📰 Source: upgoat.net | Upgoat
✍️ Original author: Trickthegoyim
⬆️ score: 23
v/whatever · by u/Trickthegoyim
📝 Original content:
The komagata maru incident.
When I was in school. This incident from 1915 was drummed into our heads. There was entire page in the textbook for history dedicated to this incident. The way they spun it: -ship full of poor refugees reached Canadian port (no other context provided) -we didn’t let them in because racism -its documented as a tragedy, the shame of Canada. Our sin.
Anyways the boat fucked off eventually. I don’t care what happened after that. After seeing another propaganda post crying about this topic, I decided to do some research. Here is what I found.
And I have to ask: why was this packed ship heading to Vancouver, Canada without any permission? Especially considering our laws at the time made this illegal and they knew that. The previous ships had been accepted but the social currency ran out eventually. They realized that if they kept accepting ships, the Indians would keep sending them. These were relatively wealthy Indians from Punjab. They left Hong Kong.
The man who chartered the Komagata Maru was Baba Gurdit Singh, a wealthy Punjabi businessman based in Malaya and Singapore. He accepted ticket payments from most passengers to fund the charter, though some were permitted to pay via promissory notes (hundis) or delayed fares when they could not pay upfront. Gurdit Singh believed the passengers could legally enter Canada for two main reasons: British Subject Status: Since India and Canada were both part of the British Empire, he argued that as British subjects, Indians had a right to travel freely anywhere within the Empire. Bypassing the Continuous Journey Regulation: Canada’s exclusion law barred immigrants who did not arrive via an uninterrupted voyage directly from their country of origin. Gurdit Singh consulted legal counsel and intentionally chartered a ship to sail directly to Vancouver, believing that fulfilling the “continuous journey” requirement on paper and challenging the law in Canadian courts would force the government to allow
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