Toronto Star Letter To The Editor: Is The Tamil Migrant Ship Just A Repeat Of The 1914 Komagata Maru Incident Of Racism?

Shades of 1914 Komagata Maru incident?

Published On Sun Aug 15 2010

Re: Canadian officials intercept Tamil ship, Aug. 13

Is MV Sun Sea a modern-day Komagata Maru?

Has anyone else noticed the eerie similarity of the treatment being meted out to the group of Tamil arrivals in 2010 with that of the more than 300 (mostly Sikh) South Asian arrivals in 1914? I am, of course, referring to the Canadian government’s shameful treatment of the passengers of the Komagata Maru in 1914. (The government would not allow the would-be immigrants to land in Vancouver and the ship was forced to take them back to India.)

In 1982 at a yard sale in Durham county, I bought a book written by Ted Ferguson with a very interesting title: A white man’s country: An exercise in Canadian prejudice, which was published in 1975. I could not remember that I had heard of the Komagata Maru incident before reading Ferguson’s book.

There are some differences in that the passengers of the Komagata Maru had not been labelled terrorists and the Canadian government was very open about its white supremacist culture.

Interestingly enough, the passengers of the Komagata Maru were all British citizens since India, like Canada at the time (1914), was part of the British Empire.

Since Freguson’s book was published in 1975 other books have been written about the Komagata Maru incident, including Tragedy of the Komagata Maru (1975) by Sohan Singh Josh The Voyage of the Komagata Maru: the Sikh Challenge to Canada’s Colour Bar (1979) by Hugh J.M. Johnston, White Canada Forever: Popular Attitudes and Public Policy toward Orientals in British Columbia (1990) by W. Peter Ward.

I encourage people who do not know about this bit of Canadian history to check out the similarities and see that the more things supposedly change, the more they remain the same.

It would be interesting to read what white Canadian journalists wrote about the passengers of the Komagata Maru and what they are writing about the passengers of the MV Sun Sea.

Murphy Browne, Toronto