The Komagata Maru and the Ghadar rising

Canada barred immigrants who had not come by a continuous journey from their country of birth, a rule no ship from India could meet. Gurdit Singh chartered the Japanese steamer Komagata Maru to test it, and 376 passengers, most of them Sikhs from the Punjab, reached Vancouver on 23 May 1914. All but about twenty were refused entry, and after two months in the harbour the ship was forced to sail back. At Budge Budge on the Hooghly on 29 September police tried to put the passengers on a train to the Punjab. In the riot that followed troops opened fire, and about twenty people were killed, most of them passengers; the government's own report counted eighteen Sikhs dead. Canada's prime minister apologised in Parliament in 2016.

The Ghadar Party, founded in 1913 by Punjabi emigrants on the Pacific coast of North America, sent thousands of men home after the war began to raise the Indian regiments. The rising was fixed for 21 February 1915 and betrayed by an informer. In the Lahore conspiracy trials that followed, Kartar Singh Sarabha, aged 19, was among those hanged on 16 November 1915.