Thinking of the Continued Legacy of Komagata Maru

A report on the Desi Dialogues at Cafe Kathmandu, Vancouver on July 20, 2014

At this cafe, moderated by Summer Pervez, a group of 12 people held a vigorous discussion on the significance of the centenary of Komagata Maru. The discussion was positioned within the various events concerning the centenary in the Vancouver area. It was remembered that these events were in marked contrast to the situation 25 years ago, when only a few people in the South Asian community were concerned with Komagata Maru and the general public not at all. The Premier of the province at the time, Bill Van Der Zalm had even silenced an attempt to raise the issue in the legislature with a mocking comment. Today there were commemorative events in many places including public institutions, and the mainstream media were also reporting on the incident.

But very little had changed at a deeper level in regard to the policy of the Canadian government toward immigrants of color from the global South. A meeting in Edmonton had pointed out that if Komagata Maru had come to Vancouver today the passengers would not just have been kept from disembarking but would have been put into prisons, many of them charged as criminals. Gurdit Singh would have been imprisoned as a “human smuggler.” Any tendency to be smug about the positive changes in the status of our community should be tempered by the knowledge that those who come to these shores on boats today, as people from China and Sri Lanka recently have done, are not only treated as criminals by the government but face the same racist, exclusionary rhetoric from the media that the passengers of Komagata Maru did. The media and the government construct such immigrants and refuge seekers as illegal aliens, criminals and terrorists. And the public, even the South Asians who have now found their comfortable place as citizens, endorse these views just as the public did in the time of Komagata Maru.

Nor should we forget that there is a class as well as a racial basis to this exclusionary attitude. Those who come by boats such as Komagata Maru are vilified, imprisoned, or turned away. But the many more who come by planes generate no such assault of public outrage and are processed in the usual way.

We should also note that despite the apologies to the Chinese, the Japanese, and South Asian communities for past acts of conspicuous discrimination, the present government has pushed through an extremely discriminatory immigration act, Act C24, that has been severely criticized by immigrant justice activists and the legal community. This act makes family reunion more difficult and creates two tiers of citizenship, in which naturalized citizens only enjoy a conditional citizenship.

More blatantly than ever the government has placed immigration in service of capitalism, While citizenship is made more difficult the government serves the interest of business by increasing the number of temporary foreign workers who can be treated as indentured labour, without effective rights and always under the threat of deportation and blacklisting.

It was reported to the group that at one of the most important commemoration events held on Musqueam territory, the chief welcomed the South Asian guests saying that if Komagata Maru had arrived in pre-colonial Musqueam land the passengers would have been welcomed as the Europeans were when they first came on their ships. Just as imagining the arrival of Komagata Maru in our time revealed the continuity of the discriminatory racist-nationalist policies of the Canadian government the imagining of Komagata Maru in the past of pre-colonial Coast Salish territory uncovered the foundation of these policies in colonialism.

Yet there was another lesson in this event, in which the food served was Indian. It had seemed to the person who reported this event that the First Nations were serving their usual ceremonial function in Canada today while South Asians were affirming their privilege of citizenship, of belonging in Canada. We  need to remember that we live on unceded and treaty lands taken from the First Nations while the First Nations live as the most oppressed people on their ancestral territories.

Komagata Maru is a foundational event in the history of the South Asian community in Canada and remembering it is to place it in the consciousness of our youth to ground them in the past struggles of the community. Memory is an anchor of identity. But we must resist the attempt by some to claim it as the property of a particular group and use it as social and political capital, which serves the interests of political parties and governments. We must also resist the attempt to confine this story as a South Asian story and affirm it as a Canadian story, as a part of Canadian history. Its legacy is a lesson in historical injustice that should guide us toward the creation of a just society in Canada.

We should go even further and remember Komagata Maru as a part of the global history of migration, displacement, and quest for refuge on the one hand and the increasingly restrictive and punitive practices on the borders of nation states on the other. There are 50 million refugees in the world today. Countless millions are internally displaced and innumerable people will face displacement as a consequence of climate change. In response to this the nation states that have been our reality for the last 400 years have increasingly fortified their borders with physical barriers, laws, violence, and prisons. Remembering Komagata Maru should also make us reflect on citizenship in such a world, a world in which the rights and privileges of citizenship that we greatly desire also depend on the continued oppression of aboriginal people and the exclusion of those who want to cross our national borders.

Chinmoy Banerjee

Note: Desi Dialogues is an open discussion group that usually meets on the first Sunday of the month to discuss issues of urgent concern to the South Asian diaspora in the Vancouver area. The topics are chosen by the moderator, Summer Pervez, with input from those who wish to participate. They are announced on Facebook and through email. Previous sessions have addressed the attitude of the community toward LGBT and the persistence of caste prejudice in diaspora. All are welcome.

Thanks SANSAD for your news release of December 15. 2013.

I want to highlight that, in addition to what is going on in India, and elsewhere in South Asia, the local South Asian GLBT community also experiences prejudice, intolerance and ostracism from within (as well as without) the South Asian community in Greater Vancouver.

I hope that we too can reflect on our own levels of acceptance and whether we need to do further work in this regard toward local GLBT South Asians.

I propose that we use this forum to continue the discussion on challenging and overcoming our and South Asian diaspora’s prejudices toward LGBT South Asians as a step toward raising greater awareness of LGBT rights as essential human rights and freedoms.

Randeep Purewall

Hassan Gardezi Comments:

The Question of Religious Minorities in the South Asian Nation States

The SANSAD Forum has raised a pertinent question regarding religion as a source of social conflict in the South Asian countries. Why is it that even after more than six decades of independence the South Asian subcontinent is plagued by religious intolerance and violence, and the extremist components of the majority religious groups, Islamists in Pakistan and Hidituwa conglomerate (parivar) in India in particular, continue to battle for appropriating the state for their exclusive rule?

In other words how do we explain that Religious consciousness and conflict have continued to dominate the overall socio-political dynamics in these countries, rather than class consciousness and conflict? Does a credible explanation lie somewhere in the Marxist thesis of Asiatic Mode of Production? Or is there some truth in the Gandhian assertion that South Asian culture is concerned more with matters spiritual as opposed to the “Western culture which is dominated by materialism? These frameworks may have some theoretical utility, but immediate relevance for coming to grips with the problem seems to lie in a sentence within the Forum moderator’s introduction to the subject. The sentence reads: “In this battle religion functions not as religion, either as doctrine or practice, but as ideology in the service of economic, social and political interests of particular religion identified groups.”

The Muslim league leaders of Pakistan were the first to come up with the construct of Islamic ideology in the newly created state of Pakistan despite the warning held out by their supreme leader, Jinnah that religion had nothing to do with the affairs of the state. Led by Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan they passed the Objectives Resolution in the Constituent Assembly in 1949 to Islamise the state of Pakistan. But then came along the chief of Pakistan army, Gen. Ayub Khan, who seized state power and dismissed the League politicians on charges of serving their own economic, social and political interests rather than those of the public, irrespective of their pious Islamic pretention. That was just the beginning of the nexus between religion and politics in Pakistan which has in the course of its turbulent history involved other external state and non-state actors, ending up in the country’s acquisition of the dubious reputation as the “epicentre of global terrorism.”

The Indian National Congress (INC) leaders, unlike the Muslim League of Pakistan chose a secular constitutional designation for the Republic of India in 1947, and Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru kept the state policy focus, at least in theory, on equitable economic development, keeping Hindu nationalist parties at bay. It was Nehru among the INC leaders who expressed serious interest in addressing the problems of mass poverty and inequality in South Asia. He saw the problem of mass poverty not only as the result of colonial exploitation but also as a function of indigenously evolved structures of inequality. In his first presidential address at the Lahore session of the INC in 1929 he was quite emphatic about the need to deal with the problem of inequality by pointing out that India “remains fallen” as a result of having built a society based on the “structural inequality” of caste system.

However, Nehru’s egalitarian politics did not last for long after he took office as prime minister. He was under constant pressure both internally by his senior Congress party colleagues, and externally by the Anglo-American Cold War alliance to give up his self-proclaimed socialist ideas in favour of free enterprise ideology. The end of his socialist disposition came rather suddenly in 1962 when the incident of clash between Indian and Chinese troops broke out over a disputed stretch of the Himalayan border. Taking advantage of this so called “India-China Border War,” the United States and United Kingdom rushed in with packages of economic and military aid to India which Nehru and his economic planner found hard to refuse.

With the death of Nehru two years later in 1964 the field was left wide open for laissez fair policy pushers and Hindu nationalists. Right wing Hindu nationalist groups became stronger under the short lived government of Shastri and the rather long but policy-wise vacillating rule of Indira Gandhi. After Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984 aggressive Hindu nationalism in conjunction with US sponsored neoliberalism has completely submerged the issues of poverty and inequality, especially during the full term Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government 1999 to 2004. Today while the neoliberal economist, Manmohan Singh, administers India as prime minister on behalf of INC, the bulk of most ardent anti-poverty activists have receded into the jungles of central India to fight the ruling establishment as “Maoist” rebels and Hindu majority groups have accelerated their violence against Muslims and Christians in the cities.

To make a long story short, we see a pattern unfolding in the South Asian region, particularly in two of its largest nations in particular. Since partition the use of majority religious symbolisms, narratives and sheer numerical strength have collectively become the tool of social, economic and political domination, characterised increasingly by violence.. There are however some significant country variations within this pattern. In India domination and associated violence follows the traditional divisions between Hindu majority and the minorities of Muslims, Sikhs and Christians who inhabit the country in small but sizable numbers. In Pakistan where about 95.9 percent of the population is Muslim according to the last Census, much of the violence takes the form of sectarian violence, the majority Sunni sect directing its violence against Shias in particular who constitute the largest group of Muslim minority sects in the country. Another important distinguishing factor in the case of religious violence Pakistan has been its internationalisation in recent years. The Saudi ruling family has played an important role in this respect. It has used its oil wealth in large quantities to promote its brand of puritanical salafi Sunni Islam in Pakistan and around the Muslim world in the hope of generating wider sympathies for its continued hold over power. That explains why the greatest violence is being directed to Shias and Sufis, the groups least likely to be converted to Salafi Islam.

From its very formation SANSAD has been deeply concerned with the rights of religious minorities. Its origin was a response to the rise of Hindutva in India and the attacks on Muslims this force generated. It has been concerned with the massacre of the Sikhs in 1984 that brought to fore the question of minority rights in India and it continues to be concerned about the unfulfilled quest for justice in that matter. The impunity established in the 1984 massacre continues in the impunity in regard to the pogrom against Muslims in Gujarat and extends to the impunity legalized in the Armed Forces Special Powers Act that enables enormous violence in various parts of India.

But Pakistan too has been a scene of violence against minorities. Ahmediyas have been under attack for many years. Shias are under attack in many places. Hazaras have been killed in Baluchistan. Christians have been killed in large numbers and their churches have been under attack. There have been forcible conversions of Hindu women and large numbers of Hindus have been forced to migrate from Sindh and Baluchistan to India.

In Bangladesh also there have been attacks on Hindus and Buddhists.

Everywhere in South Asia majority religious communities are engaged in a battle for appropriating the state for their exclusive rule irrespective of constitutional professions. In this battle religion functions not as religion, either as doctrine or as practice, but as ideology in the service of economic, social, and political interests of particular religion-identified groups. Do we have an adequate understanding of the dynamics of this struggle to enable effective resistance? We can respond to the violence against minorities by various forms of protest. But is it possible to develop a strategy to address its fundamental dynamis or motive force?