In December 2007, retired Supreme Court Justice John Major released the first report of the inquiry into the bombing of Air India Flight 182, titled The Families Remember. It portrays the human dimension of the tragedy – that before those 329 became victims, they were real people. They lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow. They were friends, colleagues, aspiring students, professionals, business people, husbands, wives, grandparents, and children. From the little boy who used to buy milk to help an elderly neighbor, to the grandmother of the three-generations taken from a single family, this was a Canadian loss of proportions unimaginable.
At the time, Justice Major wrote: “These are not easy stories to read. The pages that follow are permeated with an ineffable sadness that is emotionally draining, but the examples of courage and determination that are related through the narratives illustrate the strength that accompanied the desolation of the victims’ families.”
Difficult as those stories are to read, Members of Parliament have to read them. But that in itself is not easy; to find the report, one has to know that it exists. Even then, it takes some searching before the report eventually surfaces from the recesses of a Government of Canada website.
After I posted my own recollections of events surrounding the bombing, colleagues and friends commented on how little they had known about, or understood, this difficult chapter in Canada’s history. For those interested, painstaking research and journalism probed this tragedy then, and continues today:
Clark Blaise and Bharati Mukherjee began working on The Sorrow and The Terror–The Haunting Legacy of the Air India Tragedy almost immediately after the bombing; the book was published by Penguin Books Canada in 1987. As the authors noted then: “…with twenty years involvement in the Indian-immigrant life of North America, we were driven to write this book as citizens bearing witness.”
Kim Bolan’s extensive coverage at the time, later took form as a comprehensive book. She takes readers from events pre-dating the bombing through to the aftermath of the ill-fated trial. Loss of Faith, How the Air India Bombers Got Away With Murder, was published by McClelland and Stewart in 2005.
In April, in Khalistan’s Deadly Shadow, Terry Milewski gives a 30+ year history of the tangled events relating to the bombing, including Canada’s continued unwillingness to deal openly with this subject.
And two recent articles from Terry Glavin take readers from the very roots of this tragedy–the terrorism in India by those wanting “an ethnically cleansed theocracy,” to “the conspiracy theory that won’t die. Both should be compulsory reading for any Canadian law program concerning human rights or terrorism.
The bombing of Air India Flight 182 has been described as the tragedy that Canada never took ownership of.
The time for Canada to own it has long passed. The country’s disinterest in homegrown terror was our costly ineptitude; that the bombing should have occurred, our failure; that the bereaved families were expected to go begging for empathy and help; our shame. Nothing can change those facts, which makes it all the more imperative that we choose to remember them.
A moment of recall in the House of Commons on each anniversary of this infamous day, could well make the difference between remembrance and oblivion for the victims of Air India Flight 182, and between empathy and indifference for their surviving families.
(updated 22 June 2018)
Remembering June 23 