The ISYF, whose members typically dressed in the orthodox style, took over the Scott Road temple in 1986, and held power for over a decade. But there were concerns from the start about their leadership. Prominent Vancouver business-man Harpal Singh Nagra, a founding member of the ISYF in Canada and author of the group’s constitution, quit outright in May 1986, the day after four ISYF members tried to assassinate the Punjabi planning minister on Vancouver Island. “I told them, you did not follow the constitution. We do not accept any violent act here in Canada. That’s it.”

Nagra notes that the ISYF’s initial support rested on the community’s belief that it was best suited to fighting for Sikh and human rights. “But that didn’t happen,” he says. “People were given the wrong idea. And by then [ISYF members] had gained control of most of the temples and were using their funds for their causes. Wherever they wanted to promote the cause of Khalistan, they had discretion. They had full power.”

Members began to leave the ISYF-controlled gurdwaras. “Many families pulled out of [temples] controlled by Khalistani leadership,” Hugh Johnston says. “They didn’t feel comfortable there.” Others stayed, he says, but kept quiet.

The ISYF era at the Scott Road temple ended in 1998, when a coalition of conservative and liberal Sikhs won the temple by 250 votes at the first election held since the ISYF came to power. The election was contentious, to say the least. At one point before the vote, Harpal Nagra — who helped pick the candidates opposing the ISYF, including Balwant Gill, the incoming president — was attacked with a sword. The best-known element of the conflict, though, was the notorious “tables and chairs” controversy, which hinged on the question of whether the communal langar, meal — a traditional Sikh practice emphasizing the equality of participants — should be taken sitting on the floor, or whether members could be permitted to sit at tables, on chairs.

Tables and chairs had always been tolerated in the gurdwaras, dating back to the establishment of the Khalsa Diwan Society in 1906. The original Sikhs in Vancouver typically wore Western dress, no doubt to forestall the magnified discrimination they would have otherwise faced from locals. And there was simply no way for a Sikh woman to sit politely on the floor in a Western dress. Add to that the sketchy central heating of the day and the fact that Vancouver streets were a notorious mud bowl, and tables and chairs might have been the only way for Sikhs to preserve the langar tradition in the region.

Despite that history, and despite the fact that while they controlled the temples the ISYF leadership had never previously thought to remove the tables and chairs, the issue became a flashpoint shortly after their narrow electoral defeat. According to Nayar’s timeline, the ISYF was voted out in January 1998. And in April 1998 — some say after ISYF agitation — the senior Sikh religious governing body, the Akal Takht in Amritsar, issued a formal edict against the use of tables and chairs.

The Scott Road temple management committee, and at least two others in the Lower Mainland, failed to conform to that edict. And again, some congregation members left to start their own temples. But more important, a division formed between notional categories of Sikhs in British Columbia — categories that had never been a factor in the past, and which were no doubt entrenched by media coverage shaping the terms of debate. On one side were “fundamentalist,” “traditionalist,” “orthodox” Sikhs — thinly veiled code words for “Khalistani,” whether the people being described believed in the cause or not. On the other side were “moderates.”

The election at the Scott Road temple on November 23, 2008, must be considered against that divide. After ten years of rule by Balwant Gill, and more than twenty years since the Air India attack, the “moderates” were at last unseated. By a youth slate, no less, most of its candidates under the age of thirty-five and quintessentially of the twenty-first century: president-elect Amardeep Singh Deol, a software engineer; vice-president-elect Ranj Dhaliwal, an environmental activist and author. All of them adhering to the panjkakaar observances of their faith: all wearing turbans and the traditional kirpan and kara, and all the men bearded. All, as the press and the defeated parties had it, “fundamentalists,” “traditionalists,” “orthodox.”

And amid all the coverage, a single question seemed to lie in the subtext: how on earth did this happen?

3: A WARRIOR’S RELIGION