This story gets even worse. Punjabi nationalists (ie demanding freedom for their friends and families from British rule in India) in Vancouver organized to bring desperately needed supplies to the people stranded on the ship. Canadian police interceded and arrested them. https://twitter.com/punjabimarket/status/1264270227090608134

The police had spies planted within the Punjabi community in Van. These were Punjabis who benefitted from a relationship with the authorities and thus spies on their own community. (A reminder that identity alone doesn’t make good politics). One spy was about to be exposed, so...

He entered the Vancouver Gurdwara and killed two people. An activist in the Ghadr party who was in the temple at the time of the shooting responded to this by killing the Canadian police agent, WC Hopkinson, who had been running the spies.

This activist, Mewa Singh, understood that the real villain wasn’t the spy, it was Hopkinson, the Canadian agent playing Punjabi immigrants against one another to serve his own purposes (which was to undermine Punjabi nationalism and maintain the ‘white’ character of Canada.)

Mewa Singh did not run away, taking full responsibility for his actions, insisting that Hopkinson was responsible for an act of violence in a sacred place. He was sentenced to death by hanging, the last public hanging in Canadian history.

I share Mewa Singh’s story here because he was among those who tried to get supplies to the people stranded in port on the Komagata Maru. Singh was a martyr for a better world, killed by a Canadian state desperate to prevent Vancouver from becoming too Asian.

More detail:

This is Mewa Singh’s funeral procession, 1915. He died a hero and martyr of Vancouver’s Punjabi community and the cause of freedom from British rule in India.