Read The Statement By Prime Minister Justin Trudeau
23 May, 2017
Komagata Maru’s 103rd Anniversary: Read The Statement By Prime Minister Justin Trudeau
The Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, today issued the following statement on the 103rd anniversary of the Komagata Maru incident:
“More than a century ago today, a great injustice took place when most of the 376 passengers onboard the Komagata Maru steamship were denied entry into Canada and forced to return to India where some were killed and many imprisoned.
Prime Minister Trudeau offers a formal apology for the Komagata Maru incident
“Last year, I stood in the House of Commons to apologize on behalf of the Government of Canada to all those affected by this tragic incident. An unjust federal law ultimately led to these passengers being turned away. For that grave injustice and for the regrettable consequences that followed, we are sorry.
“The Komagata Maru passengers share much in common with the many immigrants, past and present, who have come to Canada to build a better life for themselves and their families. By offering compassion and a fair chance at success, we not only help provide more opportunities for them and their loved ones, we also build a better Canada – one that is stronger, more inclusive, and more prosperous.
Komagata Maru incident
The Komagata Maru incident involved the Japanese steamship Komagata Maru on which a group of citizens of the British Raj attempted to immigrate to Canada in 1914 but were denied entry.
Start date: 1914
“Today, we honour the victims of the Komagata Maru tragedy and their descendants. Canadians are proud to be part of a country that respects and protects multiculturalism as a core and defining value, and we thank all those from the South Asian community who make such invaluable contributions to our society. We benefit greatly from the vibrant diversity of our country.”
The real story of the Komagata Maru
Archival photo of passengers aboard the Komagata Maru in Vancouver Harbour, where the ship was denied entry to Canada.
With the forensic scrutiny of last week’s inglorious House of Commons roughhousing incident beginning to ease, now should be a good a time to have a close look at that other incident for which Prime Minister Justin Trudeau unreservedly apologized that very same day. Indeed, the apology necessitated by his own elbowing-penalty jackassery is the main reason his main-event apology has been so overlooked.
So let’s not overlook it. Far too much about what has long been known and uniformly regretted across the political spectrum in Ottawa as the Komagata Maru Incident gets conveniently overlooked at the best of times. But more than that, the story Trudeau told about it in the House last week overlooked so much that you could say that, strictly speaking, it wasn’t even true.
To be fair, Trudeau’s account was merely a saccharine gloss of the boilerplate version the Conservatives and the New Democrats also espouse, and the apology was intended to make us all feel better about ourselves, which nowadays seems to be what quite a few Canadians seem to believe is no small part of a prime minister’s job description. To be even more fair, securing a formal apology enunciated in the House of Commons was the easiest way for the leaders of Canada’s proud Sikh community to have the “incident” at least more officially commemorated, and revisited, after Stephen Harper’s not-quite-so ritualized apology several years ago.
But Trudeau might as well have said only that there were 376 passengers aboard a converted coal carrier that dropped anchor in Vancouver Harbour a century ago, and they were told to go back to India where they came from, and Canada was bad to do that and we’re sorry.
Related
Trudeau’s historic apology for Komagata Maru injustice resonates with Indo-Canadians, a century later
“Those passengers, like millions of immigrants to Canada since, came seeking better lives for their families,” the prime minister said. “Greater opportunities. A chance to contribute to their new home. Those passengers chose Canada. And when they arrived here, they were rejected.”
Well, kind of, partly, almost. 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.
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
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.
National Post
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