Now pressure was brought to bear upon the Baba sahib to pay the charter dues immediately or suffer the ship to be impounded or forcibly returned to Hong Kong. He protested that he could pay the money after he had fulfilled his contract with the passengers by getting them into Canada, and had sold the cargo which he had aboard. But his protests were ignored. The Sikh laborers in Canada raised the required amount to pay for the charter. The money was paid by them to the ship’s captain. The Baba Sahib was forced to transfer the ship’s charter to two representative of the Shore committee. But even these assignees were not allowed to have control of the ship.

As said above, the Sikh labourers in Canada raised 22,000 dollars to pay for the ship’s charter. They also appealed to the Canadian people and Government for justice, sent telegrams to the King Emperor, the Duke of Connaught, the Viceroy of India, and Indian leaders in India and England. Public meetings were held in several cities of the Punjab to express sympathy with the passengers of the Kamagata Maru. But little notice was taken of this agitation by the British, Indian and Canadian Governments. The Prime Minister of British Columbia stated categorically, “To admit Orientals in large numbers would mean in the end the extinction of the white people, and we have always in mind the necessity of keeping this a white man’s country’. The Viceroy of India said that, as the question at issue was purely of a legal character, there was no occasion of intervention.

 

“After escaping from BudgeBudge, Baba Gurdit Singh spent seven years wandering about in disguises. During these wanderings he suffered terrible dangers and difficulties. Then he suddenly appeared in a big national assembly held at Nankana Sahib on the 10th November 1921”

 

About the 20th June, at the suggestion of the legal advisers of the Immigration Department, Baba Gurdit Singh consented to take a case to the Board of Enquiry which would test the validity of the order in council without prejudicing the other cases. Messrs Macrossan and Harper were asked to take up the Kamagata Maru case. But they confessed that the matter had gone out of the legal sphere and become political. They wrote on the 24th June, “We feel that the matter has become of such great moment that it has got beyond the realm of mere legal proceedings, and has become largely, if not entirely, a question of national policy of vital importance to, not only the Government of this country, but also involved confliction, of Imperial interests. In the face of this, it seems to us, it is a question for diplomacy rather than law, and we do not feel that we could conscientiously enter upon a legal fight under these circumstances, notwithstanding the fact that you have offered a generous retainer’. The case was, of course, doomed.

The shore committee took the case of the Kamagata Maru to court. A full bench of the Supreme Court decided that the new order in council, promulgated in January 1914, barred judicial tribunals from interfering with the decisions of the Immigration Department. The decision was announced on July 7, 1914.

Now the Shore Committee, to whom the ship’s charter had been transferred, requested the Immigration Department to allow the cargo to be loaded, and also to provide passage money for the passengers, who were now ready to go back, or to take them off to some other ship. But the said Department would not allow any man of the shore committee to go to the ship nor sent any relief to the passengers who were clamoring for food. When they were sick and starving, an attack was made by the police, on the night of July 20, to force away the ship. But it would have been death for them to go way in that impoverished and unprovided condition. They resisted the attempt and drove back the police after a determined fight. The authontties then provided food for the passengers. Then, bringing an armed force in a naval craft, the authorities ordered the passengers to return to the ports from which they had come.

Ship Went Back

Thus, after two months of Canadian hospitality, the ship started back on July 23,1914. A few passengers disembarked in Japan. But after that none was allowed to land either in Hong Kong, Shanghai, or Singapore, where many of them had their homes. As the ship’s charter had been transferred by Baba Gurdit Singh to the Shore Committee of Vancouver, he had now no control over the ship or its Captain. Still, he asked the Captain many times during the voyage to satisfy himself that there were no arms kept by the passengers.

On September 27, the ship with 321 passengers arrived at BudgeBudge, some 22 kilometers south of Calcutta. The first Great War had broken out while the Komagata Maru was still at sea. The Government of India had empowered itself with the right to restrict the liberty of returning emigrant by inaction. The Ingress into India Act of 1914. Making use of those powers, the Bengal Government, in consultation with the Government of the Punjab, had decided that the returned Panjabis, on landing at BudgeBudge, should be put into a special train, and conveyed to their homes in the Punjab. All were searched three times up to the time of their landing, and no arms were found on them. This fact is important in view of the change subsequently made by the police that the Sikhs of the Kamagata maru used firearms in the fracas that occurred later. Asked To Stay In Calcutta In this connection Baba Gurdit Singh himself writes, “All the illegitimate things with the passengers were either thrown overboard into the sea, or restored to the Japanese. The deck passengers were thoroughly searched (by the police). Thank Heaven that nothing incriminating in the eyes of the law was found on us.

The passengers were ordered to board a train which was to take them to the Punjab. Out of them 17, who were Muhammedans, consented to obey the orders and went to the train; but the others, all Sikhs, refused to follow suit. They represented that they had got nothing left in Punjab to call their own, and that they should be allowed to seek their fortune in Calcutta.

Baba Gurdit Singh explained to the police officer, who served them with the notice, that his dispute with the steamship company had to be settled by arbitration at Calcutta; that the cargo on the Kamagata Maru, which was his property, had to be disposed of; that he had still to recover 25,000 dollars from the passengers who expected to get the money from their friends and relatives in Calcutta; that the men who had spent nearly six months on board wanted time to settle their accounts with each other; and that most of the passengers wished to stay in Calcutta, where they could get employment rather than return to their villages where they had now no land or other property.

The Sikh passengers, refusing to board the Panjab bound train, began to move towards Calcutta in a procession, with their Holy Book, Guru Granth Sahib, before them. They intended to go to the Gurdwara at Howrah, deposit the Holy Book there, and take rest there for the time being. But the police and a unit of the army barred their progress. They were brought back to the railway station. On the way, as it appears from evidence, some of the European police sergeants roughly handled the Sikhs. When they came back to the station, a bloody scene ensued in the darkness. The police opened fire, killing 20 men and wounding another 25. Four were killed on the Government side. Besides these, two Indian residents of Budge Budge were also killed; one of whom, at least, is admitted by the Government report to have been killed by the British troops. Baba Gurdit Singh and 28 of his companions managed to escape. The rest were arrested and sent to the Punjab, where over 200 of them were interned or thrown into jails.

A large sum of money belonging to Baba Gurdit Singh was left at the place of occurrence, but no account of it was published by the Government.

After escaping from BudgeBudge, Baba Gurdit Singh spent seven years wandering about in disguises. During these wanderings he suffered terrible dangers and difficulties. Then he suddenly appeared in a big national assembly held at Nankana Sahib on the 10th November 1921. The whole concourse of people, numbering lakhs, accompanied him peacefully to the Dak Bungalow, where he offered himself for arrest. After some months’ detention, he was released on February 28, 1922, as there was no case against him. He was, however, again arrested at the Golden Temple, Amritsar. He was originally charged under the Seditious Meetings Act for the speeches made by him about his own sufferings and in reply to the welcome addresses presented to him by the Congress and the Khilafat Committee, but, about a month later, the Government thought it fit to prosecute him for the same speeches, for the much graver offense of sedition. The Government did not provide him with his private papers which had been seized at BudgeBudge and which he required in preparation of his defense. The Court, too, disallowed as irreleyant as many as 19 witnesses out of 21 whom Baba Gurdit Singh wanted to produce to clear up certain allegations which had been made against him in connection with the Komagata Maru and the Budge affairs; and this in spite of the fact that the judge himself devoted about half of his lengthy judgment to the same affairs. The Baba Sahib, therefore, gave up his defense in protest. He was convicted on July 20, 1922, under Section 124 of the Indian Penal Code, and sentenced to five year’s transportation.

He was released in 1927, to find that all his property and belongings had been confiscated. He filed a suit against the Government in order to recover his confiscated property, but it was dismissed.

To complete his story, in brief, he was elected member of the All India Congress Committee in 1929, went to jail again in 1931 and 1932, served the earthquake victims of Bihar in 1934, and participated in other such activities till he died on July 24, 1954, at the ripe age of 96.

Article extracted from this publication >>  May 26, 1989