious, like this is just as big of a problem there as well. And that was completely missing. Because actually he talks about how his dad was excluded from the community because of his alcoholism.

So not only does he not acknowledge the broader problems in the community, he actually seems to present it as if this is a problem that’s foreign to that community. This is a community who, when pure, are not drinking alcohol. And now that his dad has followed the wrong path, he’s being excluded from the community. It’s a very strange –

Umair: Do you know how many people would be ostracized from the Sikh community – ?

Rimmy: Like 90 percent –

Umair: Not to joke about it, but it’s a serious problem. And I think that it would have been useful to have gone through this experience and to talk about it in a way that actually addresses it in a social and cultural depth.

Veronika: I also remember near the end of the book he makes a comment – this is right before his dad goes into rehab – like when he’s about to succeed and he’s all disheveled-looking, very underweight, looks really rough. And Jagmeet comments, “Every time I see a homeless person, I get that little reminder of my father.” And it was trying to humanize the homeless person but also say, “When my dad at his intoxicated, rough, near-death’s door days, I can see that in these homeless people. But I know to be sympathetic, because they could be just like my dad.”

Umair: No man, that worked on me. Like honestly, that was touching –

Rimmy: But like that’s where he always – it’s like, “I had this experience and therefore this is why I’m sympathetic to indigenous issues. This is why I’m sympathetic to women.” There’s these personal things that have happened and now this is what informed my politics – and I guess this is what made him more sympathetic to homeless people.

Umair: Yeah, that’s true. Everything is like a lesson. There’s a lesson to be drawn, which makes it quite contrived.

Rimmy: And actually when you were talking about the – the idea of the Sikh community. I think maybe this also shows some of the problems when you look at some of these communities as a single community. Because I’m not sure if, when he’s talking about the Sikh community, if he’s necessarily talking about the same Sikh community that some other – maybe people who are more secular – like, there’s no monolithic community which he’s representing.

Even when he talks about it later on, he’s talking about 1984. And he talks about the year – I forget which year it was but he says, “This is the twenty-fifth anniversary which is a very tough time because of the trauma that the Sikh community felt. And now the Sikh community could finally get over this trauma.” And I’m not sure if that is this foundational traumatic thing –

Umair: 2009 wasn’t that hard a year for you, Rimmy?

Rimmy: Like I don’t even – you know, for some people, there are certain elements of the Sikh community, for them, this is a very big thing. But that is also associated with another political project of Khalistan. So not to sort of diminish what happened in 1984, but he’s not necessarily a representative of the Sikh community. It could actually be one segment of – and this is true for communities in general, right? A lot of times we take one person who we say, “Oh, this person represents the Nigerian community” – that ends up being a misrepresentation of the community.

Umair: Yeah and we should definitely chat about 1984 – and when we talk say “1984” we’re not referring to George Orwell here. Because the events that took place were, if anything, that’s the politicizing moment for – or if not the moment then at least looking back – that’s what Jagmeet develops himself as a human rights advocate around –

Rimmy: That’s what draws him into activism or political stuff, right?

Umair: Yeah and I think that deserves a discussion. But before getting into that, we could talk also about his approach to his religion, his faith. For me, I really felt like – and perhaps this is just because he needs to communicate with his Western readers – but I know that Sikhism happens to be a monotheism. You wouldn’t know that from reading Jagmeet’s book. What you would come to as a picture of Sikhism is a kind of New Age, Buddhism-like –

Rimmy: Energy, connections.

Umair: Yeah. Like this Eastern spirituality, right? And this is where “we are all connected” – that whole line comes in. Because we had the electronic version of the book, I searched the phrase “we are all connected.” It comes up 10 times in the book. And I have a passage – his introduction to his faith, as he presents it. And this is when he was a young kid and this is what he says,

“ ‘How can I be more connected to the world,’ I asked my mom one night. ‘You could try meditating.’ She suggested. ‘Meditation helps us connect with the infinite energy inside us.’

She sat down on the floor beside my bed and patted a space on the rug beside her for me to sit. ‘We’re going to repeat the gur mantr,’ she said.” Gur means “enlightened” and mantr is a word that one reflects on. In Sikhi, the gur mantr is Waheguru. It is contemplated and repeated out loud as a way to realize and experience the oneness of the universal energy. I repeated the word ‘Waheguru’ out loud. ‘Wahe’ means ‘wonderful’ and ‘guru’ means ‘light in darkness’ or ‘enlightener’.”

So that’s a bit lengthy but it gives you a sense of what I mean when I say that it’s a New Age-y sort of thing. The word Waheguru, it’s usually translated as “Wonderful Lord.”

Rimmy: Yeah, in the Gurdwaras, when there are translations – it’s definitely referring to a monotheistic, like all that we think we would see in other –

Umair: Yeah, a God.

Rimmy: But I think there are maybe two things – we can talk about both. One is the way that it’s written for a Western audience. So we can ask, who is this actually written for? It’s written for people who are not familiar with his religion and he’s kind of packaging it in these ways using elements of Buddhism, New Age stuff. This wishy-washy universe, energy, connectedness – this kind of stuff – which maybe familiarizes his religion. But also I think for a lot of people – Sikh people, people from other faiths – that is often how they themselves now think of their religion. I think if you talk to people – because one key element of Sikhism is the oneness and all this kind of stuff. And so people now, they still identify as Sikh. But when it comes to their religious beliefs, it is more of like, “Well, I don’t know if I believe in God necessarily but I do believe in spirituality,” and so I think that is how a lot of people –.

Umair: But the people you’re referring to here would be people who aren’t necessarily religious, right?

Rimmy: But they could be –

Veronika: I feel like there are some people who they do see themselves as religious but they don’t quite know how they feel about certain terms of their religion and I see this in lots of different faiths, so they’d rather speak about “the divine” rather than a God or something like that.

And there also is a side where you want your religion because it connects you with your family and your community and your culture but you don’t know if you are really believing in it. So then you also turn to terms like that too. So it could just be a general agnosticism where you don’t feel certain enough or comfortable enough with certain terms of your religion and so you kind of substitute these slightly vaguer terms in because it makes it more open. But it could very well be that or again, it’s the audience thing. What is more palatable for an audience of either multi-faith or even non-faith type readers.

Umair: At my most cynical – and I don’t necessarily want to be the most cynical person about this – but at my most cynical, I would say that Jagmeet’s vacuousness extends even to the way that he presents his faith. He renders it into a form that’s palatable to his Western readers. And look, Westerners know what monotheism is!

Rimmy: I think they’re quite familiar with it!

Umair: Yeah, so it’s not as if they wouldn’t understand that, it’s just that – well, for Western readers, this sort of romantic, New Age depiction of Eastern faiths is what they’re comfortable with.

Rimmy: Yeah. That’s exactly what they think of as Eastern – that’s how they like their Eastern faiths. They’re spiritual, they’re –

Umair: There’s an energy. Like you really just feel connected…

Veronika: It’s like Beatles song level… The Beatles going to India, now like you can wear an amulet with the Hindu God or something.

Umair: Yeah, so I mean, I don’t know. Obviously everyone has the right to interpret their religion the way they want, as does Jagmeet or anyone else. And I know it’s not just Jagmeet. Rimmy, what you’re saying about people relating to Sikhism in this way is not necessarily uncommon. Like especially young people, right? You read and you kind of learn about their interpretation –

Rimmy: Yeah, it’s probably more common I think. But maybe it’s more strange coming from someone who seems to be very religious – or you can see how important the religion is to him. And it was something that he didn’t necessarily pick up like from his parents. He was the one who wore the turban before his dad. And even some of like the elements of the religion that he seems to be coming from. It’s hard to know how much of that is, you know, how he himself thinks about the religion or how much of it was packaged for a Western audience unfamiliar with Sikhism.

Because actually quite a bit of this book is – he’ll go through lengths to explain certain practices or he’ll use the Punjabi word and then – so it’s clearly written for an audience to familiarize them, or package it so they’re comfortable with whatever his foreign religion is.

Umair: Yeah. I think you’re absolutely right because he is a very strict adherent of Sikhism, right? And it’s not like he has a wishy-washy approach to it and yet in presenting it’s –

Rimmy: So I think you get less an idea of what Sikhism is than you would – for the amount of time he seems to spend talking about his religion, you don’t having to get a very good idea of what the religion is outside of this very romantic like, “We just want to help – we’re just about working hard and helping people.” With every religion, you could say that. You don’t want to learn that much, that specific to it.

Umair: That’s true. Okay, so what about 1984 then?

Rimmy: What about it?

Umair: So this is, like we were saying, the thing that if there’s anything in the book, this is what turns Jagmeet on to politics. So, first of all, we should go into talking about what happened in 1984, the context around it.

In 1984 in India, there were riots and a massacre of thousands of Sikh men especially and then there were also murderer of women, rapes of women – a pogrom one, could say, that took place. This followed right on the heels of the assassination of the Prime Minister of India at that time, Indira Gandhi, who was killed by her bodyguards who were Sikh. And then of course, I guess we have to go back and explain why would that have happened.

Rimmy: I don’t think you need to.

Umair: Well, just briefly. There was a Sikh separatist movement. And you’ve mentioned Khalistan – the idea of creating the Sikh homeland within the state of Punjab in India. This was something that was going on in late ‘70s, early ‘80s and the Indian government, led by Indira Gandhi, had cracked down very harshly – including by sending the army, raiding religious sites.

This was the context in which this took place. The assassination happened and then followed by this massacre of thousands of people in Delhi and then elsewhere around the country.

And Jagmeet came to know about it, I guess when it happened. And actually, we should also point out that the following year of course, in 1985, was the Air India 182 bombing. Which was something that Canada of course is related to because it was a flight that took off from Montreal on its way to London. That flight was bombed. I think 300 something people – I don’t remember the exact figures – were killed and this was a continuance of this Sikh separatist project.

Okay, so this is what happens. I guess that’s the context and Jagmeet, early in life comes to know about this because he would have been like five years old. Through the Gurdwaras, through the community, he sees pictures and then eventually, when he becomes a lawyer – and his brother actually is the one who brings him into some of these stuff because his brother’s organizing educationals with the Sikh Activist Network. His brother, Gurratan, becomes a student activist of the kind that we were – we are, is that fair?

Veronika: Are.

Rimmy: That’s the other thing, you know, if the activism was beyond Sikh activism or if it was something that we would consider to be broader Left activism. Jagmeet mentions the Iraq war but he doesn’t really give much of an idea if he was –

Umair: I think he went to a protest or something, right?

Rimmy: He went to a protest once, that’s his street cred!

Umair: I think – and there’s not that much of a discussion in the book and I don’t even know if he mentions the name of the organization – but the Sikh Activist Network, they saw themselves as progressives and tried to do things like indigenous solidarity. If there was a call for allies to come support an indigenous occupation or something, they would show up. This is part of what they were doing and they saw themselves as part of the Left.

But a lot of their advocacy was also around – education around 1984 and seeking recognition for what happened and developing this identity around what it means to be a Sikh.

So, okay, this is where Jagmeet gets involved. He runs workshops for people around the time of the 25th anniversary and he becomes an advocate for the cause to have what happened in 1984 be recognized officially as a genocide. The prelude to this is that a member of the Indian government, a guy named Kamal Nath, who’s a member of the Indian National Congress. He comes to Ontario on a trade mission to talk to – I guess, at the time it was the Liberal government in power on Ontario. And these guys – Jagmeet and some of the other people in the Sikh community – they tried to get him disinvited. They petitioned the Ontario government to have him no longer come and their petitions are refused.

And so they organized a protest and this is what it says in the book:

“On the day of the meeting with Nath, we reached out to the media and mobilized a couple of hundred protesters outside the King Edward Hotel – which is, I guess, where the meeting took place. The crowd outside chanted, ‘Go back, Kamal Nath!’ and ‘Kamal Nath: human rights violator!’ from behind a police guarded barricade. Emotions were high. I played the role of legal observer, ready to provide assistance for any legal issues that could arise and to make sure nobody’s safety was compromised.”

So Jagmeet as a lawyer would play this type of role. He would get called in if there’s any legal issues. So that’s the extent of his political involvement prior to being pulled into running for the NDP.

Veronika: I remember too, I think just after or just before, he talks about, “I was called in to be a legal observer but I wanted to go a step further. I wanted to be their legal representative.” These young – kids, sure they’d make mistakes, but they still deserve legal representation.

Rimmy: So just in terms of how he sees the law. There’s two different parts of it. First is his origin story of when he starts thinking about being a lawyer – when he’s talking the philosophy of law professor. And he asked him, “What is like the law to you?” And he just talks about, “The law is what binds communities together and brings people together, the law is what connects us.” And he has a very similar interpretation of the law again afterwards. That might be a strange impression of the law [laughs] – and maybe that tells you something about him. But it’s connecting his career to this broad idea of like connectivity and binding us together, we are all in this together – you know, it’s like every little thing is one more part of this idea of connectivity.

Veronika: I think I know which one you were talking about, the latter one where he says something like, “The law can bind us though it can also act to structurally oppress. But I wanted to use the law to fight for justice and to fight for the inclusivity of everyone.” So he recognizes this dual side of it but then he also thinks it’s a binding force for the community.

Umair: Just to frame this cynically as well – or in the same cynical way that I framed his approach to his faith. His approach to his career seems like just as superficial. It’s like, “Why do you want to become a lawyer?” “Because laws can help people become connected!”

Rimmy: Actually what was more – when his family was in a bad financial situation. He was, as the oldest kid, he needs to get a job that could help pay the bills. I feel like that’s a more legitimate. At least that’s honest.

Veronika: He does the same thing with his father too, because he repeats so often that being a physician was his father’s way of attaining financial security and social status. But then when he comes to Canada and realizes he can’t practice, he writes that his father’s lamenting because he just wants to help people. He just wants to help people so bad and he can’t do it, he’s being prevented, so he needs to study for that exam. And then a couple of paragraphs later he was back to the financial security element of it. I mean, I don’t doubt his dad wanted to help people, but –

Rimmy: I think it’s sincere but I think that actually shows you something as well. Because even when they’re talking about the hard financial times – the period when he was in university and there was a potential of debt creditors coming after them and he had to get a job. He had to work at Aldo or wherever he worked. Which is not easy, to be a student working two jobs and being in law school. But at the same time they had three properties. One, as a student, he owned the condo which was already paid for. His parents owned another house in Windsor, plus a 40-acre property.

So before I read the book – some of the reviews were coming out, they talking about how his dad was a doctor, so you can imagine, “Okay, sure, a professional life,” but then they also talked about this period of bankruptcy and financial struggle. It’s like, “Oh, I guess, they fell on hard times.”

But when you actually read the book, even when they’re falling on hard times, it was a cash flow problem and a problem of debt and interest. What 22-year-old student is living in a condo that they own that’s paid for? Working at Aldo is not such a bad place to be.

Umair: Yeah, he was going to be all right. But I can imagine it was a very difficult time.

Rimmy: Of course. And for him all his world was falling apart. So I think he’s sincere in the financial distress that they felt but that shows you the kind of situation they were in to begin with. This was a problem of how they managed their three properties. Even when they were dealing with their father’s alcoholism, one of their solution which was available to them was getting his own apartment –

Umair: And this was during the hard times.

Rimmy: This was during the hard times –

Veronika: The discussion is trying to figure out what to do with the house because of the debt then it cuts next paragraph to them moving their dad into the apartment.

Rimmy: Yeah. How did this happen? So sure it was a tough time but he doesn’t seem that aware of actually like the immense privilege that he’s coming from.

Umair: Yeah. If you go on to the NDP’s website and Jagmeet’s section of the website, what’s highlighted is that he worked at a retail store – had to take retail jobs to help his family.

Veronika: How unique!

Umair: And the fact that he lived in this like giant house on a farm, you know, that his dad just –

Rimmy: He didn’t live there, they owned it. The fact that they owned a house where they didn’t even live in –

Umair: Well, but he grew up in a fair part of his life – what was Contested Road or something?

Or some other name. But anyway, that’s not highlighted of course. But in that way Jagmeet, he’s not that different from Trudeau. He’s much closer in his lifestyle, his upbringing, his private school education – all those things – to someone like Trudeau than he is to a working-class NDP voter. But do you guys want to pause? Take a break?

Veronika: Sure.

Umair: ‘Cause there’s a bunch of other things but we’ve been going on a while.

[outro music playing]

Umair: We’re going to continue the discussion we’ve been having and we’ll publish the next part of our discussion in a week.

Veronika: We’ll see you again soon.

Umair: Bye.

Rimmy: Bye.