A village remembers how Ujjal grew up

"He was always a bright boy. In a class of 45 students or so he would stand 3rd or 4th. We were together in school. His elder brother Kamal, who was detained for a year, was also with us. I’m not sure but I think Ujjal went through two classes in one year so the brothers ended up studying together," recounts Ajit Singh.

We met him at the outskirts of the village where early in the morning, several residents were looking through a newspaper report on Ujjal’s victory. They took us to a large brick house nearby. Some old moth-eaten photographs, one of them shows Ujjal posing with other members of the Guru Har Rai Khalsa Senior Secondary School hockey team in 1961-62, were being taken out and given a dusting.

"This is where their cattle are kept. They have a house in the village as well. The land adjacent to the house, 10 acres, belongs to the family and they own another 12 acres a short distance away. His uncle’s son was the first to migrate and returns every year. Ujjal has not been here for over two years now but earlier he was a regular visitor," said Sukhjinder Singh who looks after the farm.

We are then taken to the family house where Ujjal, everybody in this village uses his first name, lived for the first 18 years of his life. The house is a modest building looked after by the family of Gurmit Singh, an employee at the local veterinary hospital. They had moved in to the house even when Ujjal’s father, Giani Pritam Singh was alive. He died in 1980.

Dr Kartar Singh, a retired veterinarian was a friend of Ujjal’s father, says: "Giani Pritam Singh was a Congressman of the old school. In fact, he brought up Ujjal, his brother and two sisters single-handedly after his wife died when Ujjal was very young. He was a teacher at the school where Ujjal studied."

At the school situated about a kilometer from the house, Gian Singh who taught Ujjal during his last year at the school, points out, "His maternal great grandfather, of Bahowal village near Mahalpur, was hanged by the British for his role in the Ghadar movement, his maternal grandfather was consigned to the Andamans for 20 years. Ujjal is a product of these two streams of Indian nationalism, the moderate and the revolutionary and this explains his opposition to the extremists in Punjab and Canada."

The Ghadarite background is typical of many emigrants from the Doaba. Residents point out that the earliest migration to Canada from Dosanjh village dates back to the early part of this century. It was these migrants’ faced with discrimination abroad in the midst of political freedom, who started the Ghadar party, with the avowed aim of liberating India from British rule. As inheritors of this mantle, it is no surprise that the Punjabis of British Columbia produced the first non-white premier of the province.