A savage act
AIR INDIA FLIGHT 182 AND THE AWFUL CONSPIRACY THEORY THAT WON’T DIE
Across Canada on Saturday, flags on government buildings will be flying at half-mast. It’s a good bet that most people won’t even know why, and if previous years’ commemorations are anything to go by, little public attention will be paid to the quiet and dignified memorials that are to take place, in their usual locations, in Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa and Vancouver.
Just outside the Irish seaside village of Ahakista, on the Sheep’s Head Peninsula in County Cork, there will be a particularly poignant commemoration, with prayers for the dead and a moment of silence that begins at exactly 8:12 in the morning, as it has every year since 1986. It was at that very moment, the year before, that Air India Flight 182 was blown out of the sky above Dunmanus Bay, killing all 329 passengers and crew. Only 131 bodies were recovered from the sea.
Until al-Qaida’s attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, the Air India bombing was the most savage act of terrorism in aviation history. It was far and away the worst terrorist atrocity in Canadian history. Flight 182 was blown up by Canadians. Of the 329 people murdered that day, 280 were Canadians.
The bomb was hidden in a suitcase that was checked in as luggage at Vancouver International Airport and sent on to Flight 182, bound for New Delhi from Toronto, via London. It was also in Vancouver that a second suitcase bomb, intended to detonate simultaneously, was placed on Air India Flight 301, bound for Bangkok via Narita, Japan. That bomb ended up detonating at Narita Airport, killing two baggage handlers.
The atrocity was conceived, planned and carried out by the terrorist organization Babbar Khalsa, specifically by its leader, Talwinder Singh Parmar, who ended up fleeing Canada and sneaking back into India, where he was killed by Indian police in 1992. In the years leading up to the Air India bombings, from the safety of his mansion in Burnaby, Parmar had been directing a campaign of assassinations in India’s Punjab state. Parmar was wanted in India on murder charges. Ottawa had declined to extradite him.
The outrageous inattention to Sikh separatist extremism in Canada — a gross negligence that implicated timid federal politicians, understaffed RCMP offices and the fledgling Canadian Security Intelligence Service — was the most damning finding of a judicial inquiry headed up by retired Supreme Court Justice John Major, whose 2010 conclusions shook Ottawa.
Only one person was ever convicted for the Air India bombings. The bomb-maker Inderjit Singh Reyat pleaded guilty to a charge of manslaughter and was later sentenced to perjury for lying about the identity of his accomplices. Two Babbar Khalsa zealots were acquitted. One potential witness, IndoCanadian Times editor Tara Singh Hayer, was murdered in 1998 before he could give evidence. Others were afraid to testify.
A long list of questions remain unanswered, but Parmar’s central role and Babbar Khalsa’s direct involvement are beyond dispute. The Crown lawyers, the trial judge, the defence lawyers, Reyat, and Justice Major all fingered Parmar as the animateur of the plot. These facts are apparently lost, however, on Sukhminder Singh Hansra of Brampton, Ont. Hansra is a devotee of the cause of “Khalistan,” the Sikh homeland that Parmar’s assassins terrorized Punjab in an effort to win.
Hansra’s Shiromani Akali Dal Canada East (the Akali Dal is a Sikh religious-political party in India) plans its own Air India vigil on Friday night at the monument to Air India’s victims at Humber Bay Park in Etobicoke – but with a creepy twist. Hansra’s vigil is in aid of pushing for another commission of inquiry. “We neither condemn or condone Babbar Khalsa,” Hansra told me.
Hansra’s chief complaint is that Ottawa refuses to entertain the proposition that it was the government of India that plotted the Air India atrocity. “Because there is so much press against the community, the entire community has been stigmatized by this tragedy in the absence of a proper inquiry.”
This is a conspiracy theory that refuses to die. It was insinuated by NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh in a catastrophic interview with veteran CBC journalist last October. Milewski was browbeaten as a “racist” for questioning Singh about the glorification of Parmar as a martyr by a minority section of the Sikh community, and it took several months, and a near revolt by the NDP caucus, before Singh distanced himself from the “racism” allegation and explicitly renounced the conspiracy theory.
It’s all a bit wearying for Bal Gupta, who heads up the Air India Flight 182 Victims’ Families Association. Gupta lost his wife, Ramwati, in the Air India atrocity. “It is a sad state of affairs, yes,” Gupta told me. “There has been an inquiry, there have been court cases and trials, and there has been one person in jail.
“I think 99 per cent of the Sikhs are peace-loving, maybe more. It is a tiny minority which may not be peace loving. The majority of the Sikhs are. The main thing is, nobody is blaming all the Sikhs as far as I know. What is the stigma? The stigma is only on terrorists, whether they are Sikhs or Hindus or Muslims or Christians.”
For anyone who wants to genuinely honour the dead and comfort the living survivors, there will be a memorial service in Toronto at Queen’s Park on Saturday, beginning at 11:30 a.m., and another at 6:30 p.m. at the Humber Bay Park Air India memorial. In Ottawa, a memorial ceremony will be held at 6 p.m. at Commissioners Park, near Dow’s Lake. Also starting at 6 p.m., a memorial service will take place in Vancouver, at the Air India memorial in Stanley Park. And in Montreal, there will be a memorial ceremony at 6:30 p.m. at Monk Island, at Lachine Canal.
“We will continue to have our peaceful prayers,” Gupta said. “Our purpose is to remember those who were killed in the Air India and Narita bombing, and other victims of terrorism, including the Canadian soldiers who have been killed fighting terrorism, and also to pray that nothing like this ever happens in Canada again.”