Politics and Intergroup Relations

In March 1907 the British Columbia legislature disenfranchised all natives of India – as it had previously disenfranchised natives of China and Japan. Sikhs argued that they should have the same rights as other British subjects, and they pointed out that in other parts of Canada they could register as voters after meeting residence requirements. Their protests were ignored, however, and in British Columbia, where most of them lived, they could not vote in municipal, provincial, or even federal elections until 1947. (Provincial electoral law then governed eligibility in federal elections.) In the early years, Sikhs generally accepted the situation as something they could not change, while agitating for a relaxation of the immigration barrier by sending petitions and delegations to Ottawa and London. These efforts had little impact as long as politicians and bureaucrats looked at them as an alien group that could never be integrated into the Canadian mainstream.

The events of 1914 sharply illustrated the social and political isolation of the pioneering Sikh community. In that year, a Japanese tramp steamer, the Komagata Maru, sailed from Hong Kong under charter to 376 Punjabi immigrants seeking entry to Canada. When the ship reached Vancouver the Canadian immigration authorities refused to allow any of the passengers to disembark except for twenty returning residents. The passengers protested that they were British subjects with the right to move freely within the British empire, while the immigration authorities described them as illegal immigrants who had come in defiance of Canadian law. (Because the ship had sailed from Hong Kong, the passengers could not show that they had met Canada’s continuous-journey requirement by travelling directly from their country of origin.) For two months the Komagata Maru rested at anchor in Vancouver harbour, with 250 men, 2 women, and 4 children confined on board but refusing to leave.

The passengers were under-financed and could not have continued to resist deportation without the support of local Sikhs who raised large sums of money for charter payments to the Japanese owners of the ship, for legal costs, and for provisions. Even with this support, the passengers were under-supplied and went without food and water on two occasions for twenty-four hours. At the end of a long summer, after the British Columbia Court of Appeal had backed up the immigration department, the Komagata Maru and its passengers were escorted out of Canadian waters by the Canadian cruiser Rainbow. This was a bitter result for the passengers and for Sikhs generally, yet few Canadians at the time sympathized and most felt that justice had been served. This episode assumed a large place in the collective memory of Canadian Sikhs, although it quickly passed out of the minds of other Canadians.

The Komagata Maru affair was complicated by the larger political objectives of men on the ship and their allies on shore. In the previous few years a spontaneous and informally organized revolutionary movement, the Ghadr (Mutiny) Party, had swept through Sikh settlements in North America and the Far East. Ghadr leaders advocated the overthrow of British rule in India by force, and they won the nominal support of Sikhs throughout the Pacific Coast states and British Columbia. Canadian and British officials were aware of Ghadr activity and employed a Canadian immigration officer, W.C. Hopkinson, a former Calcutta policeman, to monitor it. Ghadr activists brought party literature on board the Komagata Maru before it left Asia and the passengers were thoroughly politicized by the time they reached Canada. In Vancouver, the leading members of the shore committee, organized on behalf of the Komagata Maru, were Ghadr Party sympathizers. In this way the Komagata Maru was associated with revolutionary objectives and therefore doubly troublesome in the eyes of Canadian officials and politicians.

After war broke out in Europe in August 1914, Ghadr Party spokesmen called on Sikhs in North America to return to India to raise a rebellion while Britain was vulnerable. Thousands left Canada and the United States that fall, some responding directly to the call to arms, others going home after losing jobs during the recession of 1914, and still others prompted by a mixture of these motives. Most of the known Sikh activists were detained by the British India Police on arrival in India and jailed or sent to their villages in Punjab and placed under village arrest. A few gangs of returned emigrants carried out a number of armed robberies in Punjab, and Ghadr leaders who had managed to slip back into the country toured villages and fairs promoting rebellion.

By the end of February 1915 the police had the situation under complete control and the British authorities subsequently mounted a series of conspiracy trials involving nearly 300 men and leading to the execution of 29 of them. These men are now remembered by Sikhs as martyrs in the cause of freedom. Among the executed were two former members of the Komagata Maru shore committee in Canada, Balwant Singh, who had been a granthi or priest at the Vancouver Sikh temple, and Harman Singh, a student and activist who had resided in Victoria.

During the early months of World War I, an atmosphere of hostility and suspicion enveloped the immigration department and their Sikh informants, on the one hand, and leading members of the Sikh community on the other. This unfortunate situation produced a series of shootings and murders that culminated in the assassination in October 1914 of the immigration department’s W.C. Hopkinson, by Mewa Singh, a Sikh millworker. Mewa Singh killed Hopkinson in the Vancouver courthouse in full view of several witnesses and immediately surrendered himself to the police. At his trial, Mewa Singh explained that he had shot Hopkinson to show that Sikhs could not obtain justice in Canada. He believed that crimes against the Sikhs were going unpunished and that by accepting the judgment of the court and sacrificing his own life he was making a moral declaration. Ever since his execution in New Westminster, British Columbia, on 11 January 1915 Sikhs have seen him as a martyr and they continue to honour his memory.

The Ghadr exodus of 1914 stripped the Canadian Sikh community of its most prominent leaders, and when the war was over the Canadian immigration department blocked the return of those who had Ghadr connections. A remnant of the Ghadr Party persisted in California until 1947, when, with the achievement of Indian independence, the party was formally disbanded. Members of this remnant vacillated between alignment with Marxists and association with the Indian Congress movement. In either case they continued to focus on the national struggle in India. In Canada, the Ghadr Party had ceased to exist at an organizational level by the 1920s although many individuals sympathized with Ghadr goals.

After World War I, Canadian Sikhs resumed their long quest for political rights in British Columbia. They were forceful enough to gain the attention of the British viceroy and his representative, who raised the matter with Canadian officials at imperial conferences throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Because they were seeking changes in provincial legislation, however, Sikhs needed political allies in British Columbia to have any hope of success. From 1935 on, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF, predecessor to the New Democratic Party or NDP) in British Columbia supported Sikh demands for the franchise and in 1945 a CCF motion to extend the vote to Indo-Canadians failed by just two votes.

In the post-1945 world Canadians began to reassess the racist features of their political system in light of the human rights provision of the United Nations Charter and the gaining of independence by such formerly colonized countries as India, Pakistan, and Ceylon. In 1947 natives of India resident in British Columbia finally acquired the vote. The chief credit for this achievement belongs to the Khalsa Diwan societies of Vancouver and Victoria. With the guidance of Dr Durai Pal Pandia, these societies conducted a quiet but well-orchestrated campaign, making effective use of radio, the press, and lectures to church groups and other audiences.

Once they had secured the vote Sikhs began to look to their local MPs for assistance in immigration cases, and they soon established warm relations with parliamentarians from both the government and opposition sides of the House of Commons. But it took another forty years for Sikhs to make their presence felt in national and provincial politics, partly because their numbers initially were so small and partly because, as a largely immigrant community, they were either inward-looking or focused on India and Punjab. A survey of 489 Sikh families conducted in 1980 indicated just how insular the community was. Fifty-two percent of the families surveyed reported practically no social contact with other Canadians; only 10 percent said they had a lot. Among these people, what mattered most were the hotly contested elections held to choose gurdwara management committees.

Sikh immigrants were generally slow to take out citizenship or to acquire an interest in Canadian politics. In the 1980s the isolation of Sikhs in Canada became even greater. In the early years, when most Indo-Canadians were Sikh and only a few were Hindu or Muslim, all had joined together in community events. Sikh gurdwaras were the main meeting places for all immigrants from India. As numbers increased, and Hindus and Muslims built their own temples and mosques, their involvement in the affairs of the Sikhs naturally diminished. In the 1960s and 1970s the arrival of Gujaratis, Bengalis, and other regional-linguistic groups from the Indian subcontinent added another level of differentiation to a South Asian population that had been largely Punjabi.

Until 1984 a sense of common Indian culture bridged regional and religious differences among Punjabis, Gujaratis, and other South Asians. But in 1984 two events in India drove a deep divide between Hindus and Sikhs in Canada. The first, on 5 June, was Operation Bluestar – the Indian Army assault on the Golden Temple of Amritsar, where the militant Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale had taken refuge. The second was the massacre of Sikh civilians in Delhi and Kanpur after the assassination, on 31 October, of Indira Gandhi by one of her Sikh guards. These events deeply distressed Sikhs in India and abroad and gave sudden impetus to the movement for a separate Sikh state of Khalistan. Canada’s largest Sikh societies threw their support behind the World Sikh Organization, which had adopted a pro-Khalistan platform. Some Sikhs, particularly those whose families had been in Canada for several generations, distanced themselves from the Khalistan issue with the argument that as Canadians they should stay out of Indian politics. That, however, was not the view of a majority in Canada’s largely immigrant Sikh population. For the rest of the 1980s the politics that absorbed most Canadian Sikhs were either those of the local Sikh community or those of India and Punjab.

On 23 June 1985 explosions on board an Air India jet flying off the coast of Ireland and in luggage being transferred from a Canadian Pacific jet to an Air India jet at Narita Airport in Japan drew negative attention to the Canadian Sikh community. The first explosion took the lives of 329 passengers and crew and the second killed two baggage-handlers. Early reports suggested that Canadian Sikh terrorists were responsible and eventually the police arrested and secured the conviction of a Sikh resident of British Columbia. The publicity that the Air India disaster generated left Canadian Sikhs feeling misunderstood and victimized. At the same time, Sikhs were looking for greater respect and recognition for their faith in Canada.

Sikhs objected to safety regulations and industrial legislation requiring hard hats or helmets because headgear of this kind could not be worn over turbans and keeping turbans was a matter of faith for Khalsa Sikhs. K.S. Binder, a former employee of the Canadian National Railways, successfully took a case to the Ontario Human Rights Commission after he was dismissed for refusing to wear a hard hat in conformity with a policy adopted in the CNR Toronto coach yard in December 1978. The Federal Court of Appeal, however, overturned the Human Rights Commission award to Binder and the Supreme Court of Canada upheld this decision in 1985, with a majority of the Supreme Court justices ruling that the CNR had not discriminated against Binder. Sikhs were also unsuccessful in attempting to persuade workers compensation boards that a turban was a safe substitute for a hard hat.

In 1986 Metropolitan Toronto Police began to allow Sikh officers to wear the turban as part of their uniform, following a practice long adopted in the Indian army and police and in many other national services. In 1987 the commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police proposed amending the dress code for his force to let Sikh officers keep the turban. This provoked a vigorous lobbying campaign by those opposed to any change in the existing RCMP uniform and three years passed before the Canadian solicitor general announced that Sikhs could wear the turban in Canada’s national police force. In May 1991 Baltej Singh Dhillon became the first turbaned Sikh in the RCMP.

Canadian Sikhs have also fought for the right to wear the kirpan wherever they go. In this struggle they have been handicapped by the undefined nature of the emblem. Is it sufficient to wear it as an embossed image on the comb worn in the hair, as some Sikhs do? Or should it be the knife-sized emblem with a cutting edge that most Sikhs have adopted? Or should it be a full-sized sword? The dimensions of the kirpan have become a concern when non-Sikhs have seen it as a weapon and not simply a religious symbol. In Ontario the question of Sikh children wearing the kirpan to school became an issue between the Peel County Board of Education and the Sikh community. In 1990 an Ontario Human Rights Commission adjudicator ruled that Peel County must allow Sikh students and teachers to wear the kirpan as long as it is not more than seven inches long and is securely fastened inside the clothing.

Although Canadian Sikhs continued to devote much of their attention to the political situation in India, several individuals have achieved prominence in Canadian politics. In 1986 Manitoban Singh (Moe) Sihota became the first Sikh to serve in a Canadian legislature when he was elected to the British Columbia provincial assembly for the NDP. In 1988 Gulzar Singh Cheema won a seat in the Manitoba legislature as a Liberal. He retained this seat in the 1990 election but resigned in 1993. In the 1991 provincial elections in British Columbuia, three Sikhs won seats for the NDP – Moe Sihota, Ujjal Dosanjh, and Harry Lali. All three have since served as provincial cabinet ministers, although not all at the same time. Sikh supporters of Jean Chrétien played a prominent role in the national Liberal Party leadership campaign of 1989, and, in the 1993 national election, two Sikhs, Harbance Singh (Herb) Dhaliwal in Vancouver and Gurbax Malhi in Toronto, were elected as Liberals. In 1993 Harry Sohal, running as a Progressive Conservative, gained a seat in the Alberta legislature and occupied it until his death the following year. Four Sikhs gained office in the 1996 provincial elections in British Columbia: Sihota, Dosanjh, and Lali for the NDP and Sindi (Satwinder Kaur) Hawkins for the Liberals.

In 1997 the group’s political profile rose to a new level, first, when three Sikhs were elected to the House of Commons – Mahli and Dhaliwal for the Liberals and Gurmant Singh Grewal for the Reform Party – and, second, when Prime Minister Chrétien promoted Dhaliwal to the federal cabinet as minister of revenue. In the 1997 Alberta provincial elections, Raj Singh Pannu secured a seat for the NDP. These successes are evidence of a significant new involvement by Sikhs in Canada’s national and provincial political life.