Komagata Maru: The Ship That Shaped Multiculturalism in Canada

Vancouver—[This week, nearly 100 years ago,] The Komagata Maru, a Japanese freighter carrying Sikh immigrants from India, was forced to sail from Vancouver after sitting for weeks in the city’s harbour. Under Canada’s strict immigration laws, the passengers were not allowed to land.

The ship, chartered by Singaporean Sikh Gurdit Singh, arrived in Vancouver on May 23, 1914, with 376 British subjects from India aboard. The ship’s point of origin in Hong Kong violated a 1908 Canadian law that required a continuous passage.

As British subjects, the passengers should have been able to settle in Canada, but public and political sentiments and laws at the time were overtly racist.

The passengers were forcibly confined to the ship and a Canadian warship, HMCS Rainbow, guarded the Komagata Maru before escorting it out of Vancouver Harbour on July 23, 1914.

Because those aboard were thought to be anti-British, when the ship arrived back in India, British police fired upon the group, killing and injuring dozens of people.

“At the time, the politicians thought they had a legitimate right to discriminate against East Indians,” Charan Gill, president of the B.C. Organization to Fight Racism, told The Sun on the 75th anniversary of the event in 1989.

The federal government announced funding for two projects two commemorate the incident in 2010. The Khalsa Diwan Society was to receive $82,500 to work with the Vancouver park board to design and locate a memorial to the Komagata Maru, while an additional $104,000 was committed to provide seed money to develop a museum on the site of the Ross Street Temple.

1 COMMENT

  1. ASIA FOR THE ASIANS, AFRICA FOR THE AFRICANS, WHITE COUNTRIES FOR EVERYBODY!

    Everybody says there is this RACE problem. Everybody says this RACE problem will be solved when the third world pours into EVERY white country and ONLY into white countries.

    The Netherlands and Belgium are just as crowded as Japan or Taiwan, but nobody says Japan or Taiwan will solve this RACE problem by bringing in millions of third worlders and quote assimilating unquote with them.

    Everybody says the final solution to this RACE problem is for EVERY white country and ONLY white countries to “assimilate,” i.e., intermarry, with all those non-whites.

    What if I said there was this RACE problem and this RACE problem would be solved only if hundreds of millions of non-blacks were brought into EVERY black country and ONLY into black countries?

    How long would it take anyone to realize I’m not talking about a RACE problem. I am talking about the final solution to the BLACK problem?

    And how long would it take any sane black man to notice this and what kind of psycho black man wouldn’t object to this?

    But if I tell that obvious truth about the ongoing program of genocide against my race, the white race, Liberals and respectable conservatives agree that I am a naziwhowantstokillsixmillionjews.

    They say they are anti-racist. What they are is anti-white.

    Anti-racist is a code word for anti-white

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