Justin Trudeau, PM of Canada apologized in the Canadian parliament for the Komagata Maru incident in 1914 and tweeted the same.
But what really happened in 1914 at Vancouver and later Kolkata and all over India with the Ghadar Uprising in 1915...Read Madhavi Thampi explaining in Ghadar Jari Hai....
Ghadar Jari Hai, Vol 3, Issue 1&2, pp 29-30, 2009
Stirring legacy of the Komagata Maru
Madhavi
Thampi
tells us about an episode in the history of colonialism that enraged Indians
abroad and in India for the callous and discriminatory treatment meted out to
an enslaved people.
Passengers of Komagata Maru
The struggle against the British colonial rulers was joined
by hundreds of streams of Indian people, including Indians abroad. Poverty and destitution, the drying up of
economic opportunities at home, as well as political oppression, had compelled
millions of Indians in the colonial period to uproot themselves from their
homeland and make their way to places as far away as Mauritius and China,
Africa and the Caribbean islands, Australia and the Americas. However their status, as people who came from
a land that had been occupied and enslaved by a foreign power, did not leave
them wherever they went. Abused by
racist and colonial authorities in the places they moved to, with strong
emotional ties to their communities back home, and with their horizons
broadened by their experience as migrants, Indians who went abroad were among
the most militant fighters for India’s freedom. The episode of the Komagata
Maru, that took place 95 years ago, is a landmark in the anti-colonial struggle
that enshrined this spirit of the Indian people. The Komagata Maru was a Japanese steamship
that was chartered in Hong Kong in 1914 to carry aspiring Indian emigrants,
mainly from Punjab, to Vancouver, Canada.
As part of the process of conquering new lands and opening them up for
economic exploitation, colonialism and imperialism had always sought to use labour
from colonies and dependent countries in Asia and Africa. After the abolition of the slave trade in the
19th century, labour from India and China was in great demand to work on
plantations, railroads, lumber yards, mines, and so on. This gave rise to the notorious coolie trade,
in which lakhs of men and women were shipped off in the most barbaric
conditions to work as virtually bonded labour in other colonies.
However, from the beginning of the 20th century,
discriminatory immigration laws began to be applied, first against the Chinese,
and then against Indians also, in those places.
Along with these laws, racist campaigns were deliberately launched which
warned of “brown-skinned” and “yellow-skinned” immigrants “flooding” those
countries and taking over all jobs. The
idea here was not to stop the flow of immigrants from India and China, whose
labour was still very much needed by the capitalists in those countries, but to
tightly control it. It was a useful way
of engendering divisions among the workers of those countries on the basis of
their place of origin, and of preventing immigrants from standing up for their
rights out of fear of being persecuted and deported. To put the squeeze on
potential Indian immigrants, the government of the British colony of Canada
passed two Orders-in-Council in 1908.
One raised the money requirement for the immigrants at one go from $25
per person to $200 – a huge sum of money in those days. The other stipulated that only those who
sailed to Canada in a “continuous journey” from their place of origin were
eligible to be considered for immigrant status.
This was a near impossibility for those coming from India. Meanwhile, the US government also issued
regulations to curtail the flow of immigrants from India.
A large number of Indians had by this time made their way to
various places in China and Japan in the expectation of going onward from there
to North America for work. Stopped from
proceeding further, they had to bide their time for months on end with little
or no income.
In the words of Gurdit Singh, the businessman who hired the
Komagata Maru: “When I came to Hong Kong for some private business in January
1914, I could not bear the grief and hardship of the Vancouver emigrants who
had been waiting in the Sikh temple in Hong Kong. It was a matter of injustice and darkness, I
thought, because our brethren were passing their days in a miserable state for
the hope of arriving at Vancouver while staying here for one year and spending
money for their eating from their own pockets.”
After finally getting clearance from the colonial authorities
in Hong Kong to set sail, the Komagata Maru left for Vancouver on April 4,1914, picking up more passengers at
Shanghai and Japan on the way, a total of 337 passengers.
When they learned of the departure of the ship from Hong
Kong, the Canadian government went into a fever of preparations to forcibly
prevent the ship from docking at Vancouver and unloading its Indian
passengers. However, the Indians
resident in Vancouver, numbering not more than about 2,000, also made their
preparations to support their fellow countrymen in every way they could. When the Komagata Maru reached Canadian
waters in May 1914, it was ordered to turn back at once. After all that they had endured to reach
Canada, the passengers refused. A
stalemate ensued, with the Canadian authorities trying to use every means to
force the ship and its passengers to leave, including denying food and
essential supplies, while the Indian community in Vancouver tried their best to
send food and supplies and also to fight a legal battle on behalf of the ship
passengers. This was an extraordinary
display of courage and defiance, as well as love for their fellow countrymen, by
the Indian community.
In the end, after two months confined to the ship, the
Indians on board had no choice but to turn back. The events in Vancouver had among other
things raised the level of consciousness of the ordinary working people on
board the ship about the real nature of imperialism and about the necessity to
free India from the chains of colonial rule.
When the ship approached Calcutta on September 26, they were met by a
British gunboat which did not allow the ship to dock at Calcutta as planned,
but took it to Budge Budge. The
passengers wanted to take out a procession from the ship to the authorities in
the city to register their protest at their treatment. However, the British authorities had other
plans. Treating them as criminals, they
tried to force all the passengers, irrespective of what their plans were, to
proceed straightaway to Punjab in a special train. When the passengers tried to march in a
procession anyway, they were met with brutal force. More than a score of passengers died in
police firing, while many more were injured.
The news of the brutal treatment of the Komagata Maru
passengers both at Vancouver and when they returned to India aroused widespread
fury against the British rulers. It was
directly responsible for the mutiny in 1915 of the Indian regiment posted at
Singapore, the first such rebellion of a unit of the Indian armed forces after
1857. It also led to large numbers of
Indians from North America, China and other places volunteering to return to
India and join the campaign led by the Hindustani Ghadar Party to overthrow
British rule by force of arms.
The Komagata Maru episode holds important lessons for us
Indians today. The nature of imperialism
has not changed, even if direct colonial rule over India and other countries
has ended. When they want, the capitalists
in various countries use the state to manipulate immigration laws and
regulations to either entice labour from poorer countries to come and work
their enterprises, or to discourage them when that suits their interests. Migrant workers, be they from India or other
countries, have no rights and are always under pressure to accept whatever
conditions are imposed on them. Far from
defending their rights, the present-day Indian state shows only lip sympathy
for these hapless working people from our country.
The Komagata Maru episode
shows the unconquerable spirit of Indian people to unite and fight
against injustice, whether they are in India or abroad.
No words can fully erase the suffering of Komagata Maru victims. Today, we apologize and recommit to doing better.pic.twitter.com/NsryzhUbp1
