By Gurbir Singh
New Zealand August 01, 2017: Twelve Indian-origin candidates are in the fray in New Zealand’s forthcoming elections to be held on 23 Sept 2017.
The ruling National Party has selected four Indian candidates in this year’s list, including two current List MPs, Kanwaljit S. Bakshi and Parmjeet Parmar. Other two new faces selected are Bala Beeram and Rahul Sirigiri. Rahul, however, has not been allocated any seat and is on the list only.
Similarly, the main opposition party, Labour party has also included four Indians who would be battling it out in the election, Priyanca Radhakrishnan, Jesse Pabla, Baljit Kaur and Gaurav Sharma.
Mahesh Bindra, a List MP of New Zealand First party, has again been included this year as a list candidate by the Party.
The ACT party also has two candidates, Bhupinder Singh and Satnam Singh.
Another Indian, Raj Pardeep Singh has been included by the Green party as a list candidate.
At this stage, the candidates who are almost definite to be back in the Parliament include Kanwaljit Bakshi, Parmjeet Parmar and Mahesh Bindra. It would be a record fourth term in Parliament for Bakshi.
NZ parliament has a mix of Electorate MPs and List MPs. The Electorate MPs are elected and the rest of a party’s MPs are elected from the party’s list. The number of List MPs each party receives is the difference between a party’s total allocation of seats in Parliament and its number of Electorate MPs.
The Indian ethnic group comprised 155,178 people living in New Zealand according to the census of 2013. These numbers include Indian descent persons from Fiji, South Africa also.
Gurbir Singh is a New Zealand-based feature writer & journalist.
He can be reached at: gurbir@journalist.com