We remember Shaheed Udham Singh, Shahid-e-Azam Bhagat Singh and Kartar Singh Sarabha as heroes of India’s freedom struggle. Their sacrifices echo through our history books, their names etched in our collective memory. Yet very little is known about the Komagata Maru episode itself—and even less about the patriotic role of Bhai Mewa Singh during the course of this broader tragedy. His story deserves to emerge from the shadows.
The Voyage of Dignity
In 1914, the Japanese steamship Komagata Maru carried 376 passengers—340 Sikhs, 24 Muslims, and 12 Hindus—from Punjab to Vancouver. They were British subjects seeking a better life in Canada, but they sailed into the teeth of imperial racism. Canada’s Continuous Journey Regulation, enacted in 1908, was designed specifically to exclude Asian immigrants while maintaining the façade of equality within the British Empire. The law required uninterrupted travel from one’s country of origin—a geographic impossibility for Indians, as ships invariably stopped in Japan or China.
Led by Baba Gurdit Singh, a contractor and businessman from British Malaya, the journey became more than an attempt at immigration. It transformed into a floating declaration of resistance. Ghadar Party literature circulated aboard the ship. Political meetings were held on deck. The passengers, many of them ex-soldiers who had served the British Raj, were awakening to a new consciousness: that the empire which demanded their loyalty offered them nothing but exclusion and contempt.
Upon arrival at Vancouver’s Burrard Inlet on May 23, 1914, the passengers were met not with welcome but with hostility. Only 24 were permitted to land. The rest were confined to the ship for two months, denied food, water, and medical aid—a deliberate campaign of cruelty orchestrated by immigration officials determined to break their spirit.
The Empire’s Spy
At the center of this surveillance operation was William C. Hopkinson, a former Calcutta police officer who had become Canadian immigration inspector. Fluent in Hindi though not Punjabi, Hopkinson built a network of informants to infiltrate the Ghadar Party and monitor the Indian diaspora. He was the Empire’s eyes and ears in Vancouver, feeding intelligence to both Canadian and British authorities.
Hopkinson’s espionage activities were not merely observational. His actions led directly to harassment, arrests, and deaths within the Indian community. When violence erupted inside the Vancouver Gurudwara—where an informant named Bela Singh shot two Sikhs—it was the culmination of tensions that Hopkinson had helped create and manipulate. The sacred space had been desecrated by imperial intrigue, and the community’s anger burned with righteous fury.
A Martyr’s Choice
On October 21, 1914, William Hopkinson arrived at the Vancouver courthouse to testify in Bela Singh’s trial. He never made it to the witness stand. In the courthouse corridor, Bhai Mewa Singh—a devout Sikh and Ghadar sympathizer—shot him dead.
Mewa Singh did not flee. He surrendered immediately to authorities, reportedly saying simply: “I shoot. I go to station.” There was no attempt at escape, no plea for mercy. At his trial, he explained with calm dignity that he had not acted from personal hatred, but to defend the honor of his faith and community. The violence inside the Gurudwara—orchestrated through Hopkinson’s web of informants—had violated something sacred. Mewa Singh chose to answer that desecration with sacrifice.
He was executed on January 11, 1915, at New Westminster Jail. To this day, many in the Sikh community regard him as a shaheed—a martyr who chose death over dishonor, who placed the dignity of his people above his own survival.
Why his Story Matters
Bhai Mewa Singh’s act was not isolated terrorism but part of a broader pattern of resistance that connected Vancouver to Punjab, Singapore to San Francisco. The Komagata Maru incident became a rallying cry for the Ghadar movement, which sought to overthrow British rule through armed rebellion. Though the planned uprising of 1915 was ultimately foiled and many revolutionaries—including Kartar Singh Sarabha—were executed, the seeds of resistance had been planted.
Mewa Singh’s assassination of Hopkinson sent shockwaves through colonial intelligence networks. It exposed the fragility of imperial control when confronted by diasporic resistance. It proved that surveillance and informants could not extinguish the yearning for dignity and justice that burned in the hearts of those who had been excluded, humiliated, and denied their most basic rights as British subjects.
The tragedy of the Komagata Maru did not end in Vancouver. When the ship returned to Budge Budge near Kolkata in September 1914, British authorities attempted to forcibly arrest the leaders. The confrontation turned violent, and at least 20 passengers were killed by police gunfire. Baba Gurdit Singh went underground, eventually surrendering in 1920 on Gandhi’s advice and spending five years in prison.
Reclaiming Memory
Today, memorials stand at Budge Budge and in Vancouver. In 2016, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau formally apologized for the Komagata Maru incident. These gestures of recognition matter, but they cannot erase the lived reality of those who suffered—or the courage of those who resisted.
Bhai Mewa Singh deserves to be remembered not as a footnote but as a central figure in this story. His was not a random act of violence but a deliberate sacrifice born from moral conviction. He saw the corruption of sacred space, the manipulation of his community, the systematic dehumanization of his people—and he chose to act, knowing full well the price he would pay.
While we honor Shaheed Udham Singh and Kartar Singh Sarabha, let us also remember Bhai Mewa Singh. His story illuminates the Komagata Maru episode in all its complexity: not just as a tale of immigration denied, but as a chapter in the global struggle against colonialism, racism, and the violence of exclusion. His martyrdom reminds us that resistance takes many forms, and that sometimes the most profound act of defiance is to choose dignity over survival, principle over preservation, and sacrifice over silence.