Posted on 05/08/2014 1:08:48 AM PDT by ND23
Canada Post unveiled a new stamp on May 6 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Komagata Maru incident. The stamp was unveiled on Parliament Hill to start Asian Heritage Month. Canada Post issued the stamp to mark the centennial of this event and also recognizing the steps that the country has taken towards a more tolerant and diverse society.
(Excerpt) Read more at livepunjab.com ...
When I first read it I thought it said “Kobayashi Maru” from Star Trek.
This incident happened in 1914. This demand by the Punjabi community of Sihks has a purpose. That is to connect the hitorical “misaction” of the Canadian and British Columbia government to those who were yet unborn at the time, so that the now innocent muct bear guilt and culpability for the activity of their ancestors.
This is the very basis of nationalism. Hostorioc justice was also the cry of nationalisty socialists ( fascists) of Germany, Italy , and other places in modern times involving the US COngressional Black Caucus.
This enables the present “raciast shakedown” on the virtually innocent people of today who had nothing to do with the historical actions of their ancestors, who lived in a time that had a very different morality and culture.
Enough already my dear Sikhs! Be Canadians or get the hell out!
I do not mind a commorative stamp, BUT socially forced government apologies for historical incidents retroactively adjudged as wrong? Eff them.
Komagata Maru incidentFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Komagata Maru incident 1914
The Komagata Maru incident involved a Japanese steamship, the Komagata Maru, that sailed from Hong Kong, Shanghai, China to Yokohama, Japan and then to Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, in 1914, carrying 376 passengers from Punjab, India. Of them 24 were admitted to Canada, but the 352 other passengers were not allowed to land in Canada, and the ship was forced to return to India.[1] The passengers consisted of 340 Sikhs, 24 Muslims, and 12 Hindus, all British subjects. This was one of several incidents in the history of early 20th century involving exclusion laws in both Canada and the United States designed to keep out immigrants of only Asian origin.
Immigration controls in Canada[edit]Main article: Continuous journey regulation
Within the British Empire, the main class of people who were not British subjects were the rulers of native states formally under the protection of the British Crown, and their peoples. Many such smaller states, especially in India, were for most practical purposes administered by the imperial government, but the sovereignty of all rested in their rulers and not in the British Crown, and all such persons are considered to have been born outside the sovereignty and allegiance of the Crown, so were (and, where these persons are still alive, still are) known as British Protected Persons.
The Canadian government’s first attempt to restrict immigration from India was to pass an order-in-council on January 8, 1908, that prohibited immigration of persons who “in the opinion of the Minister of the Interior” 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.” In practice this applied only to ships that began their voyage in India, as the great distance usually necessitated a stopover in Japan or Hawaii. These regulations came at a time when Canada was accepting massive numbers of immigrants (over 400,000 in 1913 alone – a figure that remains unsurpassed to this day), almost all of whom came from Europe.
Gurdit Singh’s initial idea[edit]“ The visions of men are widened by travel and contacts with citizens of a free country will infuse a spirit of independence and foster yearnings for freedom in the minds of the emasculated subjects of alien rule. ”
—Gurdit Singh
Gurdit Singh Sandhu, from Sarhali (not to be confused with Gurdit Singh Jawanda, from Haripur Khalsa, a 1906 Indo-Canadian immigration pioneer), was a well-to-do fisherman in Singapore who was aware of the problems that Punjabis were facing immigrating to Canada due to certain exclusion laws. He wanted to circumvent these laws by hiring a boat to sail from Calcutta to Vancouver. His aim was to help his compatriots whose previous journeys to Canada had been blocked.
Though Gurdit Singh was apparently aware of regulations when he chartered the Komagata Maru in January 1914,[2] he continued with his purported goal of challenging the continuous journey regulation and opening the door for immigration from India to Canada.
At the same time, in January 1914, he publicly espoused the Ghadarite cause while in Hong Kong.[3] The Ghadar Party was an organization founded by Indians of the United States and Canada in June 1913 with the aim to liberate India from British rule. It was also known as the Hindi Association of the Pacific Coast.
Passengers[edit]The passengers consisted of 340 Sikhs, 24 Muslims, and 12 Hindus, all British subjects. One of the Sikh passengers, Jagat Singh Thind, was the youngest brother of Bhagat Singh Thind, an Indian-American Sikh writer and lecturer on “spiritual science” who was involved in an important legal battle over the rights of Indians to obtain U.S. citizenship (United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind).[4]
Indian nationals had engaged in terrorism, assassinating Lord Mayo in India; William Hutt Curzon Wyllie and wounding Lord Hardinge; Gun running with ships off Gray’s Harbour and Singapore, as well as breaking immigration laws. The Government of Britain held the Canada Immigration portfolio at the time was naturally worried about Indian nationals spreading rebellion on the eve of the First World War. See Ghadar Conspiracy ; Annie Larsen arms plot Christmas Day Plot
Voyage[edit]Departure from Hong Kong[edit]Hong Kong became the point of departure. The ship was scheduled to leave in March, but Singh was arrested for selling tickets for an illegal voyage. After several months he was released on bail and given permission by the Governor of Hong Kong to set sail, and the ship departed on April 4 with 165 passengers. More passengers joined at Shanghai on April 8, and the ship arrived at Yokohama on April 14. It left Yokohama on May 3 with its complement of 376 passengers, and sailed into Burrard Inlet, near Vancouver, on May 23. “This ship belongs to the whole of India, this is a symbol of the honour of India and if this was detained, there would be mutiny in the armies,”[citation needed] a passenger told a British officer. The Indian Nationalist revolutionaries Barkatullah and Balwant Singh met with the ship en route. Balwant Singh was head priest of the Gurdwara in Vancouver and had been one of three delegates sent to London and India to represent the case of Indians in Canada. Ghadarite literature was disseminated on board and political meetings took place on board.
Arrival in Vancouver[edit]
Komagata Maru (furthest ship on the left) being escorted by HMCS Rainbow and a swarm of small boatsWhen the Komagata Maru arrived in Canadian waters, it was not allowed to dock. The first immigration officer to meet the ship in Vancouver was Fred “Cyclone” Taylor.[5] The Conservative Premier of British Columbia, Richard McBride, gave a categorical statement that the passengers would not be allowed to disembark, as the then–Prime Minister of Canada Sir Robert Borden decided what to do with the ship. Conservative MP H.H. Stevens organized a public meeting against allowing the ship’s passengers to disembark and urged the government to refuse to allow the ship to remain. Stevens worked with immigration official Malcolm R. J. Reid to keep the passengers off shore. It was Reid’s intransigence, supported by Stevens, that led to mistreatment of the passengers on the ship and to prolonging its departure date, which wasn’t resolved until the intervention of the federal Minister of Agriculture, Martin Burrell, MP for Yale—Cariboo.
Meanwhile a “shore committee” had been formed with Hassan Rahim and Sohan Lal Pathak. Protest meetings were held in Canada and the United States. At one, held in Dominion Hall, Vancouver, it was resolved that if the passengers were not allowed off, Indo-Canadians should follow them back to India to start a rebellion (or Ghadar). A British government agent who infiltrated the meeting wired London and Ottawa to tell them that supporters of the Ghadar Party were on the ship.
The shore committee raised $22,000 as an instalment on chartering the ship. They also launched a test case legal battle under J. Edward Bird’s legal counsel in the name of Munshi Singh, one of the passengers. On July 6, the full bench of the B.C. Court of Appeal gave a unanimous judgement that under new orders-in-council, it had no authority to interfere with the decisions of the Department of Immigration and Colonization.[6] The Japanese captain was relieved of duty by the angry passengers, but the Canadian government ordered the harbour tug Sea Lion to push the ship out to sea. On July 19, the angry passengers mounted an attack. The next day the Vancouver newspaper The Sun reported: “Howling masses of Hindus showered policemen with lumps of coal and bricks... it was like standing underneath a coal chute”.
Departure from Vancouver[edit]
Inspector Reid, H.H. Stevens and Walter Hose on board the Komagata Maru.The government also mobilized HMCS Rainbow, a former Royal Navy ship under the command of Commander Hose, with troops from the 11th Regiment Irish Fusiliers of Canada, 72nd Regiment “Seaforth Highlanders of Canada”, and the 6th Regiment “The Duke of Connaught’s Own Rifles”. In the end, only 20 passengers were admitted to Canada, since the ship had violated the exclusion laws, the passengers did not have the required funds, and they had not sailed directly from India. The ship was turned around and forced to depart on July 23 for Asia.
Return to India[edit]The Komagata Maru arrived in Calcutta on September 27. Upon entry into the harbour, the ship was stopped by a British gunboat, and the passengers were placed under guard. The government of the British Raj saw the men on the Komagata Maru not only as self-confessed lawbreakers, but also as dangerous political agitators. When the ship docked at Budge Budge, the police went to arrest Baba Gurdit Singh and the 20 or so other men that they saw as leaders. He resisted arrest, a friend of his assaulted a policeman and a general riot ensued. Shots were fired, 19 of the passengers were killed. Some escaped, but the remainder were arrested and imprisoned or sent to their villages and kept under village arrest for the duration of the First World War. This incident became known as the Budge Budge Riot.
Ringleader Gurdit Singh Sandhu managed to escape and lived in hiding until 1922. He was urged by Mahatma Gandhi to give himself up as a ‘true patriot’; he duly did so, and was imprisoned for five years.
Significance[edit]The Komagata Maru incident was widely cited at the time by Indian groups to highlight discrepancies in Canadian immigration laws. Further, the inflamed passions in the wake of the incident were widely cultivated by the Indian revolutionary organisation, the Ghadar Party, to rally support for its aims. In a number of meetings ranging from California in 1914 to the Indian diaspora, prominent Ghadarites including Barkatullah, Tarak Nath Das, and Sohan Singh used the incident as a rallying point to recruit members for the Ghadar movement, most notably in support of promulgating plans to coordinate a massive uprising in India. Lack of support from the general population caused these plans to come to nothing.
Credit:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komagata_Maru_incident
Canada had very little "asian heritage" until the mass immigration of the 1970s.
Will Canada Post be issuing a stamp commemorating the 268 canadians who were murdered by Sikh terrorists when they blew up Air India flight 128?
How about a stamp commemorating Sikh extremism in Canada? That's a bit of asian heritage worth talking about.
Sikhs should apologize for blowing up 268 canadians on Air India 128.
>How exactly is this the same as nationalism exhibited by Nazis and Italians? They base their historical inaction based on their defeat in World War 1, which THEY STARTED. That was solely their fault. How exactly are the Sikhs at fault to challenge the validity of the racist and discriminatory laws that were present in Canada at the time? Who else did those laws hurt other than Indians? Certainly not the Canadians. Atleast use some brain before making false equivalences.
>No, the demand by the Punjabi Sikhs is to get some closure, over a terrible incident that happened a century ago. It doesn’t matter if it is socially forced or not- the least the government can do is to acknowledge that a certain incident was wrong. Nowhere have they implied that the current generation is responsible for what happened in the past. If you know you’re not guilty for something that happened a century ago, why would you feel guilty anyway, just to acknowledge an incident as wrong?
Using your logic, the German government shouldn’t apologize for the actions taken by the Nazis half a century back. Would you consider that an “antisemitic” shakedown against the current generation?
>Nope. Judging the incident as wrong retroactively doesn’t imply that the incident was right for its time. That law was discriminatory, through and through. Even if reparations couldn’t be made then, it should be done now, to end this, once and for all. And it’s not as if it’s only recently that this was perceived as wrong. Indian revolutionaries and British officials had already said that the incident was wrong at that time. Even when Canada passed the Continuous Journey legislation, the British Government explicitly warned that such incidents might happen. And yet, the Government at the time chose to ignore that. So whose fault is it then?
>You talk about yourself as innocent, and then you go ahead and tell Sikh-Canadians to get out if they don’t ascribe to your view? Such hypocrisy. Comments like these are precisely why past incidents like the KM incident should be brought to light.
>Anyway, who are you to tell them to get out? It’s not as if they only suck money out of the country. They have contributed a lot to this country, and have lived there for around 150 years. The Canadian values should incorporate Sikh culture and vice versa. They’ve earned it.
Remember, your ancestors were immigrants too.
>As for the person that commented that Canada Post should condemn the Flight 182 bombing, they absolutely should. It was done by Khalistanis, who are as bad as the Taliban. I don’t understand why the Canadian Government is so soft towards Khalistanis in general. Those are the ones that should be genuinely kicked out since they can never assimilate into Canada. Even Trudeau supported the fringe farmer’s movement in India, without even understanding the basic context. Luckily, he got his karma in the name of Freedom Convoy.
On a related incident, when the Titanic survivors were being landed in the U.S. four of the survivors were refused entry. They where Chinese sailors destined to crew a British ship. They were sent to the Caribbean instead. Same reason as these people were denied entry.
I do not mind a commorative stamp, BUT socially forced government apologies for historical incidents retroactively adjudged as wrong? Eff them.
History is history.Why would anyone want NOT to remember? Stop rewriting history and stop making modern people being assigned a retroactive responsibility for it.
Remember history, and if ist worng. remembering will make sure it does not happen again. But I am not responsible for what happened years ago.
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