The As It Happens Files (23 page)

Whatever lies at the root of our failure to give Air India the attention it deserved, there’s no denying we failed. For example, Indian officials, up to and including Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, warned Canadian officials on numerous occasions that Sikh extremists in Canada were plotting and sponsoring criminal acts against India and, very likely, against Air India, but they were left at liberty to scheme away.

Talwinder Parmar was one of the extremists. Parmar came to Canada in 1970 and founded the organization Babbar Khalsa, which was dedicated to the establishment of an independent Sikh state in the Punjab. In 1982 Gandhi tried to extradite him from Germany in order to try him for the murder of two policemen in India, but the Germans only sent
him back to Canada. In October 1984, four months after the Indian army’s raid on the Sikhs’ Golden Temple in Amritsar, Gandhi herself was assassinated by her own bodyguards, who were Sikhs. Gandhi’s assassination provoked widespread killings of Sikhs and Hindus in India, further inflaming passions on all sides. Parmar, too, was later murdered in India—but not before playing a leading role in the bombing of Air India Flight 182.

Another man who merited watching was Inderjit Singh Reyat. Born in India, Reyat apparently found his fervour for the Sikh religion when he was growing up in England and brought it with him to Canada in 1974. He worked as a mechanic for Auto Marine Electric in Kamloops, British Columbia, and later in Duncan, on Vancouver Island. It was Reyat, we now know, who procured materials used in assembling the bombs that blew up the Air India plane and killed two baggage handlers at Narita Airport in Tokyo the same day.

And there was Ajaib Singh Bagri, who’d immigrated to Canada in 1971 and worked as a forklift operator at a sawmill near Kamloops. Bagri was another outspoken advocate for Khalistan, the Sikh state they wanted to found. After the Indian army’s raid on the Golden Temple, Bagri addressed a crowd in Madison Square Garden in New York, promising them, “We will kill fifty thousand Hindus.”

Canada didn’t ignore the warnings exactly, but the response was inadequate. The newly formed Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) was tasked with keeping an eye on Sikh agitators in British Columbia, and it did; in 1985 CSIS installed wiretaps and put Talwinder Parmar under surveillance. But when CSIS agents followed Parmar to a meeting with Inderjit Singh Reyat in Duncan one day and then followed them both into the woods, where they heard a loud bang, it didn’t occur to them, apparently, that someone might
be testing a bomb. They later told the RCMP that they thought it was a gunshot they’d heard.

This happened on June 4, 1985, two weeks before Flight 182 was attacked.

Later it transpired that the wiretaps were not as useful as they might have been either, since the phone conversations CSIS was listening to were in a language no one at CSIS could understand, and having them translated was a slow business. And then—unbelievably—most of the tapes got erased. And CSIS was erasing wiretap material linked to Sikh terrorists even
after
the Air India explosion. The agency claims that the erased tapes held no relevant information, but RCMP spokesmen have since remarked that having the tapes intact might have led to a successful criminal prosecution.

In the event, Mr. Justice I. B. Josephson, who presided over the Air India trial when it eventually occurred, did say that authorities had violated the Charter rights of one of the suspects on three occasions—one of them being the destruction of the wiretap evidence. And Reid Morden, the man chosen to head CSIS after the Air India debacle, told CBC News that he believed the agency had dropped the ball.

In 2006 the federal government finally established a commission of inquiry into the Air India disaster, but why did it take so long to do so? One reason was that no one wanted to jeopardize the criminal investigation—which made the outcome of that investigation 20 years later all the more frustrating.

Canadian police and security agents weren’t the only ones asleep at the switch, though. One wonders, for instance, how two men named Singh got their bags checked through on separate flights to Delhi and Tokyo when neither man ever boarded a plane. Both tickets had been bought with cash the day before. Both bags carried bombs.

Air India and the RCMP, we later heard, were not entirely in agreement over who should be paying for the extra security Canada was supposed to be providing to Air India operations in Canada, but it was being provided—up to a point. On June 22, 1985, the X-ray machine used to check the bags being loaded onto the Air India flight out of Pearson International Airport in Toronto broke down and was replaced by a handheld sniffing device. People testified later that when the device beeped, the security agents ignored it, and the agents themselves claimed it didn’t work very well.

There was to be a further baggage check when the plane took on new passengers at Mirabel Airport near Montreal, but that didn’t happen either. Air India 182 was now running almost two hours behind schedule, and the flight took off before the bags were rechecked. Were the pilots more concerned with the schedule than with their own safety? Did they realize the bags hadn’t been properly examined? Were they aware of the level of threat that terrorists posed to Air India?

In hindsight, given all the warnings and the preparations, the Air India disaster should never have occurred. Hindsight, of course, is always 20/20, so we must make allowances. But how do we explain Canada’s actions
after
the disaster, which were no more adequate than its attempts to avert it?

Early in 2002, the Air India investigation was entering its 18th year and no one had yet been tried in connection with the worst act of terrorism in Canadian history. Inderjit Singh Reyat was serving a ten-year sentence in connection with the bomb at Narita Airport. It was assumed that he was also involved with the Air India bomb, but the physical evidence tying him to the bomb on Flight 182 was still lying somewhere
on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. It wasn’t until February 2003 that Reyat eventually pleaded guilty to providing materials for the Air India bomb, and in a deal that CBC’s Rex Murphy dubbed a Boxing Day sale of Canadian justice, received an additional five years in prison. We made that out to be about five
days’
imprisonment for every man, woman and child who went down on Flight 182. But in the spring of 2002, even that sorry excuse for justice had yet to be delivered, and the whole case seemed to have fallen off the radar screen. So we at
As It Happens
set about preparing a special programme to air on June 21st, the eve of the Air India anniversary. We wanted to remind people that the murderers were still at large, that their victims were still awaiting justice. On that show, Salim Jiwa, the author of
The Death of Air India Flight 182,
told us about the ongoing agony of the victims’ families.

“People have been overcome to the point of devastation,” he said. “They can never get over the picture of what happened to them.”

People died of heart attacks, he said, and their families believed the strain of Air India was responsible. Others carried on somehow, as they did after the 1988 explosion of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, but the way victims’ families were treated after Lockerbie bore no resemblance to how Air India families had been treated. American families of Lockerbie victims received condolence messages from the White House; they were invited to Washington. Air India families said they’d been kept in the dark by both the RCMP and the Government of Canada. The Prime Minister conveyed his sympathy to
India.
Canada just hadn’t rallied round the Air India victims, Salim said.

“We have failed these people as a nation.”

Vancouver Sun
reporter Kim Bolan, who had covered the Air India case from the beginning, brought us up to speed
on the criminal investigation. The RCMP had made two arrests finally, and the trial process was beginning to creep forward. Charged with 329 counts of murder and conspiracy were Ajaib Singh Bagri, the forklift operator from Kamloops and Ripudaman Singh Malik, a businessman and prominent member of the Vancouver Sikh community. Also charged was our old friend Inderjit Singh Reyat, who was already serving time in connection with the bombing at Narita Airport. Bolan informed us that the reason it had taken so long to lay charges was that a lot of potential witnesses were too afraid to testify. Many in the community, Kim said, were also doubtful that they’d ever be able to put this case behind them—a statement that proved sadly prescient when the verdicts came down nearly three years later.

In our special, we also spoke to two survivors who, although devastated by their loss, had managed to build something from the wreckage of their lives. Because we had time, producer Robin Smythe and I decided to interview them in person rather than over the phone, which was our usual custom.

One of the people we talked to was Lata Pada, the founder and Artistic Director of the Sampradaya dance company based in Mississauga, Ontario. She was also an acclaimed choreographer and performer of Bharata Natyam, a classical dance form originating in southern India. Lata Pada recounted for us how in early spring of 1985, she had travelled to Bombay to rehearse for an upcoming performance, expecting to be joined by her husband, Vishnu, and her daughters, Brinda and Arati, when their school year ended. Instead, she got a phone call from Air India—and life as she had known it suddenly ended.

Now, 17 years later, Lata Pada had remarried and was living with her second husband in a suburb of Toronto. She had
recently premiered a multimedia stage performance based on the explosion of Air India. After 1985, all Pada’s work had been informed by the loss she suffered when Air India Flight 182 went down; an earlier creation had dealt with the unravelling of her personal identity, which is what happened when she lost her roles of wife and mother. But now she was performing the first work to deal directly with the explosion aboard Flight 182, using panels of fiery silk, the sounds of aircraft flying overhead, the sounds of the Air India announcement and of the telephone message her daughter Brinda had left on a friend’s answering machine moments before boarding the doomed aircraft.

As Michael Crabb wrote in a review in the
National Post,
Pada’s show could have come across as ghoulish, but her art transcended the self-indulgent and conveyed her message with dignity and restraint.

For Pada it was a way of going on, transforming her pain into art. For 15 years, the recording of Brinda’s last words had lain untouched on a corner of her desk. She’d never had the strength to listen to it. Now she was hearing it every night, purging her pain with every repetition. Dance had given her solace and comfort, she told us. In the beginning, it was just something to divert her, to keep her from going crazy; now it had brought her to “some level of mental peace.”

But what if you don’t have dance to carry you through? Where do you find the strength and the will to go on after such a devastating loss? Anant Anantaraman found salvation
in creation, too, but in his case, it was a music scholarship and a school that got created. In 1985 Anant was working for the Department of Defence in Ottawa. Like Lata Pada, he lost his spouse and two daughters on Flight 182. When I met Anant, he told me that the pain of his loss was indescribable. I could well believe it. Every parent’s worst nightmare is the loss of a child, but to lose your children and your mate in such a violent way, and not even have a body to bury, must be like being thrust into Dante’s ninth circle of Hell.

And so it seemed to Anant. Echoing Lata Pada’s description of a self unravelling, Anant recalled that after the tragedy, he didn’t know who or what he was. He walked around his empty house, clutching the pillows that his wife and daughters had slept on, because there he could still detect the scent of their bodies. When that was gone, there was nothing. He had no will to live, he said, but he had been raised to believe that suicide was wrong. He had to carry on—but how?

As time passed, he began to consider what the message of Air India might be for him. What was he meant to learn from it? He began to spend more time in India, near his sister-in-law’s home in Yercaud in Tamil Nadu—and he saw that people there had a lot of unmet needs. For a while, he helped feed children in an orphanage. Then he thought,
This is not the way to help; if you really want to help these people, you must feed the mind, not the body.
He decided to set up a school for the children of the coffee plantation workers who worked in the hills around Yercaud.

The Bhawani Memorial School, named after Anant’s wife, opened in June 1999 on a site that a visitor has described as a bit of God’s country.

In the spring of 2002, when Anant first talked to us, the school consisted only of a dining hall, a kitchen and a well, with classes taking place in the dining hall, but it was already a huge accomplishment. Anant’s eyes lit up with joy and pride as he showed me pictures of his fresh-faced, neatly uniformed young kindergarten and primary school charges. These were his girls now—his girls and boys. He had found a new family to replace the family that had been taken from him.

Every spring Anant returns to Ottawa and Toronto to visit old friends and do some fundraising for the school and for the music scholarship he set up to remember his daughters, Rupa and Aruna, who were both accomplished violinists. In Ottawa he stays with his friend Claire Heistek, a musician in her own right, and a member of the Board of Directors of the Bhawani Anantaraman Memorial Foundation. When Anant arrives, we work out a place and time to meet for coffee or a bite to eat and to get caught up. Last year when we met, we talked about trying to get an Ottawa school to adopt the Bhawani school as a project, to help collect money and books for it. I think of it as a small step in the direction of compensating one of the Air India families for our country’s neglect in their regard, although the debt is vast and ultimately unpayable.