A protest at sea
The Komagata Maru incident challenged Canadian immigration laws.
Alex Q. Arbuckle
May 23 - July 23, 1914
In 1908, the Canadian government passed an order-in-council which prohibited the immigration of people who did not “come from the country of their birth or citizenship by a continuous journey and or through tickets purchased before leaving their country of their birth or nationality.”This “continuous journey” regulation was a masked attempt to restrict the entrance of immigrants arriving from India, a lengthy journey which necessarily included a stopover in Hawaii or Japan at the time. The exclusionary law faced several legal challenges and was amended a few times. Its most high-profile controversy came in 1914, when Gurdit Singh Sandhu decided to challenge it directly. Singh was a Punjabi man who had become wealthy in Singapore and was a supporter of the Ghadar Party, an organization dedicated to ending British rule over India. He chartered the Japanese freighter Komagata Maru and filled it with Punjabi immigrants, including 340 Sikhs, 24 Muslims and 12 Hindus, all of whom were British subjects. The ship departed from Hong Kong and stopped over in Shanghai and Yokohama before steaming into Burrard Inlet off Vancouver on May 23, 1914.
The ship was intercepted at the docks and the passengers were not permitted to disembark, except for 20 who were returning Canadian residents. A lengthy standoff ensued, as the government ordered the ship to turn around and leave.The people on the Komagata Maru were stuck floating in the harbor, denied resupplies of food and water from shore. Indian immigrants in Canada and the United States protested on their behalf, raised funds for a legal battle and delivered them supplies.
A case was filed and quickly heard. The court ruled in favor of the government’s denial of entry.Troops were deployed aboard the H.M.C.S. Rainbow to enforce the ship’s departure. On July 23, two months after its arrival, the Komagata Maru left for India, carrying 355 dejected and angry passengers. The freighter arrived in the Indian port of Budge Budge on Sept. 29, and British officials attempted to arrest Singh and the other leaders, who they saw as dangerous political agitators who could threaten British dominion over India. A scuffle ensued, which escalated into a riot. Nineteen of the passengers were killed.
While the provinces of British Columbia and Manitoba have issued official apologies in the decades since the incident, the federal government of Canada has yet to make an apology in the House of Commons.