ਮੇਵਾ ਸਿੰਘ ਲੋਪੋਕੇਮੇਵਾ ਸਿੰਘ ਲੋਪੋਕੇ

Mewa Singh Lopoke (died 11 January 1915) was a Punjabi Sikh mill worker from Lopoke village in Amritsar district who came to Canada in 1906, helped build Vancouver's first gurdwara, and on 21 October 1914 shot and killed immigration inspector William C. Hopkinson at the Vancouver courthouse, for which he was hanged in 1915.

Early life in Lopoke and the journey to Canada

Mewa Singh was born in Lopoke, a village north west of Amritsar in Punjab. The sources do not agree on his birth year: some accounts give 1880 and others 1881, so this page does not fix a single year. He was the son of Nand Singh Aulakh and had one brother, Dewa Singh. In his lifetime the village lay in Ajnala tehsil of Amritsar district; Lopoke is today the headquarters village of its own tehsil in the same district, in the Majha region.

Like thousands of Punjabi men of his generation, he left home looking for better wages. He reached British Columbia in Canada in 1906, part of a wave of more than 5,000 Punjabi arrivals in the few years before 1908, when Canada brought in the Continuous Journey Regulation, a rule that in practice stopped immigration from India by requiring a direct voyage that no shipping line offered. In British Columbia he found work on the green chain at Fraser Mills, sorting lumber as it came off the saws, the kind of heavy mill work that employed many Punjabi newcomers.

Work, faith and the first Vancouver gurdwara

In Vancouver, Mewa Singh came close to two leaders of the small Sikh community, Bhag Singh Bhikhiwind and Balwant Singh Khurdpur of the Khalsa Diwan Society. With them he helped collect funds, visiting Indian homes across the area, for the building of the first gurdwara in Vancouver, which was also the first in North America. The gurdwara opened in January 1908, and accounts of his life say he took Amrit, the Khalsa initiation, there on 28 June 1908. He was not married, and after his mill shifts he spent much of his time at the gurdwara, helping with its upkeep and serving as a granthi, a reader of scripture. People who wrote about him later described a quiet, religious man who was rarely away from the temple.

What was the Komagata Maru, and why did it matter here?

The Ghadar Party had been formed in North America in April 1913 by Indians living in Canada and the United States. Its aim was to end British rule in India, and Mewa Singh began working with its Vancouver circle alongside Bhag Singh and Balwant Singh. Watching the community from the other side was William Charles Hopkinson, a Canadian immigration inspector who also worked as an intelligence agent and Punjabi interpreter. Hopkinson ran a network of informants inside the Punjabi community and reported on its political activity to Canadian and British authorities.

In May 1914 the Japanese steamship Komagata Maru, chartered by the Sikh businessman Gurdit Singh, reached Vancouver with 376 passengers, most of them Punjabi Sikhs and all British subjects. Canada refused them entry under the Continuous Journey Regulation. The ship sat in the harbour for two months while a Shore Committee of local Sikhs raised money and fought the case in court, then was forced to sail away on 23 July 1914 under naval escort. When the ship reached Budge Budge near Calcutta, a clash with police ended with 20 passengers shot dead. In Vancouver, the affair left the local Sikh community angry and divided, and Hopkinson's informants were at the centre of the tension.

The summer of 1914: an arrest, and a shooting inside the gurdwara

On 16 July 1914, while the Komagata Maru was still in the harbour, Mewa Singh crossed the United States border at Sumas with Bhag Singh, Balwant Singh and Harnam Singh to buy firearms meant for the ship's passengers. Coming back through the woods to avoid the checkpoint, he was arrested by a Canadian constable carrying two concealed revolvers and several hundred rounds of ammunition. He was held in New Westminster jail, where Hopkinson and his superior, immigration agent Malcolm Reid, pressed him to give a statement against the other men. He was released on 7 August 1914 after a fine of 50 dollars, paid with the gurdwara's help.

On 5 September 1914, Bela Singh, one of Hopkinson's informants, opened fire inside the Vancouver gurdwara during a funeral gathering and killed two men: Bhag Singh Bhikhiwind, the president of the gurdwara committee, and Badan Singh. Others were wounded. Mewa Singh was in the gurdwara at the time, taking part in kirtan, the singing of hymns, according to Balwant Singh's later testimony. Bela Singh was charged with murder and claimed he had fired in self defence, a case that depended heavily on Hopkinson's evidence about threats against him.

21 October 1914: the courthouse shooting, the trial and the execution

On the morning of 21 October 1914, Hopkinson came to the provincial courthouse in Vancouver to testify in Bela Singh's defence. Just after ten o'clock, in a corridor outside the courtroom, Mewa Singh walked up to him and shot him. Hopkinson died at the scene. Mewa Singh did not run. He gave up his weapons to the courthouse staff, saying, in the words recorded at his trial: I shoot. I go to station. Bela Singh's trial was postponed, and the case against Mewa Singh took its place.

His own trial opened on 30 October 1914, nine days after the shooting. The surviving transcript, Rex v Mewa Singh, shows a packed courtroom and five witnesses heard. At Mewa Singh's instruction, his court appointed lawyer, Edward Montague Woods, called no witnesses for the defence and cross examined none. Instead, a statement by Mewa Singh was read out. In it he said he had shot Hopkinson, in his words, out of honour and principle to my fellow men, and for my religion, and he blamed Hopkinson and Reid for the troubles that had led to the shooting in the gurdwara. He was convicted of murder, for which the death sentence was then mandatory in Canada. Woods later appealed to the Minister of Justice in Ottawa for the sentence to be commuted, without success.

Mewa Singh was hanged at the provincial jail in New Westminster at 7:45 in the morning on 11 January 1915. About 400 Sikhs had gathered outside the jail. His body was handed over to them, carried in procession to Fraser Mills, and cremated there. The jail site is now Simcoe Park in New Westminster, which the Canadian Register of Historic Places lists for its association with him.

Why is Mewa Singh still remembered today?

Mewa Singh is remembered very differently by different writers, and the records themselves pull in two directions: the official files of 1914 treat him as a convicted murderer, while many Sikhs in Canada have honoured him since 1915 as a shaheed, one who gave his life for his community. A scholarly study of the case, published by the University of Victoria, shows in detail how the same archive can support both readings, which is why this page states the plain facts and leaves the judgement to the reader. What is not in dispute is the memory work itself: gatherings marked the anniversary of his death in 1916 and 1917, his painted portrait hangs in the langar hall of the Khalsa Diwan Society gurdwara on Ross Street in Vancouver, and his death is still commemorated every year in that gurdwara and in others across Canada and the United States.

In January 2015, a hundred years after his execution, members of the Sikh community gathered at the old jail site in New Westminster at the same early hour to mark the centenary. Some community members, among them the Vancouver journalist Gurpreet Singh, have also campaigned for Canada to clear his name after his death, arguing that the case cannot be separated from the discrimination South Asian immigrants faced in British Columbia at the time. At home in Punjab, his name has come back to Lopoke itself: the village primary school was rebuilt with support from SAF International and the Gurdwara Sahib Sukh Sagar in British Columbia, completed in 2021, renamed Bhai Mewa Singh Primary School, with a plaque telling his story.