Three South Asian candidates are currently seeking re-election. While the Liberal candidate from South Vancouver, Ujjal Dosanjh, is a former federal health minister, his party colleague Sukh Dhaliwal, from Newton North Delta, is seeking election for the second time. Meanwhile, Conservative candidate Nina Grewal is seeking a third term as she campaigns in Fleetwood Port Kells.
The other Indian candidates may be political greenhorns, but they do have some background in community work and in social activism. 
Among them are two Conservative candidates -

 

Sandeep Pandher from Newton North Delta, and Sam Rakhra from Burnaby New Westminster.
The two other South Asian candidates are seeking office in ridings further afield. Brenda Jagpal, a Liberal candidate, is running in Southern Interior, while NDP candidate Bonnie Rai is seeking a seat in Abbotsford, another municipality with a sizable number of Indo-Canadian voters.
These women are not very well known in the parties they represent, but they have been socially active in their communities. 
Harjeet Daudharia, another Indo-Canadian candidate, is running for the Communist Party of Canada in Newton North Delta.

Largely marginalized for his far-left views, comrade Daudharia has been more or less a source of entertainment with political pundits.
Still, Daudharia is well known in Surrey as a cultural worker, anti-war activist and defender of the rights of seniors.
Among this pack of Indo-Canadian politicos, Ujjal Dosanjh is the most experienced. The former premier of B.C., Dosanjh became the first Indo-Canadian provincial premier as leader of the ruling NDP in 2000.
Derided as a political turncoat after he quit the NDP to join the federal Liberal party, Dosanjh was picked

 

as a star candidate by former Prime Minister Paul

Martin in the 2004 election, and was later appointed federal health minister.
Past media reports and some of his old friends claim that he had ties with the Marxist communists during late 1960s. He has always been a staunch opponent of the Sikh separatists. He was assaulted by the fundamentalists in 1985, likely as a result of this position. Dosanjh, however, did visit the Dashmesh Durbar Sikh temple in Surrey after being appointed premier. The temple management, as many in the community know, supports a separate homeland for the Sikhs.

Dosanjh reportedly received threats even recently for speaking out against terrorism. He suffered a mild heart attack in 2007.   
Nina Grewal is the wife of Gurmant Grewal, a former Conservative MP. He represented Newton North Delta. The first time she was elected she joined her MP husband in the House of Commons in 2004 and together they made history as the first couple in the world to get simultaneously elected to parliament.
But Gurmant did not run in the next election. In May 2005 he recorded a series of phone conversations and meetings with health minister Ujjal Dosanjh and Tim Murphy, the prime minister’s chief of staff about possible rewards if he and his wife MP Nina Grewal

crossed the floor to join the Liberals. The scandal triggered investigations by the RCMP and the federal ethics commissioner as is still under investigation.
Liberal hopeful Sukh Dhaliwal was a surveyor and was active in municipal politics in Surrey before he decided to run for the federal election. Locally, he was associated with the Surrey Electoral Team, which had ties with the Conservatives.
When he first ran for parliament in 2004, he was defeated by Gurmant Grewal. In the 2006 election, when Gurmant did not run, he was the only Indo-Canadian candidate in the running and won after defeating NDP candidate Nancy Clegg.
Subsequently, Dhaliwal sparked a controversy by writing a letter of support to convicted drug trafficker, Ranjeet Cheema, who was sentenced by a U.S. court in recent weeks.
The Conservatives’ Sandeep Pandher is running for the first time against Dhaliwal alongside Sam Rakhra.
The Liberals claim that both these candidates were muzzled by their party and its “iron bubble campaign” wherein they did not show up for recent media debates. 
Sandeep Pandher, another Conservative, admitted in a media interview that he earlier worked with the former Liberal federal minister, Herb Dhaliwal.
Sam Rakhra claims to be a philanthropist and is at the centre of a fresh controversy for being disciplined on three occasions by the Real Estate Council of B.C., including a six-month suspension of Rakhra’s real estate license for incompetence and professional misconduct.
If elected, Bonnie Rai will be the first Indo-Canadian MP from the NDP. Most Indo-Canadian members of parliament elected to date are either Liberals or Tories.
In Newton North Delta, a socially and economically diverse riding, the Indo-Canadian candidates are trying to strike a balance between the mainstream voters and their own ethnic communities.
Bridging the cultural gap between the two groups is a challenging task, most of the candidates agree.
Sukh Dhaliwal claims that he has been trying to get his community involved in  mainstream issues, such as the campaign for the protection of Burns Bog.
“Only if they get involved in the mainstream campaigns, can they expect the support of the wider community on issues concerning them,” he told the South Asian Post.
Dhaliwal acknowledged that issues such as the environment and inflation are affecting everyone in his riding, but maintains immigration is the major concern of Indo-Canadian voters.
The biggest challenge is balancing the need of the new professional class immigrants, while clearing the backlog of immigrants’ families, he explained.