Komagata Maru

I've been anticipating the advent of this issue ever since the stamp was announced late last year. There is no doubt that the topic is politically controversial:
The Komagata Maru Incident of 1914.

The blurb in Details No.3 April recounts how Canada turned away 356 Sikh immigrants who could not pay the required $200. Twenty of them returning to India were shot there.
I am entirely uncomfortable with this issue - which is, I presume, the reaction Canada Post intended to provoke. I would be interested to hear what others of you think of this.

Only 1 denomination: international rate so we won't see many in Canada and USA. Quantity is also low at 250,000

Be careful what you post and what your outlook is on any controversial subject..You leave it open for the possibility of not so good comments..True though..Not a good thing that happened..

They are hard to acquire in my experience. A future rarity?

It is a very attractive stamp. I do not know a lot about the history (thank you, sak), but maybe the idea Canada Post is trying to convey is that we ought not to let this type of thing happen again?

Peter

This sounds like a politically motivated stamp issue.

I'm totally unfamiliar with the circumstances surround the event, but curious to know if 356 paying passengers took the slots or did the ship sail with that many vacant spaces?

The implication is that whoever owned and operated the ship was morally responsible for the deaths of those returning to India.

Were the Sikhs assured they would have passage regardless of ability to pay and then turned back?

Would appreciate a little more information on this event.

Thanks.

Don

Very politically motivated. Not too sure why this deserves a stamp. However, it is a nicely designed stamp.

I looked into this incident online and it appears that it was an attempt to circumvent the immigrantion regulations of the time. It seems that subjects of the British Empire were free to migrate to any of the the Commonwealth counties, Canada, in this case. However, Canadian authorities of the era (prior WWI) did not want immigrants from India.

There was a regulation that India subjects had to come to Canada directly from an Indian port without intermediate stops or potential immigrants boarding the vessel at an intermediate ports.

This was, then, a planned passage that would test the regulation and the ship loaded a number of Sikhs, along with a few Muslims and Hindus on the Komagata Maru, a Japanese ship, at ports in China to sail to British Colombia where they planned to disembark as immigrants.

Upon arrival, the Canadian authorities would not permit them to disembark and except for the Muslims, the Sikhs and Hindus were turned back and returned to India. Added to the immigration regulations was the fact that the organizers of the voyage, and, perhaps, some of the passengers were members of a militant group seeking independence of India from Great Britain. Upon arrival back at India, some of the Sikhs suspected of anti-government plotting were arrested and a riot followed during which shots were fired and some of the Sikhs killed.

The above is a very simplified explanation of the incident and I apologize for any historical inaccuracies it contains as I attempted only to summarize a series of complicated events.

What was seen in 1914 as immigration officials doing their duty by upholding the regulations in force at the time is now apparently viewed as discrimination on ethnic grounds. The issue is further viewed negatively because of the deaths that resulted at the end of the voyage.

I don't know what information the Canadian Post Office issued about the stamp's subject, but the stamp itself doesn't offer much background. For collectors like me, it's a puzzler now. May be even more so to future generations of collectors. Still, looking in to it was interesting.

Don