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But Canadians may soon be revisiting their revision of the Komagata Maru story. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be visiting Canada next week. Only two weeks ago the legislative assembly in the Sikh homeland of India’s Punjab State called on him to demand that the Canadian Parliament apologize specifically to India for the “atrocities committed on the Indian people” during the Komagata Maru affair.

The Punjab Assembly says it wants something along the lines of the House of Commons’ apologies and restitutions arising from the 1885 Chinese Head tax and the internment of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War. Modi is expected to visit the Komagata Maru Museum and Monument in Vancouver. Things might get awkward. In 2008, Prime Minister Stephen Harper delivered an apology to Canada’s Indo-Canadians at a gathering of 8,000 Sikhs at a temple in suburban Vancouver, but his overture wasn’t accepted graciously, exactly. The complaint was that the apology should have come from the floor of the House of Commons, and it should have more closely resembled Ottawa’s elaborate regrets about the Chinese Head Tax and the Japanese internment.

Compounding the awkwardness of just who should be apologizing here, and to whom, and for what, is that the story India tells itself about the Komagata Maru has undergone some significant revision as well. It was not long ago that the 1914 voyage was widely regarded in India as something of an embarrassment, an ill-conceived operation put up by Sikh militants and other Indian radicals who were rather too rash in their patriotism.