The Komagata Maru: Anti-Asian Racism Then and Now

One hundred years ago, in May 1914, the Komagata Maru steamship sailed into Vancouver harbour. On board were 376 courageous Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus from India who were determined to break Canada’s racist colour bar against Asian immigration. The government refused to let them land and for two long, hot summer months the passengers were left to perish on the ship. Denied regular supplies of food or drinking water, they stood down continual harassment by immigration officials. Some 160 police and immigration officials tried to storm the ship but were repulsed with bricks and chunks of coal. Finally, on July 23, under the guns of a naval cruiser, the passengers of the Komagata Maru sailed back to Asia.

When the ship arrived in India in late September, the British colonial police would not permit it to enter Calcutta. Instead, the passengers were forced to disembark some 27 kilometres away, where the police provoked an altercation that left 19 passengers dead. Those who did not escape were arrested. By this time, World War I had begun. The people of India were subjects of British colonialism, and although the Komagata Maru incident had shown that they could not freely traverse the Empire, they were still expected to fight and die for their imperialist oppressor in its brutal wars.

The Canadian government has tried to expunge this chapter of its bloody racist history by issuing an apology. Indeed, the bourgeoisie has been churning out such hollow apologies, including for the racist Chinese head tax, for the internment of Japanese Canadians in World War II and for the horrible abuse of Native peoples in the residential school system. The hypocrisy is breathtaking. In August 2008, after Tory prime minister Stephen Harper delivered his apology to an Indian community festival in Surrey, B.C., Sikhs in the audience denounced this. Community leaders then asked for a show of hands and determined that the crowd of 8,000 rejected the apology (cbc.ca, 3 August 2008).

And the Canadian rulers’ racist war on immigrants continues. In the very year Harper made his phony apology, the government deported Laibar Singh, a paralyzed Sikh man from India, despite protests of thousands throughout the country. Two years later, in August 2010, a ship carrying 492 Tamil asylum seekers was intercepted off the coast of B.C. by Canadian authorities. The men, women and children on board were jailed for months and in some cases years; many have been deported back to Sri Lanka.

In 1914, members of the Socialist Party of Canada (SPC)—at the time, the main Marxist group in B.C.—fought for the rights of the Komagata Maru passengers. SPC member Husain Rahim was a key organizer of their supporters on shore, while J. Edward Bird was their lawyer until he was forced to leave town with his family after receiving death threats.

Today, we of the Trotskyist League/Ligue trotskyste call for full citizenship rights for all immigrants. We fight to build a multiethnic revolutionary workers party. Such a party would fight all strains of oppression and exploitation, mobilizing the social power of the working class on behalf of immigrants, refugees and ethnic minorities as part of the struggle to sweep away racist capitalism through a socialist revolution.