Terry Glavin: The real story of the Komagata Maru

Terry Glavin provides additional historical and broader context:

It’s true that many, if not most, of the passengers later disavowed any seditious intent, but telling the story the way Trudeau told it does a grave disservice to the memory of the brave radicals who organized the Komagata Maru enterprise, from the outset, in the cause of India’s freedom.

A quixotic propaganda-of-the-deed collaboration between the Socialist Party of Canada and the revolutionary Ghadar Movement, the explicit purpose of the effort was to mount a legal challenge to the “continuous passage” immigration regulations that India’s British overlords had persuaded Ottawa to adopt to stem the flight of pro-independence Indian militants to Canada. The larger aim was to bolster the ranks of insurrectionists plotting India’s emancipation from the relative safety of North America or, failing that, to expose the cruel hoax of equal citizenship in the British Empire, first asserted by the Empress of India, Queen Victoria herself, more than a half-century earlier.

The slogan of the Komagata Maru campaign’s organizers was not: “We choose Canada, please be nice to us.” It was: “What is our name? Mutiny. What is our work? Mutiny.” This was a specific reference to the 1857 Indian insurrection known as the Sepoy Rebellion, named after the British Empire’s native soldiers in India, known as sepoys. In the Urdu language, “mutiny” is “ghadar.”

Ghadar Movement leaders saw to the organization of the ship’s voyage, led the “shore committee” activities while the ship was waylaid in Burrard Inlet, and eventually provided arms to Komagata Maru’s passengers during their stopover in Yokohama on the return journey to Kolkata. In the days after its forced departure from Vancouver Harbour, Ghadarite propaganda aimed at Vancouver’s Indian expatriates was explicit: “Go to your country and set up a rebellion at once.” Even before the ship weighed anchor and headed out to sea, the Socialist Party’s H.M. Fitzgerald was exhorting Vancouver’s Sikhs to heed the Ghadarite call and return to India to take up the fight. Within two years, half of British Columbia’s roughly 2,000 Sikhs had done just that.

The Socialist Party provided the Komagata Maru’s legal defence in Vancouver, which was no small affront to “progressive” thinking at the time. British Columbia’s labour movement and left-wing leadership had been rife with racist hooliganism ever since B.C.’s assortment of socialist leagues and union councils coalesced into the Provincial Progressive Party in 1902. Fractious and comically sectarian, the one thing the party delegates firmly agreed on at their founding convention was that Asian immigrants should be barred from Canada.

All this is not to say that the Komagata Maru passengers were not treated abysmally, or that none of the passengers intended to settle peacefully in Canada, or that they were not subjected to racist immigration rules, or that Canada has nothing to apologize for, or that the passengers were not unjustly denied permission to disembark in Vancouver. But to cast them all in the role of “victims,” as Trudeau put it, commits an indignity against the truth and dishonours the cause of Indian freedom to which the Ghadarites and their eccentric, ahead-of-their-time socialist friends were so passionately committed. Parliamentary apologies are all well and good, but a formal House of Commons’ acknowledgment of their bravery would have been a more worthy tribute.

During his apology for Canada’s role in the Komagata Maru affair last week, Trudeau said this: “When we make mistakes, we must apologize, and recommit ourselves to doing better.”

This is a fine sentiment. We might also hope that committing ourselves to being a bit more honest about Canada’s past, rather than just putting history to the purpose of making ourselves appear so much better than our forebears, should be something to strive for, too.

Source: Terry Glavin: The real story of the Komagata Maru | National Post