Mewa Singh Lopoke

Mewa Singh Lopoke (1881 - January 11, 1915) was a Sikh activist in Canada who was a member of the Vancouver branch of the Ghadar Party, which called for the overthrow of British rule in India. On October 21, 1914, Mewa Singh murdered a Canadian immigration inspector, W. C. Hopkinson, a political act of violence for which he was executed by the Canadian government. In the eyes of Sikh Canadians, Mewa Singh's assassination of Hopkinson was a display of martyrdom, one which they commemorate annually.

Early life Mewa Singh was born in 1881 in the village of Lopoke which is located in Ajnala Tehsil of Amritsar district in Punjab, India. He was the son of Nand Singh Aulakh and had one brother, Dewa Singh. Singh was one of over 5000 Punjabi men who arrived in Canada in three years before 1908, the date when the Canadian government passed the Continuous Journey Regulation to prohibit further immigration from India. On one side, there was the Ghadar Party activists, and on the other, a handful of informants reporting to W.C. Hopkinson and the Vancouver immigration department. Through his connections with Balwant Singh, a fellow mill worker and granthi in the Vancouver Sikh Temple, and Bhag Singh, president of the Gurdwara management committee, Mewa Singh began working with the Ghadar Party. Formed by Indians living in North America, the Ghadar Party was a movement founded in April 1913 that sought to undertake an armed struggle to gain India independence from British rule. During the period of 1908–1918, Canadian immigration officials in Vancouver played an integral role in the surveillance of Indian nationalists in North America. At the centre of this surveillance effort was W.C. Hopkinson, an immigration inspector, who established a network of moles within the city's nascent Punjabi community.

In a statement made to Hopkinson in June 1914, an informant, Bela Singh Jian, reported that Mewa Singh, who was acting as a messenger, offered him $500 and a ticket to India or a piece of real estate in exchange for Jian stopping his collaboration with the immigration office. A month later, on July 16, 1914, Mewa Singh joined three other Ghadarites – Bhag Singh, Balwant Singh, and Harnam Singh – who crossed the border at Sumas to meet Taraknath Das, a Bengali activist, and to purchase weapons to give to the passengers of the Komagata Maru. However, the passengers refused to depart until the Canadian government had allocated provisions for their return across the Pacific. When he was arrested, Mewa Singh was found with two concealed revolvers and 300 rounds of ammunition. Ultimately, Mewa Singh complied, and in the statement he gave to Hopkinson and Reid, he acknowledged the following: (1) He went on the cross-border trip with the other men by chance and was never in their full confidence; (2) they purchased four revolvers; (3) Balwant Singh paid for the firearms; (4) and, according to his knowledge, the weapons were bought with the intent of convoying them to the Komagata Maru. Although Hopkinson and Reid deemed his statement unsatisfactory, Mewa Singh was not considered a major player and was released on August 7, 1914, after paying a $50 fine with the help of the Vancouver Sikh Gurdwara. During this time, Bela Singh Jian - one of W.C. Hopkinson's chief informants - became convinced that the Sikh Ghadarites in Vancouver would target him for being a spy within the community. The sudden deaths of two other Immigration Department informants – Harnam Singh Gahal and Arjan Singh – seemed to confirm Bela Singh's suspicions. Bhag Singh Bhikhiwind, the president of the Gurdwara management committee and an anticolonial leader, was one of the two Sikhs that Bela Singh shot dead.

After the shooting, Bela Singh called the police and was subsequently arrested. At the police station, Bela Singh claimed that he fired in self-defence. The other witnesses—who were friends of Bela Singh—corroborated his story.

Shooting and arrest On October 21, 1914, Bela Singh, charged with murder, was tried in the Provincial Court House of British Columbia. As they got closer, Mewa Singh marched up to Hopkinson, pulled out a revolver, and opened fire on him. Mewa Singh did not resist arrest, and as the head janitor stripped him of his weapons, he said “I shoot. I go to station."

Murder trial and execution As the historian Hugh M. Johnston writes, the speed at which the BC legal system processed the case of Mewa Singh had no precedent in modern Canada. thumb Funeral Procession of Mewa Singh, 1915.At Mewa Singh's request, Edward Montague Woods, his court appointed lawyer, called no witnesses and conducted no cross-examination. Yet, Woods attempted to help Mewa Singh by appealing to the Minister of Justice in Ottawa, advocating for Mewa Singh's sentence to be commuted. Ultimately, Woods' efforts were futile and Mewa Singh's death sentence, the mandatory punishment for murder in Canada, was not commuted.

On January 11, 1915, approximately 400 Sikhs gathered outside the New Westminster jail, where Mewa Singh was executed. After he was hanged, Mewa Singh's body was turned over to the crowd of Sikhs in attendance. From there, the procession of nearly 400 carried the body for three kilometres until they arrived at Fraser Mills, where they had received permission to cremate Mewa Singh's body.

Aftermath Neither the police nor the Vancouver Immigration officials believed that Mewa Singh acted alone. Although officials believed there to be a larger plan behind the murder, the Immigration Department was unable to make a compelling case to support these suspicions. However, officials still arrested several members of the Shore Committee (nearly all of them Ghadrite) with the charge of inciting Mewa Singh to murder Hopkinson. Later authorities dropped these charges for lack of evidence.

A year after Mewa Singh was hanged, on January 11, 1916, he was acknowledged and eulogized in Ghadar Party literature. On the second anniversary, in 1917, Vancouver Sikhs congregated for several days at the Gurdwara by Fraser Mills, the location of Mewa Singh's cremation. In the following year, the number of Sikh attendees grew to five hundred, even though there were only about seven hundred Sikhs in BC.

Contemporary memory and legacy

Film and literature A film named as Guru Nanak Jahaz on his life has been made with Tarsem Jassar in lead role. The film was released on 1 May 2025.

Annual commemoration

For the Sikh community of Vancouver, Mewa Singh is a martyr and his martyrdom is celebrated every year in the Khalsa Diwan Society's Gurdwara on Ross Street. Also, this occasion is marked and celebrated by other Sikh temples across Canada, and in the United States as well. In Sikh circles, Mewa Singh is often referred to with the honorific title "Bhai" (or "brother"), which is accorded to those Sikhs who have distinguished themselves in their deeds for the community.

In 2015, the 100th anniversary of Mewa Singh's martyrdom was commemorated by the Prof. Mohan Singh Memorial Foundation. Taking place at the old British Columbia jail site in New Westminster at 7:45 AM - the same location and time of Mewa Singh's execution – members of the Sikh community paid tribute and respect to Mewa Singh for his sacrifice and contributions to the Ghadar Party.

Bhai Mewa Singh Primary School In 2019, SAF International, a Canadian NGO that provides aid to individuals across India, visited Mewa Singh's ancestral village of Lopoke. Upon seeing the village's primary school in such disrepair, SAF announced plans to rebuild and rename the primary school in his name. The project, which was supported by the Gurdwara Sahib Sukh Sagar in British Columbia, Canada, began construction in early 2020 and was completed in 2021. The school now features SMART classrooms, a water reservoir, access to solar power, and a plaque that honours Mewa Singh's legacy and tells his story.

Calls for posthumous exoneration A profile of Mewa Singh displayed by the Khalsa Diwan Society Gurdwara in their Komagata Maru Museum.Members of the Sikh community of Vancouver, such as Gurpreet Singh, the founder of the monthly magazine Radical Desi, have called upon the Canadian government to absolve Mewa Singh of criminal charges. A petition for this cause appeared on Change.org following Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's exoneration of six Chilcotin chiefs who were executed by the colonial government of Canada over 150 years ago. Gurpreet Singh, who started the petition, argues that Mewa Singh's murder of W.C. Hopkinson was a political act of aggression that was in response to the wider institutional racism against South Asian immigrants in Canada. Similarly, at the centenary of Mewa Singh's martyrdom, Sahib Singh Thind, the president of the Prof. Mohan Singh Memorial foundation, called for Mewa Singh's name to be disassociated from any criminal connection within the legal system of Canada and the relevant historical literature. It was the first major artistic and theatrical production to revisit and re-envision the assassination of W.C. Hopkinson and the trial of Mewa Singh. As playwright Paneet Singh explained, The Undocumented Trial of William C. Hopkinson is a forum that seeks to insert Mewa Singh's story into the mainstream by recounting the events that led to the shooting, and the social conditions that made his martyrdom inevitable. Importantly, the play was performed at the same venue where the original trial took place on October 21, 1914.