Hurdles
Faced By Sikh Pioneers In Canada
By Lieut Colonel Pritam Singh Jauhal (Retd) World War II Veteran
The Sikh community’s celebrations of its Centenary in Canada
in 1997 provided an opportunity for all Canadians to enrich themselves
by studding the immense contributions to Canada’ national
prosperity and well-being and also to the richly populated society
in which we all live today, by one of our most distinctive community.
The serving Indian Army Sikhs came to Canada in transit back
from Great Britain where they had gone for the Diamond Jubilee
celebrations, in 1897, of the 60th Anniversary of the reign of
Queen Victoria. They were members of the Imperial Sikh Lancers
and Sikh Infantry Regiment specially invited to join the Ceremonial
Parade through the streets of London. Evidently, there was something
in British Columbia’s natural environments- the mountains,
the valleys, the forests and great rivers that reminded them a
little of Punjab and made them feel instantly at peace in a land
of opportunity, for some of them returned to live here as early
as 1899, and their family members and friends followed from 1904
onwards.
The historical link with Queen Victoria-titular head of the British
Empire of which India and Canada were then part, and the symbol
of British Imperial authority and also the rule of law throughout
the British Dominion and Colonies, makes very strange and contradictory,
the unhappy travails of the Sikh community over the next few decades
in B C.
The B C Provincial Statue passed in 1907, disfranchising all
natives of India, not born of Anglo-Saxon parents and the Order-in-Council
designed to stop all immigration from India by introducing the
“continuous journey” clause and also requiring possession
of $200 as a pre-condition of entry, were not merely blatantly
discriminatory on their face but also inconsistent with the principle
of equality before the law-the law of all British Subjects which
was one of the pillars of the Imperial legal system.
On reading the record of the extra-ordinary incident in 1914
of the Komagata Maru, when 376 ship passengers mainly Sikhs who
had fought for the British, were confined under conditions of
extreme physical hardship on their vessel in the port of Vancouver
and denied permission to land for two months before being sent
back to India, one is struck by the intellectual courage and the
integrity of a British Columbia Judge, Chief Justice Gordon Hunter,
who found the legal base on which the Komagata Maru passengers
were detained in the port to be flawed and the Order-in-Council
to be invalid accordingly.
Unfortunately, Chief Justice Hunter’s remarkable display
of justice independence in upholding the Imperial Rule of Law
against an arbitrary and discriminatory regulation was over-ridden
by further Order-in-Council and the judicial intervention came
to naught. In later years, on a step-by-step-basis, the worst
errors were corrected.
In 1919, the reunification of families was permitted when restrictions
on bringing wives, and children under 18 years from India were
removed. In 1947, Sikhs were granted right to vote and become
Canadian citizens, and the legal disabilities to acquiring and
exercising the rights and the duties of full citizenship disappeared.
Since then, members of the Sikh community in B C have risen to
the highest posts, in elective office at the federal, provincial
and municipal levels and also in judicial and other professional
activities. The record is one of fine community service and giving
back to the larger national community as much and more as one
has received oneself.
True that in time, original historical errors were corrected
, but one may wonder why there had to be all those years of waiting
before the record could be set right. The signal, early contribution
to ending historical negations for the Sikh community in Canada,
made by the British Columbia Judge more than Century was warmly
and generously acknowledged by the Sikh community in its centennial
celebrations.
Chief Justice Hunter’s initiative then, legally innovative
for its time, stands today, even though it was nullified by subsequent
executive degree, as a model for the plural society that we have
in Canada today-the community of different communities that are
in peaceful co-existence with each other and that live and work
together in friendly co-operation and in mutual respect for each
other’s distinctive cultural inheritance. This is what real
Canada is?
