20 Years too late...

Last week, the Canadian Government set off the public enquiry commission into the Kanishka bombing trial of 1985. There was a half an hour documentary on the national CBC news network. It started off my showing last years 20th anniversary gathering at the coast of Ireland when grieving family and friends came to pay their homage to the 329 lives lost in that ill fated air craft over the Atlantic(this report was interrupted occasionally by the ghastly 1985 videos of Irish seamen picking up frozen bodies of children smeared in aviation fuel from the sea). It was the first time, when the families got the high profile political attention they wanted for so long. The then liberal prime minister Paul Martin said this on the occasion, "Make no mistake. The plane might have been Air India's. It might have crashed off the Irish coast. But in so many ways, this is a Canadian tragedy". He and the then opposition leader (now prime minister) Stefan Harper promised the families that a public commission will soon be set up to enquire into the most notorious and ill-handled criminal prosecution that lasted for 20 long years without any real conviction.

This realization is pretty late. When this disaster(the most devastating terrorist attack involving an air plane, prior to September 11) happened, the Canadian government didn't even consider that this was their problem. This height of ignorance is shown by the fact that the then Canadian prime minister called up Rajiv Gandhi to express his condolences while almost ALL the passengers who were killed were Canadian citizens. May be they just thought that a few brown people in India and a few brown people in Canada were fighting with each other. A businessman from Mumbai named Sanjay Lazar, who lost his entire family in the tragedy told the reporter, "Try telling this to those 329 people out there buried in the seas. They are waiting for answers. So are we". May be they won't get the justice any more. At least they deserve an explanation about what went wrong in the costliest trial in Canadian judicial history.

Only one person named Inderjit Reyat, an electronics engineer, has been found guilty for two counts of man slaughter- the 2 baggage handlers killed in Narita airport in Japan the same day- on the plea that he did in fact help the perpetrators make the time bomb. The prime suspects and also the leader of the Sikh militant group Babar Khalsa, Talwinder Singh Parmar based in Vancouver, were not found guilty on all counts. The reason being the controversial destruction of evidence and killing of witnesses in the name of "policy" by the CSIS. The families, one by one, were allowed to speak in public on the inception of the enquiry commission. They all recounted the horror they faced 21 years back, which is still fresh in their minds. The head of the commission, a former judge was silent for most of the time except when one of the ladies who lost her two daughters in the plane finished talking and thanked the judge as she left when he remarked, "You don't have to thank me for that. You are here by right. You deserve this opportunity to speak."

When I type "Kanishka" in the search engine in the Internet, the website takes me to the great Kushan emperor of the same name who ruled India during the early part of the last millenia. There is a parallel between these two Kanishkas- both have a tormented and bloody history behind them. Now that I try to figure out where it all started, the level of human stupidity involved perplexes me- Sikh nationalists make a place of worship their base and conduct terrorist activities targeting innocent civilians, Indira Gandhi storms the temple and crushes them, a pro-Khalistaan Sikh assassinates her, Congress goons massacre thousands of Sikh families in northern India and finally the Sikh militants in Canada kill 329 people by blowing up an aircraft. So who won? Apparently no one. Most of the time, people who did not have any thing to do with these conflicts got killed. Sons grew up without knowing their mothers, fathers spent the rest of their old age in the memory of their daughters- all because they booked their tickets in the wrong time.