Costly failure

Published : Jul 16, 2010 00:00 IST

Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper at the Air India memorial site after apologising to the families of the victims at the 25th anniversary gathering, in Toronto on June 23.-MARK BLINCH/REUTERS

Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper at the Air India memorial site after apologising to the families of the victims at the 25th anniversary gathering, in Toronto on June 23.-MARK BLINCH/REUTERS

MANDEEP GREWAL lost his father in the Kanishka Air India bombing of 1985, the worst incident of airborne terror before the September 2001 attacks in the United States. Now close to the 25th anniversary of the attack, the public inquiry report on Canada's 9/11 has come but Mandeep does not want to talk about it.

The report has done little to ease his pain. He was a small boy when his father Daljit Grewal boarded the Air India flight 182 to India on June 23. He was going to see his ailing mother in Punjab. But the aircraft was bombed over the Atlantic Ocean in the Irish airspace killing all 329 people on board.

Now, the public inquiry ordered by Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper in 2006 has concluded that the attack could have been prevented. Retired Supreme Court Judge John C. Major, who headed the inquiry commission, described the errors committed by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), the Canadian spy agency, as inexcusable.

The commission has found that despite the danger of a terrorist attack being imminent, the two agencies had failed to prevent it.

It is difficult to talk about it again and again. It just opens up our wounds, said Mandeep when asked for his reaction.

Surjeet Singh Kalsi, who lost his cousin in the bombing, feels the same. He, however, maintains that the Canadian authorities discriminated against the victims because of their race. Though most of them were Canadian citizens, they were of Indian descent. The investigation would have taken a different course had the victims been Anglo-Saxons.

In fact, Justice Major looked into this angle. Although he concluded that the term racism was not helpful in understanding the government response, he acknowledged that the callous attitude of the Government of Canada towards the families of the victims might make them wonder if the response would have been similar had an overwhelming majority of the victims been white Canadians.

The families are shattered by the knowledge that their relatives would not have died if proper security checks had been made. There were warnings from India, and also from within the Canadian Sikh community about a possible terror attack around the first anniversary of Operation Bluestar, the Indian military operation to flush out religious fundamentalists (fighting for a separate state of Khalistan) in the Golden Temple, the holiest shrine of the Sikhs, in Amritsar. Thousands of Sikhs in Canada had protested against the military operation, while a few extremists vandalised the Indian consulate office in Vancouver. The militants also gave a call to boycott Air India flights.

The assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her two Sikh bodyguards the same year and the subsequent anti-Sikh pogrom added fuel to the fire.

The bombing

The bombing was blamed on the Babbar Khalsa, a Sikh separatist group that was seeking revenge for the bloody events of 1984, as well as the attack on the Golden Temple.

Two suitcase bombs intended to target two Air India planes flying to two different destinations, were checked in at the Vancouver Airport. Both travelled up to Toronto. One exploded on the ground at the Narita Airport in Japan, killing two baggage handlers. An hour later, the other snatched the lives of 329 passengers, taking the toll from the coordinated attacks to 331.

A protracted investigation launched by the Canadian Police resulted in one conviction and two acquittals. While Inderjit Singh Reyat, the bomb-maker, has served 20 years in jail for the twin attacks, Ripudaman Singh Malik, a Sikh millionaire from Vancouver, and Ajaib Singh Bagri, a sawmill worker in Kamloops in British Columbia, were acquitted by the British Columbia Supreme Court in 2005.

Bagri was a leader of the Babbar Khalsa, which was banned in Canada only after 9/11. The Babbar Khalsa is believed to have raised funds in the name of charity for years.

In a prominent hate speech following the 1984 incidents, Bagri had said, We won't rest until we kill 50,000 Hindus. Another Babbar Khalsa leader and the alleged mastermind of the Air India bombing conspiracy, Talwinder Singh Parmar, was killed in 1992 by the Punjab Police. He had escaped from Canada despite being under police surveillance only to be killed in an alleged fake encounter, a charge former Punjab Police chief K.P.S. Gill denied in an interview to this writer. Gill, however, could not explain why no collateral damage was suffered by the police.

Reyat is currently facing perjury charges for not disclosing the identity of a suspect, who came to be known as Mr. X throughout the Air India trial. The unknown man had accompanied Reyat and Parmar to a bomb-testing site in Duncan, British Columbia. Before the bombings, CSIS agents had tailed the three men and discarded the noise of the bomb as gunfire. Although Reyat pleaded guilty to manslaughter, he claimed he did not know the name of the third person. Judge Ian Josephson, who acquitted Malik and Bagri, had described him as an unmitigated liar who had lied 27 times in court. As a result, he was charged with perjury, the jury trial for which is now scheduled for September. Some other potential suspects were never charged. Among them was Surjan Singh Gill, who is now in the United Kingdom. Gill, who was a self-styled ambassador of Khalistan in Vancouver, was believed to be a CSIS mole.

Although the Canadian Police claim that the investigation is still going on, the families of the victims have virtually lost all hope of getting justice. If they could not do anything in 25 years, what can we expect at this point? asked Major Singh Sidhu, who lost his sister, a nephew and a niece. However, the Canadian Minister for the Asia Pacific Gateway, Stockwell Day, announced that the Air India Task Force is still working on some leads and the victims' families have been updated about the ongoing investigation. The families, meanwhile, have tried to find solace and fight anger through different means. Major Sidhu, joined the Sikh temple politics in Vancouver to challenge the fundamentalists.

Lata Pada, a Bharatnatyam dancer who lost her husband and two daughters, used her dance piece, Revealed by Fire to tell her story.

Laxminarayan Turlapati, who lost two sons, has started a trust to help needy children.

Harper's gesture

Harper has expressed his willingness to implement all the recommendations in the report, including the one for compensation. He offered an apology on the 25th anniversary of the tragedy.

Perviz Madon, who lost her husband, says she is pleased with Harper's generosity, but clarified that the families had never demanded compensation. I have raised two children without my husband all these years. Compensation can never bring me back what I have lost, she said.

It is pertinent to mention that the Canadian police and previous Liberal governments were opposed to a full public inquiry. Even Ujjal Dosanjh, Federal Liberal MP and Canadian Sikh, who is critical of extremism and had survived a murderous attack in 1985 for his moderate views, favoured a limited public inquiry then.

The previous Liberal government's reluctance to order a full inquiry had sparked angry protests. The leader of the Air India victims' families association, Bal Gupta, who lost his wife in the attack, filed a petition seeking full inquiry. The New Democratic Party (NDP), which supported the minority Liberal government of Paul Martin, threatened to withdraw support to the government on this issue. This forced Paul Martin to appoint a limited inquiry commission headed by former Ontario premier Bob Rae in 2005.

Harper, for his part, vowed to launch a full inquiry if he came to power. Even his political opponents have welcomed his initiative. Among them is Surinder Sangha, leader of the Indo Canadian Workers' Association, a leftist group. Although we do not endorse his far-right ideology, we acknowledge that he has made the Canadian establishment accountable, something which his Liberal predecessors could not do. Sangha's group had repeatedly passed resolutions seeking a full public inquiry.

Even the World Sikh Organisation, which advocates a separate Sikh homeland, has welcomed the recommendations of the commission. Despite serious concerns over the limited involvement of the Sikh community in the inquiry, the WSO welcomes many of the John Major Commission's key recommendations, a statement issued by the group said.

Sikh separatist groups have for years maintained that Indian intelligence agencies were behind the Air India attack. A good Sikh can never do such a dastardly act. This was done by the Indian agents to discredit our movement in Canada, said Namjeet Singh Randhawa of the United Sikh Federation, a pro-Khalistan group. They cite the killing of Parmar by the Indian police and the erasure of surveillance tapes by the CSIS as proof.

A parallel investigation launched by the Punjab Human Rights Organisation (PHRO) charged in 2008 that Indian intelligence agencies were behind the bombing. Rajwinder Singh Bains, a Chandigarh-based lawyer associated with the PHRO, was on the list of witnesses for the John Major inquiry. He claims that his observations were based on the interrogation of Parmar. Harmel Singh Chandi, a former Punjab police officer, claims to posses the confessional statement of Parmar.

Gian Singh Sandhu, a senior policy adviser of the WSO, lamented in a statement, Canadian Sikhs have lived under a cloud of suspicion ever since the bombing of Air India, and routinely faced harassment and intimidation by authorities.

Banu Saklikar, who lost her sister and brother-in-law in the crash, said, I understand that the Sikh religion does not preach violence, so nobody in the Sikh community should treat those who did this as saints or heroes. Banu Saklikar, who was on a visit to India, was reacting to the portrayal of Parmar as a martyr by the supporters of Khalistan in Surrey, British Columbia.

It took years for the Canadian government to acknowledge the Air India attack as a Canadian tragedy; memorials for those killed were raised only after 9/11. Terrorism seemed to enter the Canadian consciousness only on September 11, 2001 when New York and Washington, D.C. were targeted by religious extremists, says Ujjal Dosanjh. Therefore, it is not a coincidence that the voluminous report of Justice Major has been titled A Canadian Tragedy.

Gurpreet Singh is a journalist with Radio India Vancouver.

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