Outsiders with Christian church backgrounds might underestimate the importance of this election. But temple committees are more than vestries. Their members assume responsibility for independent non-profit organizations that can control significant real estate assets and annual revenues from the donation box running into the millions of dollars. Temple leaders are also important political power brokers. Committees can’t tell their congregations how to vote, but individual committee members often endorse federal and provincial candidates. Ask Ujjal Dosanjh how significant it was that Balwant Gill, president of the Scott Road temple, failed to endorse him during the 2008 federal election for Vancouver South. Dosanjh won the long-time Liberal riding only after a recount, and then by just twenty votes.

The most important role the temples have played in Sikh life historically, however, is as sites of social and cultural security for new Canadians. The country’s first gurdwara was built by the Khalsa Diwan Society in Vancouver in 1908, in the heart of Kitsilano. The temple was open to anybody at that time — Indians of all castes were welcome, for example — in keeping with the teachings of Guru Nanak Dev Ji (1469–1539), the first of ten Sikh gurus who established the doctrine that all races, religions, and genders should be considered equal, and that a true Sikh should not discriminate against anyone. Even so, the sense of displacement for new arrivals, who often came from small farms in the Punjab, would have been radical. In Sarjeet Singh Jagpal’s 1994 book, Becoming Canadians, the oldest surviving members of the community recalled the earliest days: Men having to pantomime in order to buy eggs, all of them dancing around, flapping their arms and squawking like chickens. A woman screaming in surprise the first time she saw a Chinese person — and the Chinese person screaming back. “Coming here would have been like you and me going to the moon,” says Jagpal, whose grandfather arrived in 1907.

Local racism further isolated new arrivals. In 1907, Vancouver’s notorious race riots broke out, led by the candidly named Asiatic Exclusion League. Four decades later, Jagpal’s mother was blocked by residents when she tried to buy a $6,000 house in Kelowna on which she’d already put down a deposit of several thousand dollars. She took the matter to city council, where it was debated for weeks before the sale was approved. The Kelowna Courier’s top story for August 22, 1946, recaptures the priggish ignorance of the day:

Local residents . . . are protesting over the contemplated purchase of a house on Wolseley Avenue by a Hindu family on the grounds . . . that the area would slowly grow into a Hindu settlement, thereby lowering property values and causing general unpleasantness in the neighborhood.

The size of the deposit suggests another “Hindu” quality that might have alarmed white, middle-class Kelowna: in- tense industry and thrift. Hard labour was the order of the day for most Sikhs. Men often worked twelve-hour days at the most back-breaking job in the province’s sawmills: the dreaded green chain, stacking fresh-cut lumber before it fell off the conveyor belt.

“These guys had to be tough,” says Jagpal, who worked the green chain himself decades later, while attending university to become a teacher. Against that backdrop, he explains, the temple became a critical place for regrouping and gathering one’s strength. “They went through a lot of crap together. And the only way to handle it was to get together on the weekend at the temple, compare stories, blow off a bit of steam, pat each other on the back, and say, ‘Well, at least we have each other; we’re like family.’ Then get back out there and work six days again.”

The temples have of course evolved over time, alongside the community. A dramatic example was the transformation of Vancouver- and Surrey-area temples in the wake of Operation Blue Star, the tragic storming of the Golden Temple in Amritsar by the Indian military in June 1984. Following that came several other high-profile events: The reprisal assassination of Indira Gandhi in October. The anti-Sikh riots in Delhi in November. And then the bombing of Air India Flight 182 in June of the following year.

The impact of these incidents on the local community was “visible and immediate,” in the words of Hugh Johnston, professor emeritus of history at Simon Fraser University and co-author of the 1995 book The Four Quarters of the Night: The Life-Journey of an Emigrant Sikh. He describes to me how, after Operation Blue Star, many Sikh men began to adopt traditional markers of the faith: turbans, beards, the kirpan knife and kara iron bracelet. “It was a collective shock,” he says, “and it gave birth to a tremendous sense of threat.”

That threat also contributed to a surge in support for an independent Sikh state called Khalistan. Although most Sikhs did not embrace the separatist cause, according to The Sikh Diaspora in Vancouver, by Kwantlen Polytechnic University instructor Kamala Elizabeth Nayar, “The popularity of this movement was evidenced in the growth of several organizations in Vancouver, which held as their single-minded goal the establishment of a separate Sikh homeland.”

Nayar mentions two particularly significant organizations, the Babbar Khalsa International and the International Sikh Youth Federation, both started in the ’80s and listed as terrorist entities by Parliament in 2003. The prime suspects in the Air India bombing were members of Babbar Khalsa International. And the ISYF grew in influence to the point that it was able to take over control of some of the largest and most important gurdwaras in the Lower Mainland.