Iran tragedy spurs memories of Air India bombing
Victim’s brother sees parallels to 1985 crash, but more media attention
VANCOUVER— A deadly plane crash halfway across the world. Scores of Canadians dead. The realization it was no simple accident or mechanical failure.
For Rajiv Kalsi, this week’s headlines about the Iran plane crash, which claimed the lives of 176 people, including 138 passengers who had been headed onward to Canada, have brought the old emotions flooding back.
Rajiv’s sister, Indira, was 21 when she boarded the Air India flight in June 1985. Sikh extremists had planted a bomb on the plane, causing it to disintegrate over the Atlantic Ocean. Everyone on board was killed, including 268 Canadians. It remains the deadliest aviation disaster in Canadian history.
Kalsi remembers dropping his sister off at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport. The next day, a friend called him to say Indira’s plane had crashed.
“We were just dealing with the shock; it was surreal,” said Kalsi, who was 19 at the time. “You drop somebody off at the airport, and you never see them again.”
The announcement Thursday by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and others that the plane in Iran had “likely” been shot out of the sky by a missile added, for Kalsi, another visceral parallel to the Air India bombing.
“It’s sad that all these lives were lost or sacrificed for whatever political reason,” Kalsi said. “And it’s the same thing — it doesn’t stop.”
The Iran crash has sent waves of shock and horror through the Iranian Canadian community, and the tragedy has garnered instant media and government attention on a national scale — something that did not happen after the 1985 Air India bombing.
“With the general public, it wasn’t taken as a real Canadian issue, it was somebody else’s. I felt that,” said Kalsi, who was a student at Humber College at the time.
“People would write things in the bathrooms. Someone wrote ‘Their lives were not worth caring about.’”
Former B.C. premier and MP Ujjal Dosanjh recalled the lack of reaction from mainstream Canadian society in 1985.
“In Air India, the people who died were mostly Canadian, the terrorists were Canadian, but the tragedy was treated despicably differently, both by government and the population at large.”
Dosanjh is in touch with many of the families affected by the
Air India bombing and has been intimately involved in the debate within the Indo-Canadian community about Sikh extremism.
“The families felt abandoned,” he said.
Chandrima Chakraborty, an associate professor of English and cultural studies at McMaster University, has interviewed dozens of families who lost a loved one in the Air India bombing and has combed through news articles of the 1985 event. Over and over again, she said, she’s seen the bombing referred to as a “foreign tragedy.” Chakraborty published an anthology called Remembering Air India: The Art of Public Mourning in 2017 and is now creating an Air India Flight 182 archive that will be publicly accessible.
Mass killings often provoke uncomfortable questions, she said.
On Thursday morning, front pages across the country clearly proclaimed the plane crash near Tehran a Canadian tragedy.
“It brings up questions of what Canadian means. And in 1985, I think it meant a very particular kind of Canadian,” Chakraborty said. “I think things have changed and, it’s terrible to say, but you can see a broadening of grief which was not the case with the Air India tragedy.”
The collective outpouring of grief across the country, expressed through news coverage and social media posts, show that more Canadians today see the plane crash as a loss for the whole nation, not just a particular community, said Chakraborty.
It’s a much different feeling, this time around, agreed Kalsi.
His sister had been studying to be a nurse when she died in 1985. To honour her memory, he felt compelled to seek a career in which he helps people. Today, he works at a rehabilitative centre in Ottawa with people who are physically challenged.
But Rajiv said his father never forgot that Prime Minister Brian Mulroney sent condolences to the Indian Prime Minister after the Air India bombing even though the majority of passengers on board were Canadian. Rajiv said he hopes today’s federal government offers support to the families grieving the loss of loved ones in the Iranian plane crash — the kind of support families of the Air India tragedy didn’t received.
A memorial for the Air India bombing victims was built in Ireland in 1986. Kalsi’s parents went to visit the memorial every year for about 20 years, he said.
“That was the only tangible thing they had.”
“It’s sad that all these lives were lost or sacrificed for whatever political reason.”
RAJIV KALSI LOST HIS SISTER, INDIRA, IN AIR INDIA BOMBING