National Post (National Edition)
When terror strikes at home
Atwal affair is personal
Every now and then a story will erupt out of nowhere that brings up horrible things we’ve all forgotten. The case of the former terrorist and convicted wouldbe assassin Jaspal Atwal showing up out of the blue on Team Trudeau invitation lists in India a couple of weeks ago is a story like that. For me, it’s a bit personal.
Back in the 1980s, Jaspal Atwal was one of the nastier characters in the Sikh separatist Khalistan movement, which at the time was bullying and intimidating the Sikhs at their gurdwaras in Surrey, Vancouver and New Westminster. Atwal first came to my attention from conversations during visits with my friend Tara Singh Hayer. He was the editor of the Indo-Canadian Times in Surrey, and he’d developed a habit of bravely talking back to the Khalistanis.
In 1986, Atwal was arrested with three accomplices on a Vancouver Island backroad after firing two bullets into Punjab cabinet minister Malkiat Singh Sidhu, who was visiting family in Tahsis. Atwal had shadowed the car Sidhu was travelling in, all the way from the Sikh Temple Sukh Sagar in New Westminster, where Sidhu had been celebrating the wedding of a nephew.
It’s not just that the Sikh Temple Sukh Sagar happened to be right out my kitchen window, or that I ended up covering Atwal’s trial for the Vancouver Sun.
Atwal was a member of the terrorist-listed International Sikh Youth Federation, and it just so happened that its leader, Amrik Singh, had insisted on acting as my interpreter two years before the Sidhu ambush, while I was interviewing various Khalistani holy warriors in Amritsar, Punjab. At the time, Khalistani militias, most notably Babbar Khalsa, had transformed Amritsar’s Golden Temple Complex, the Sikh Vatican, into a heavily fortified barracks, arms depot and terrorist command centre. But that’s not the half of it.
On June 21, 1985, I said goodbye to my Uncle Phil and my cousins in the town of Midleton, County Cork, after paying them a visit. Two days later, in London, the television news was suddenly awash with the horror of the Kanishka, a Boeing 747 passenger plane, Air India Flight 182 out of Toronto, bound for New Delhi. It had fallen into the sea in pieces off the Irish coast, west of Cork Harbour, out toward the Sheep’s Head Peninsula. There had been 329 people on board, almost all of them Canadians, mostly from the Toronto area. More than 80 were children. Six were babies.
I’d happened to be a passenger on that very airplane only the year before, and straight away it occurred to me that I almost certainly knew exactly who had murdered all those people. As things were to turn out, I was right, and that’s the horrible, still-beating heart of the Air India tragedy: there was nothing exceptional about what I knew. You didn’t need to be an agent with the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service or the Research and Analysis Wing of India’s foreign intelligence service to be confidently certain about who had committed the Air India atrocity.
For years, Khalistani militants had been mobilizing and fundraising from the safe haven Canadian authorities had been providing them, thanks to a succession of politicians who had reckoned selfishly and wrongly that they’d be treading on the toes of Sikh voters if they did anything much about it. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi may well be a paranoid and a scoundrel, but it is a recurrence of this pathology in Justin Trudeau’s government that Indian intelligence officials say they have some cause to fear.
Most notable among the terrorists in Canada was Talwinder Singh Parmar, the high priest of Babbar Khalsa, a theocratic fascist terror militia. I’d first interviewed Parmar when I was a cub reporter, long before Air India. He was wanted back in Punjab on several murder charges going back to 1982. From the safe distance of his mansion in Burnaby, all the while passing himself off as a humble sawmill worker and a persecuted “simple Sikh preacher,” Parmar commanded a small army of assassins holed up in a heavily fortified four-storey bunker inside Amritsar’s Golden Temple Complex.
I visited the complex. From his perch in the Akal Takht, “the throne of the timeless one,” the genocidal hatred of Hindus that Khalistani supreme leader Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale expressed during our interview was helpfully informative. It confirmed everything that so many Sikhs back in Canada had been trying to explain to Canadian politicians. Khalistan was the ethnically cleansed theocracy that Bhindranwale wanted to carve out of Punjab. It was nothing like the cause of a righteous ThirdWorld liberation movement that Canada’s Khalistanis were claiming it was.
Across the shimmering pool from the Akal Takht, in his sandbagged bunker, Babbar Khalsa’s senior commander, Sukhdev Singh, happily admitted to me that on Parmar’s direct orders he’d recently carried out more than 40 assassinations. The dead were insufficiently observant Sikhs, poets, Hindu-Sikh peace activists, leftwing intellectuals and innocent Hindu shopkeepers.
The killing would go on until Khalistan was won, Sukhdev Singh told me.
A month later, the Indian army moved in with Operation Blue Star, the bloody and bungled siege and bombardment of the Golden Temple Complex that enraged Sikhs around the world. Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh guards, touching off an orgy of reprisal riots, mass murders and pogroms that left thousands of Sikhs dead. Then came the Air India bombing. Parmar fled Canada and made his way back through Pakistan into Punjab, where he was killed in a muchdisputed encounter with Punjab police on Oct. 15, 1992.
The B.C. Supreme Court and a later federal judicial inquiry found that Parmar was the mastermind of the Air India operation. Inderjit Singh Reyat, the bomb maker, was the only person convicted.
Released two years ago after serving a 30-year sentence, Reyat never gave up his several accomplices, and he’s never expressed remorse.
They came for my friend Tara Singh Hayer in August 1988. He was shot and crippled and ended up confined to a wheelchair. Only the triggerman in that operation, Harkirat Singh Bagga, was convicted, after pleading guilty. They came for Hayer again in 1998, and killed him. His killers remain at large. After surviving Atwal’s 1986 assassination attempt, Malkiat Singh Sidhu was murdered at his home in India in 1991.
Everyone I interviewed in Amritsar in April and May, 1984, was killed during Operation Blue Star. So was my interpreter, Atwal’s idol, Amrik Singh. After his jail time, Atwal went on to become a prominent figure in Liberal party circles in Surrey.
As for those 329 people who fell out of the sky off the Irish coast all those years ago, they’re rarely remembered in Canada, but every year they are mourned aloud in the little village of Ahakista, on the Sheep’s Head Peninsula, on Dunmanus Bay. It’s a place of pilgrimage now.
There’s a memorial there, a sundial, and the sun strikes its mark every year on June 23 at precisely 8 a.m., the moment when Babbar Khalsa’s bomb exploded in the baggage compartment of Air India Flight 182.