air india 182 retrial: the face of terrorism, up close and personal

sept 27th, 2006

and nobody mourns for the human rights of these victims. or of the victims of the mumbai train bombings. or of the pilgrims burned alive in godhra. all the tears are wasted on the perpetrators. this is an abomination. this is simply unjust: the evil ones get the sympathy, the innocent bystanders are forgotten.

the poignancy of the mother never mourning her dead daughter.
that of the son mourning his dead mother.

these are real people, you know. their tears are real. no less real than the tears of the victims of 9/11. but their grief has been devalued, diminished, disrespected. why are the tears of indians so devalued?

there was a beautiful and wrenching short story by bharati mukherjee -- the management of grief -- about this tragedy. this is the only time she has ever been sympathetic to her indian characters.

http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1159267267118&call_pageid=968332188774&col=968350116467

Air India witness tells of `epiphany'

Sep. 26, 2006. 04:07 PM

CANADIAN PRESS

OTTAWA — A witness testifying at an inquiry into the 1985 Air India bombing remembered how as a 12-year-old boy he experienced ``an epiphany" in the hours after learning his mother had been killed in the attack. A shaky-voiced Susheel Gupta took the stand on Day 2 of the federal probe, saying he learned of the crash off Ireland shortly after 6:30 a.m. the day after his mother left on a trip to India to see her parents. Gupta said he left the house to deliver the Sunday newspapers after his father told him and his brother their mother was dead. He said he cried through the entire 90 minutes it took to complete his three newspaper routes, then sat beside a creek near his home and watched as a turtle struggle to right itself after rolling on its back. Gupta told inquiry commissioner John Major he thought what a ``horrible world we live in" as he watched the innocent turtle in its death throes; he equated it with the death of his innocent mother and decided to save the animal. He said he decided then and there he did not want to be part of the same kind of evil that killed his mother, that he wanted to side with the "innocents" of the world, and he returned home full of purpose.

txt Write

Meantime, it took 20 years — and a narrow escape from yet another potential tragedy — for Jayashree Thampi to come to terms with the Air India bombing.

Thampi, who lost her husband Lakshmanan and seven-year-old daughter Preethi in the 1985 terrorist attack, recounted today how the enormity of it all overwhelmed her at the time.

"I closed my mind to the crash, I concentrated on my work at the Bank of Montreal," she told a public inquiry. "I pretended it did not happen to me. In all those years I never cried for my daughter."

The tears didn't come until last August — after Thampi had watched in horror at Toronto's Pearson Airport as an Air France plane carrying her son Vivek skidded off a runway and burst into flames.

This time the ending was a happy one, as Vivek emerged safely into his mother's embrace.

"Nobody understood why I was crying, because my son was safe," Thampi told a hushed hearing room in a trembling voice.

"They didn't know I wasn't crying for the son who made it, but for the daughter who didn't. For the first time in 20 years I mourned the death of my daughter and cried for her."

Thampi is one of dozens of family members who have told — or will tell — their story to the inquiry mandated by the Conservative government to investigate the June 1985 downing of Air India Flight 182 that took 329 lives.

Two Japanese baggage handlers died the same day when another bomb exploded on the ground at Narita Airport near Tokyo. Both blasts were blamed on Sikh extremists campaigning for a homeland in northern India.

Major has set aside the first three weeks of his hearings to let the families of the victims tell their stories in their own words. But they've done more than dwell on their personal grief.

Virtually all so far have added heart-felt appeals to Major to get to the bottom of why Canadian security and police forces failed to prevent the bombing, then botched the criminal investigation that followed.

"Air India was a preventable tragedy," said Thampi. "Why did the system fail?"

It's already known the Canadian Security Intelligence Service had the men suspected of planning the bombing under surveillance for months before the attack.

And it's known that CSIS unthinkingly erased wiretap tapes both before and after the event, thus hampering the work of the RCMP in its effort to gather enough evidence for a criminal prosecution.

Two prime suspects, Ripudaman Singh Malik and Ajaib Singh Bagri, did not face trial until two decades after the bombing — only to be acquitted in a verdict last year that shocked the victims' families.

Major has no power to re-try those cases, but the families cling to the hope that he can shed new light on the affair all the same.

"For 20 years we asked for a public inquiry," noted Padmini Turlapati, a Toronto pediatrician who lost two sons on Flight 182.

Successive governments brushed off the demand for the kind of wide-ranging probe Major is now conducting, insisting that a more tightly focused case before the criminal courts would offer a better hope for justice.

When the verdicts in last year's trial finally came down "it shattered all hope and decimated me back to zero," said Turlapati.

She now puts her trust in Major.

"We have hung in limbo with no closure, as living dead," she told the judge. "We want to know how the system failed us (as) Canadians. Only the truth will set us free and help us heal."

Susheel Gupta, who has grown up to become a federal Crown prosecutor in the years since his mother perished on Flight 182, also expressed hope that justice can yet be done.

"I promised to myself, and to my mother, that I was going to work in a field where I could make my country safer, healthier and happier," said Gupta.

"I could not walk into a court of law today if I did not have faith in our laws and justice system."

That said, he urged Major to consider some changes, including tougher measures to fight terrorist fundraising in Canada and making it easier to strip Canadian citizenship from terrorist suspects and return them to their countries of origin.

Gupta concluded with an impassioned plea for inquiry participants to remember the human consequences of the events they're examining.

"This is the face of terrorism," he said, as a video screen flashed a morgue photograph of his mother's battered face, the caption identifying her simply as victim No. 97.

"As lawyers and academics, many of you . . . will consider issues and scenarios in a vacuum in your debates. I consider that a mistake."