Source: Los Angeles Times

Three months ago, most Canadians had never heard of Harjit Singh Sajjan.

But after newly elected Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tapped him to be defense minister in November, a 2006 photograph of the former soldier went viral on the Internet.

It shows him on duty in Afghanistan, wearing a wide smile, bushy beard, camouflage flak jacket and wraparound sunglasses. But it was his head wear that attracted the most attention: a turban.

Sajjan is a Sikh immigrant from India. His appointment to the Cabinet is a testament to Trudeau’s willingness to break tradition. The first person of color to run Canada’s 100,000-person defense department and military, the 45-year-old former police detective is neither a career officer nor defense policy wonk.

Until Sajjan was elected to Parliament last fall, he had never been a politician either.

Now he is the point person in implementing Trudeau’s campaign promise to end Canada’s fighter jet bombing operations against Islamic State militants. Sajjan announced the move this month.

In an earlier interview with The Times, he explained: “We are going to be adjusting our resources to have a greater and meaningful impact on the mission and meet the needs of the coalition.”

For the most part, Canadians have welcomed Sajjan’s appointment. “Badass” became the standard description on social media. One military officer was reprimanded for posting racist comments on the Canadian forces Facebook page.

Sikhs in Canada number about 500,000 — or just over 1% of the country’s population — though their turbans, beards and gravitation toward politics and activism have made them more visible than many other minorities.

They now occupy four of 30 positions in Trudeau’s Cabinet.

Born in a farming village in the state of Punjab, Sajjan was a beneficiary of Canadian immigration reform under Trudeau’s father, then-Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, that encouraged family reunification. Sajjan arrived in Vancouver as a 5-year-old with his mother and sister to join his father, a former police constable who had immigrated a few years earlier and worked in a sawmill.

He grew up in South Vancouver, an immigrant enclave with a large Sikh population.

After graduating from high school in 1989, Sajjan joined the reserves and immediately encountered cultural conflict. The Sikh religion, a monotheistic faith that originated in the 15th century, generally requires its adherents to keep their hair uncut and wrapped in a turban. Because that made it impossible to wear a standard gas mask, Sajjan invented and later patented a protective hood that solved the problem.

His first deployment overseas was a North Atlantic Treaty Organization peacekeeping mission to Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1997.

Two years later, the soft-spoken Sajjan joined the Vancouver Police Department as a patrol officer and was eventually promoted to a plainclothes detective in the gang unit.

He would encounter buddies from his old neighborhood, which was a hotbed of gang activity.

“I was sometimes arresting people who were more physically fit and smarter than me,” he recalled. “It was sad to see them end up this way.”

His unlikely rise to the top defense job started with a 2006 leave of absence from the police department to deploy to Afghanistan as a reservist.

It was during that operation that Sajjan posed for the now-famous photograph.

Sajjan was originally sent to Afghanistan as an administrative officer. But his Canadian commander, Maj. Gen. David Fraser, had other plans for him.

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