There are no permanent friends or enemies in politics, and Surrey Mayor Dianne Watts has proved just that by courting South Asian voters at two Surrey temples on either end of the political spectrum.
Just two days before the civic elections, Watts visited a Sikh temple run by supporters of Khalistan, or a separate Sikh homeland in northern India.
The occasion was the birthday of Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhism. Dianne Watts went to the Gurdwara Dashmesh Durbar to officiate the granting of a building permit for the temple’s new youth centre.
The temple glorifies Sikh militants, particularly those who died 20 years ago at the hands of the Indian police or were hanged as “martyrs” in the weeks and months following Operation Bluestar, in which the Indian army was sent in to the Golden Temple in Amritsar to rout extremists.
Mayor Watts earlier refused to go and speak from the main stage of the Vaisakhi parade that was organized by the same temple this past summer. Instead, she joined the parade as an ordinary spectator as she does not approve of the glorification of violence.
Interestingly, earlier this month Watts also visited the Guru Nanak Sikh Temple in Surrey, a temple that is controlled by political moderates. There the Surrey mayor joined the community in paying tribute to the slain editor of the Indo Canadian Times, Tara Singh Hayer, who was murdered 10 years ago — a case that remains unsolved.
Why would the mayor of a city that is home to the largest concentration of South Asians in Western Canada, attend two different temples whose ideologies are so radically opposed? Does the good mayor wish to have her cake, and eat it too?
While politicians of every stripe, including Dianne Watts, skipped or attended incognito the Vaisakhi cultural parade over the summer, during the federal election campaign in October at least five candidates of the Liberals and the NDP visited the Vaisakhi-organizing Dashmesh Durbar temple to seek the support of the Sikh community.
At best this is inconsistency — at worst, hypocrisy.
While the federal and the municipal elections have passed, the B.C. provincial elections are due next year.
It remains to be seen who will be the next after Dianne Watts to do a volte-face during the election season.
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