Bhai Mewa Singh

Mewa Singh was a Khalsa Sikh mill worker and scripture reader at the Vancouver Sikh temple who shot and killed the immigration inspector William Hopkinson on 21 October 1914. He made no attempt to escape, said in a statement that he was giving his life to show that his people could not get justice in Canada, and was hanged at New Westminster on 11 January 1915. The Dictionary of Canadian Biography says that veneration of him began on the day of his execution and that annual observances in Sikh temples continue.

He was born about 1881 at Lopoke, the son of Nund Singh, and never married. He reached British Columbia in 1906, one of more than 5,000 Punjabi men who arrived in the three years before Canada halted Indian immigration in 1908, and found unskilled work in lumber mills. He took Khalsa initiation in 1908, helped maintain Vancouver's first Sikh temple and served as its granthi, though he was a secondary figure in its leadership.

Key moments

• 17 July 1914: he was arrested at the border with 500 rounds of ammunition and a revolver bought in Sumas, Washington. Officials pressed him to implicate his companions on the trip, Bhag Singh and Balwant Singh, and he gave a statement in exchange for a lesser charge.
• 5 September 1914: the Dictionary of Canadian Biography says Bela Singh, an informant for Hopkinson, fired two revolvers into a gathering of 35 to 40 men at the temple during a funeral. Eight or nine were wounded and two died, Bhag Singh and another man. Mewa Singh later said that this desecration led him to kill Hopkinson.
• 21 October 1914: Hopkinson, an immigration inspector who kept watch on Sikhs and other Indian immigrants, was shot in a corridor of the Vancouver courthouse, before a grand jury hearing in Bela Singh's case. The Sikh Heritage Museum of Canada says Hopkinson was due in court that day to testify in Bela Singh's favour.
• The following week: his trial lasted under two hours. He offered no defence, and his lawyer, Edward Montague Nelson Woods, cross-examined no witnesses and read the court a long statement by Mewa Singh.
• 11 January 1915: he was hanged at New Westminster. A procession of about 400 Sikhs carried his body four miles from the New Westminster jail to a funeral pyre at Fraser Mills. South Asian Canadian Heritage says hundreds waited outside the penitentiary that morning to receive his body.

The sources differ on Bhag Singh's role: the Dictionary of Canadian Biography calls him president of the temple society, while the Sikh Heritage Museum of Canada calls him the temple's granthi. The Dictionary says that press commentary suggested Vancouver's white majority saw Hopkinson as the hero.

Remembered for: a shooting after which he made no attempt to escape, a statement that his people could not get justice in Canada, and annual observances in Sikh temples since the day of his hanging.