VANCOUVER: Judi Tyabji has heard the slurs all her life. Even coming an MLA does not change that.
Tyabji was scouting for a con -Stridency office last week when she met a landlady more concerned with the color of her skin than the color of her money.
Tyabji, born in Calcutta, says her Realtor reported that the landlady: later kept “calling us the dark couple” and the Pakistanis.
For the Tyabji, race has always been of more concern to others than to herself.
I don’t put labels on people”, ‘says Tyabji, a liberal who, at age 26, will be the youngest MLA in the legislature.
Tyabji (Okanagan East) is one of four Indo-Canadians elected to the legislature this month, a re- mark able feat for a community first allowed to vote in a provincial election in 1949.
In 1986, Moe Sihota became the first Indo-Canadian to be elected to any legislature in Canada.
He was the target of racially motivated verbal attacks in the legislature – former cabinet
Minister Bill Reid once interrupted him by shouting, “Kamagata Maru ! ‘Komagata Maru!”
(A steamer by that name carrying 376 Sikhs was barred from docking in Vancouver in 1914, Two months later, the shipload of near starving British subjects was escorted from the harbor by a warship).
Sihota was re-elected in Esquimalt-Metchosin and will be joined by New Democrat colleagues Harry Lali (Yale-Lillooet) and Ujjal Dosanjh (Vancouver- Kensington),
Dosanjh says most voters now look beyond race.
It’s not the skin that matters, he says. “It’s the skills.” Dosanjh, 44, a former millworker and Punjabi-language newspaper editor, formed an advocacy group for farmworkers in the early 1970s. He was born in the village of Dosanjh Kalan, where he graduated from a high school his teacher father had founded.
“My father taught thousands of students in that area. I still run into his students and they still refer to him as Master.”
Dosanjh’s maternal grandfather spent 18 years in British a its as he fought for Indian independence.
Tyabji claims an equally rich political heritage.
“We were brought up with the ideal that we would participate in Political and social reform as we saw fit.” she says.
Tyabji, a Roman Catholic who is five months pregnant with her third child, says prejudice surfaced during the campaign.
We had two people come into the office and say, “How can we have a Paki for a candidate?”
Born in Miranpur, Lali’s Scored opponent reportedly described Lali as “East Indian and
Unemployed.”(Canadian newspaper report)
Article extracted from this publication >> November 1, 1991
