Source: This article has been reprinted from the online edition of the TML Weekly
Source url: http://www.cpcml.ca/Tmlw2014/W44025.HTM#10
On July 23, 1914, the Canadian warship Rainbow with several hundred armed Canadian soldiers on board forced the chartered freighter Komagata Maru with the 352 British subjects of Punjabi nationality it carried, out of Vancouver harbour. Supplied with food and water obtained through the mass actions of the passengers and their allies in Vancouver, the ship made a 66-day passage to Calcutta. The passengers, who had invested their life savings to obtain passage to Vancouver where they aspired to join other countrymen living in BC, needed to find work in Calcutta to recover their losses. However, the ship was diverted by a British gunboat and docked at Budge Budge where British officers, guns drawn, tried to arrest Gurdit Singh, leader of the expedition and force the passengers onto a train to return them to Punjab. The passengers would not hand over Gurdit Singh or other leaders.
Source: This article has been reprinted from the online edition of the TML Weekly
Source url: http://www.cpcml.ca/Tmlw2014/W44025.HTM#10
On July 23, 1914, the Canadian warship Rainbow with several hundred armed Canadian soldiers on board forced the chartered freighter Komagata Maru with the 352 British subjects of Punjabi nationality it carried, out of Vancouver harbour. Supplied with food and water obtained through the mass actions of the passengers and their allies in Vancouver, the ship made a 66-day passage to Calcutta. The passengers, who had invested their life savings to obtain passage to Vancouver where they aspired to join other countrymen living in BC, needed to find work in Calcutta to recover their losses. However, the ship was diverted by a British gunboat and docked at Budge Budge where British officers, guns drawn, tried to arrest Gurdit Singh, leader of the expedition and force the passengers onto a train to return them to Punjab. The passengers would not hand over Gurdit Singh or other leaders.
The arbitrary and brutal actions of the British occupying army at Budge Budge culminated in their opening fire on the resisting disembarked crowd. Once the shooting started, a number, including Gurdit Singh, escaped and went into hiding, but 19 others were shot to death. The British state had entered World War One on August 4 while the Komagata Maru was at sea and most of the rest of the passengers were forcibly returned to Punjab by train, where they were held either in jail or under village detention until the end of the war. Gurdit Singh lived free underground for five years, but was persuaded by Mahatma Gandhi to turn himself in to the British occupiers in 1922. He subsequently served five years in a British occupation jail. Thus with mass killings, arrests and jail terms ended this sordid and shameful story of racism, violence and imperialist hypocrisy played out by the British state and its colonial administration in Canada and India.
The story preceding the expulsion of the Komagata Maru from Vancouver is one of a brave act of resistance against the unjust and racist immigration policy of Britain and its colony Canada. Settlement of Punjabi workers in BC and on the west coast of the U.S.A. began at the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries. These early Indian settlers organized themselves against the prevailing racist working conditions imposed by sawmill owners, and took up the cause of liberating their homeland. British colonial authorities feared this development and in 1908 planted a key Indian colonial police agent in Vancouver, William Charles Hopkinson, who posed as a Canadian immigration official. His mission was to infiltrate and liquidate revolutionary organization within the Punjabi community.
Immigration was the prerogative of the British and on January 1, 1908 the British Governor-General passed an Order-in-Council which stated "immigrants may be prohibited from landing or coming into Canada unless they come from the country of their birth, or citizenship, by a continuous journey and on through tickets purchased before leaving the country of their birth, or citizenship." This "continuous journey" provision, which remained in law until 1947, was written explicitly to prohibit any more Indians from migrating to BC.
The state tried to hide its racist hand by blaming non-Asian settlers. The society had been incited by the capitalist newspapers and reactionary politicians to push racism as a means of dividing workers, and enabling capitalists to establish a two-wage and apartheid system in the province. However, enlightened workers in BC founded the Socialist Party of Canada in December 1904 during the 4th annual convention of the Socialist Party of BC. These socialists had inscribed the ideas of Karl Marx in their program. In 1908 the party elected one of its members, J. Edward Bird, to City Council. Bird, a lawyer who had migrated to Vancouver from Ontario in 1901, developed close relations with the Punjabi community undertaking both business and immigration matters. Bird and his socialist colleagues fought against the racist attacks being organized by the state on behalf of the capitalists and the racist "continuous journey" regulation. Bird was elected to City Council just months after a notorious racist attack on the Vancouver Chinese and Japanese communities organized by an agent from San Francisco in 1907 which shows the advanced working class movement never collaborated with imperialist racist politics in BC.
In October 1913, a group of Punjabi immigrants arrived in Victoria arguing they had previously been settled in BC, but the Immigration Board nonetheless ordered them deported. Bird was hired by the Indian community to fight. He "filed a notice of appeal with the Interior Ministry and also applied for a writ of habeas corpus, arguing that the wording of the Orders-in-Councils that amended the Immigration Act conflicted with the original legislation. In Rex vs. Thirty Nine Hindus, B.C. Chief Justice Gordon Hunter ruled the ‘ continuous journey’ regulations to be ultra vires, or beyond the power of the Act, allowing the immigrants to land in Canada."[1]
This was an historic victory for rights and it encouraged Indians to write to friends and relatives urging them to book passage to BC. Within this situation Gurdit Singh, a patriotic businessman in Singapore, chartered the Komagata Maru and sold tickets to Indians wanting to emigrate to BC. In April they set sail from Hong Kong to pick up passengers in various Asian ports, departing Yokohama, Japan with 376 passengers on May 3 and arriving in Vancouver on May 23. His objective was clear: challenge the racist "continuous journey" regulation. He and his political allies on the vessel and in Vancouver were determined to take a stand for their right to settle in BC.
The Indian community and its allies organized another legal battle, raised funds and held public meetings to counter the filthy racist propaganda in the Vancouver Sun and Province and the racist slanders of politicians like Conservative MP H.H. Stevens and Conservative Premier Richard McBride who adamantly refused to allow the immigrants to land. They deprived the vessel of food and water, and only the active organizing of the community in Vancouver provided the passengers with necessities. The legal battle was again headed by Bird, but he was curtailed to challenge the newly re-written order-in-council on behalf of only one immigrant, Munshi Singh. The full bench of the BC Court of Appeal unanimously rejected Bird’s case on July 6, saying it had no authority to interfere with the Department of Immigration and Colonization.
The passengers on board the Komagata Maru fired the Japanese captain. They were adamant to stay. The Vancouver police attacked the ship on July 19 from a police launch. They were decisively repelled by the immigrants, who pelted them with lumps of coal. Only after the authorities allowed proper provisions for the ship and called in the warship Rainbow with its decks lined with armed soldiers did the Komagata Maru, its captain back on board, raise anchor and sail out of Vancouver on July 23. This was a most sordid deed by British imperialists and Canadian colonial politicians.
A hundred years later, how are British Columbians and all Canadians to assess the significance of this reactionary act denying the rights of Indians to settle here? The official narrative is: "well those were the bad old days." In a hundred years, this story goes, Canada has grown up. Both federal and provincial governments issued some words of apology back in 2008, although Harper never spoke those words in parliament.
In reality, however, things remain very similar — not the same, but similar — to those days. When the Komogata Maru was driven out of Vancouver harbor in 1914, only 50 years had passed since Justice Begbie hanged five Tsilhqot’in chiefs in Quesnel for waging an armed resistance against the genocidal spread of small pox amongst the Pacific indigenous nations by Governor Douglas in order to "clear the land" for European settlement. The genocide was followed by more genocide in the residential schools. More apologies have been made, and more apologetic words from reactionary governments will follow.
But has the situation changed in essence? Can it be said that the rights of immigrant workers settled in BC have been secured? Can it be said that the rights of First Nations are enforced? Is it not the case that workers like the port truck drivers are unable to force the companies to honour agreements made months ago? Is not public education being starved of funds which specifically hits hardest at working class, immigrant and First Nations children? Is it not the case that the descendants of those capitalists and politicians who profited from genocide and apartheid racism 150 years ago, 100 years ago, are still impoverishing First Nation reserves, still imposing racist and exploitative "temporary foreign workers" programs to divide the working class and deny rights to workers?
The conditions today are similar to those in 1914, but not the same. Today the capital of the ruling empire is Washington, DC, not the colonial office in London. Today the working class has inherited the fighting anti-racist spirit of the early Socialist Party, but has evolved its thinking and organization into a militant contemporary Marxist-Leninist force, which under the leadership of its founder, Hardial Bains, gave rise to a modern Canadian working class-led anti-racist and anti-fascist movement in BC to lead the fight for rights.
Imperialism dominates the world today as in 1914. Days after the Komagata Maru left Vancouver the British empire engaged in industrial mass slaughter against their rivals for world domination. Sixty-thousand Canadian youth perished in the muddy filth, rat-infested trenches of World War One, part of the millions slaughtered to decide whether the financial oligarchs in London or Berlin would rule the world. Today the war-monger Harper supports the colonial occupying state of Israel’s genocide of the indigenous Palestinians. War runs through the veins of the financial oligarchs who profit from arms production and sales. Great dangers face the peoples. Only qualitative changes can save humanity.
Here in BC, the story of the heroic resistance of Gurdit Singh, the passengers on the Komagata Maru, the internationalist fighting stance of British Columbians, led by the then 5,000 strong Indian community and joined by other progressive people like Bird inspires the working class to step up the battle for the rights of all: for workers, First Nations, immigrants, women, youth, everyone. Today’s British Columbian masses have had enough with neo-liberalism, with hypocrisy and lies, with being marginalized and deprived of the power to decide. The ignominious act of the racist Canadian state on July 23, 1914 and the courageous struggle of resistance against it, inspires the working class today, inspires all those who want to learn from history, to step up the struggle to bring an end to the old, racist world of empire disguising itself today as multi-cultural and democratic. Those early struggles of the BC working class to resist the racist imperialists in 1914 as shown by the fight of the passengers on the Komagata Maru together with their allies on shore, will most certainly mature and grow to put an end to racism, empire and imperialist war and usher in new arrangements that empower the people to ensure the rights of all. A new world will be born!
Notes
1. "Behind the Komagata Maru’s fight to open Canada’s border," Globe and Mail, May 24, 2014.
(CPC ML Archives, Wikipedia, Globe & Mail, Government of Canada Website