See No Evil

Brian Fawcett weighs in on the Air India aftermath

A few minutes after seven in the morning of June 23, 1985, a suitcase bomb exploded in one of the holds of an Air India Boeing 747 as it approached the coast of Ireland on its way into London. In the next few seconds, all 329 people aboard Air India Flight 182 died horribly. About an hour earlier in Tokyo’s Narita airport terminal, a suitcase bomb exploded while a CP Air flight out of Vancouver was being unloaded, and two baggage handlers were killed. Both bombs originated in Vancouver, and were almost certainly built and placed on the aircraft by members of Vancouver’s Sikh community in retaliation against the storming of the Golden Temple in Amritsar, slightly more than a year earlier. That operation had resulted in the killing of several thousand militant Sikh separatists, who had occupied the spiritual centre of Sikhdom six months earlier.

In May 1991, Inderjit Singh Reyat, the local number-two man within the separatist group Babbar Khalsa, was convicting in the Narita bombing and sentenced to 10 years in prison. He later pleaded guilty to manslaughter in the bombing of Air India Flight 182. The local leader of the group, and by virtually every account the mastermind of both the Narita and Air India bombings, Talwinder Singh Parmar, was killed in India in October 1992, either in a gun battle with Indian police agents or by clandestine execution shortly after the gun battle.

But in March 2005, almost two decades after the bombs exploded and after nearly two years of court testimony and cross-examination, two other men, a wealthy Vancouver businessman named Ripudaman Singh Malik and a Kamloops millworker named Ajaib Singh Bagri, were acquitted of planting a bomb on Air India Flight 182 by Judge Ian Bruce Josephson, who ruled that the prosecution had not established guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

The uproar over Malik and Bagri’s acquittal has been loud and passionate, and considerable pressure to conduct a judicial or even parliamentary inquiry has been levied by the families of the victims, and by a number of other sensible people who believe that the acquittals constitute a gross miscarriage of justice.

Loss of Faith: How the Air India Bombers Got Away With Murder, is Vancouver Sun reporter Kim Bolan’s recounting of the Air India bombing, its human aftermath, and the judicial attempt to bring the guilty to justice. Bolan is uniquely positioned to deliver this account, because she has covered the story from its beginning to its, well, present state. Her account is thorough—her story is a much larger and detailed one than was delivered to Justice Josephson during the trial. She argues passionately and convincingly that justice has not been served, and that at least two guilty men are walking the streets of Greater Vancouver.

Kim Bolan is a very good newspaper reporter. She is dogged and stubborn (her most frequent self-identifications). She can assemble and sort facts and events within the narrow band of event analysis newspapers seem to prefer. And she can remember and integrate their—in this case—extraordinarily complex threads. She is also a person with the courage to uphold her convictions and clearly is not easily frightened—she’s been subjected to both tacit and direct threats as a result of her coverage. In general, she seems a likeable and decent human being, the sort of friend you’d want around if you were returning a poor piece of recently purchased merchandise to an unscrupulous dealer, or heading into a PTA meeting that promises to be fractious. I trust her sensibility and I believe what she writes about the bombing, the victims, and their families. She thinks that Malik and Bagri helped to construct and deliver the bomb that blew up Air India Flight 182. I believe her about that, too.

I also think an inquiry is needed, but not the kind most people concerned with the Air India bombing—Bolan included—are asking for. Bolan and company want a judicial inquiry to determine why Malik and Bagri weren’t convicted. Yes, the squabbling investigating agencies screwed it up, the crown prosecutors didn’t present the evidence the investigators assembled very well, and the incurious presiding judge didn’t do enough homework on Sikh culture, or on the way Canada’s separatist Sikhs have been allowed to operate in BC for the last 25 years.

But what we really need is an inquiry to figure out why and when our criminal justice system isn’t able to uphold the Rule of Law, and to decipher the interactions between that failure and a system of multicultural compensations and bonuses. It’s a system that gives advantage to immigrant and visible-minority perpetrators of crime, allowing them to ignore and, when it serves their advantage, to manipulate the codes of egalitarian civility upon which democracy is grounded. It is within those interactions that the plan to bomb the planes was hatched and the bombs delivered, and it was because of those interactions that the perpetrators got away with killing more than 300 innocent people.

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For all its considerable virtues, Loss of Faith has startlingly little to say about these larger and, to my mind, more crucial issues. Fine reporter that she is, Bolan isn’t a journalist, by which I mean she lacks the ability to draw her subject out of its physical details to reveal the larger (and here, occasionally global) contexts within which it resonates. As a newspaper reporter, she’s more interested in—and better at—the drama and pathos of events. Those are, after all, the keystones of newspaper reportage; the things that, as any news editor will tell you, sell papers. I’m not sure if this has always been so, or if it is the consequence of print journalism’s subservience to television. The corporations call it convergence, but it’s actually an informational catastrophe.

From its beginnings, television has been obsessed with stimulating the reptilian core of human emotions—dressing it up in McLuhan’s “hot” medium rhetoric. The catastrophe lies in the inability of print newspapers, in an age in which television has become the dominant instrument of information dissemination, to evolve into badly needed instruments of public analysis.

In her reportage of the trial testimony, for instance, Bolan takes us to the warehouse where the recovered remnants of the Air India 747 have been reassembled. What she writes about it is telling:

“… I found the sight haunting and eerie. Some of the pieces, looking grey and corroded, were clearly the ones I’d seen floating in the ocean in news photos at the time.… when I saw the seats, with fabric torn and foam hanging out, I could picture the people sitting in them.… We stood there trying to imagine the instant when [the plane] exploded. As overwhelming as it was to see the wreckage, what was really eerie was the absence of anything related to the victims—no suitcases, no clothing, no personal effects. Terry Milewski [of the cbc] commented that it was “bloodless,” like a graveyard without any bodies.

I was filled with sadness as I stood there. I wished that all Canadians could have seen the absolute devastation wreaked by the bombing. Maybe then, they would have understood the magnitude of the calamity.”

What she gives us here are ghoulish details that invoke sentimentality about the dead, but leave them as absent as they in fact are from the world. Such details also offer very little analytic sense of what the “calamity” actually was, or how it can usefully inform us about the world we’ve created and/or how to prevent the sort of lunacies that killed these 329 perfectly innocent human beings. We need to know how the calamity of such acts get so casually constructed and rationalized by their perpetrators. We also need more tangible notions of the political, social and cultural ramifications of the calamity.

There’s something morbid about familiarizing readers with the aspirations and idiosyncracies of the victims of Air India Flight 182, and about drawing out the inevitable ironies that landed them aboard the doomed 747. Bolan does both at length. The usual argument offered to excuse this sort of writing is that it somehow empowers the victims and their surviving family members. But I don’t see how the dead can be usefully empowered. Dragging their families through what they lost and what their loved ones’ lives might have been one more time simply seems like cruelty. That leaves us with “informing the general public,” and even here I don’t get it: If there’s anyone out there who doesn’t recognize that real human beings are on airliners, I’m sure pretty well everything else about the human condition will be lost on them.

Part of the problem is that Bolan is, well, not much of a writer the moment she goes beyond the reportage of events or testimony. For the most part, once she steps outside her reporter’s stance, she’s quickly lost amongst the vacuous expressives of contemporary news reporting. These include inflatedly dramatic and usually antiquated adjectives like “dastardly”, “tragic”, “calamitous”; an over-use of rhetorical questions; overweening sentimentality; and constant appeals to her readers to experience outrage and indignation—usually within a context that doesn’t lead anywhere but to more outrage and indignation.

The problem with outrage and indignation is that they are self-fulfilling emotions as easily satisfied by sentimentality as by effective action. It seems to me that as citizens, Bolan needs to tell us three things about the Air India bombing: 1) Why it happened; 2) Why the machinery of Canadian law couldn’t catch and convict the perpetrators; and 3) What ought to be done to prevent this sort of thing from happening again.

So let me make a very rough paraphrase of what’s in the reportage:

1) The bombings were carried out as revenge against the Indira Ghandi-ordered storming of the Golden Temple. They were successful because, in 1985, it was possible to put uninspected luggage on a plane and then not board the plane oneself. The perpetrators weren’t stopped from doing this, even though most of the principal conspirators were under surveillance from Canada’s then-fledgling security agency (including wiretaps), because those watching them were incompetent boobs who stopped the surveillance 24 hours before the bombs were loaded onto the planes.

2) The courts did not convict Ripudaman Singh Malik and Ajaib Singh Bagri for a number of reasons. Some involved a combination of structural and incidental bungling by the principal policing agencies. In 1985, for instance, CSIS erased surveillance tapes shortly after they had been logged, and did so in this instance, thus depriving the RCMP and the prosecutors of crucial evidence. More generally, there was a serious lack of coordination and trust between the RCMP and CSIS, and between other involved agencies, including the Vancouver police and several security and diplomatic agencies of the Indian government.

Beyond that, the prosecutors either argued their case badly, or misunderstood the presiding judge, or were simply faced with poor or badly decayed evidence. (Bolan soft-pedals in this area, likely out of a reluctance to impugn colleagues and sources). Finally, the judge, Ian Bruce Josephson, made some restrictive judgements concerning admissible evidence that deprived him of context. The most serious was ignoring the clearly connected murder in 1998 of Vancouver Sikh journalist Tara Singh Hayer, who would likely have served as the prosecution’s most effective witness, had he survived to testify. Josephson also seemed to have a limited knowledge of Sikh culture in general, and dangerously little understanding of the structure and behaviors within BC’s large Sikh community. This likely caused him to devalue the prosecution’s key remaining witness against Malik, a non-practicing Sikh woman named “Rani Kumar.” This name is a pseudonym to protect her identity. She was, and likely remains, under the Witness Protection Program, a fact that Josephson, somewhat incomprehensibly, seems to have ignored in his deliberations.

Ironically, Bolan herself may have played a minor part in the failure to convict. She could be accused of being overly concerned with preserving her identity. She was obsessed with not testifying, although it is clear that she could have helped the prosecution, particularly in validating the crucial testimony of “Rani,” with whom, by her telling, she was on more intimate terms than virtually anyone connected with case.

3) Preventing this from happening again is where Bolan is largely inarticulate, if not quite silent. In a sense, the subject is not within the natural scope of her interests and abilities. Like most news reporters, she appears to believe that an outraged public demanding an inquiry will suffice, although I suspect that if confronted about it, she’d have quite a lot more to say on the subject. The fact is that post-9/11 security improvements within our air transportation security systems would make a conspiracy as ad hoc as the Air India bombing highly unlikely to succeed. Moreover, Sikh separatist energies appear to have waned considerably since the 1980s—in no small measure because the Indian government, facing much more profound threats along its border with Pakistan, has ameliorated its policies towards the Sikhs. The only ones talking about an independent Sikh state in the Punjab these days appear to be a few radical splinter groups in the diaspora.

It’s not far off to suggest that the Sikh religion is simply returning to its deeply civilized roots. Sikhism created itself in the 16th century as a rejection of the Hindu caste system, seeking to combine the inherent compassion at the root of Hinduism with Islam’s concept of equality in the sight of God. At its best, Sikhism tries to claim temporal accuracy (doing what’s best in the moment) and the individual dignity that comes from its practice, the need for social and political justice, and the wish to live without fear and without rancour as the basis for civil harmony. The Sikhs have always been among the sanest minorities on the subcontinent, and that sanity, to some extent, seems to have reasserted itself in recent years, both in India and abroad.

All this leaves just one outstanding issue—that of the possible culpability of Canada’s multicultural system in the Air India bombing. Canadians need to conduct a political examination of whether it fertilized and even encouraged the peculiar set of inhumane lunacies that ended with that 747 exploding in the middle of the air, and whether, with the now-Byzantine array of ethnic and cultural sanctities and encouragements built into its structure, it is rendering Canada unable to understand its own component minorities, let alone integrate them into a democratic and peaceful mosaic.

It’s a little too easy to write off the Air India conspirators as cultural psychotics we can do nothing about, to feel indignant and outraged at the pointless deaths of the 329 victims of the Air India bombing, or to feel appalled and angry that the culprits got away with it. Malik and Bagri were part of a beyond-the-law political sub-theocracy within BC society, one that misused government funding and at times embezzled it in plain sight of both politicians and their regulatory personnel. The one person who blew the whistle, the courageous Sikh-Canadian journalist Tara Singh Hayer, was shot and crippled in 1989 and, six years later, murdered. There has been no serious attempt to find out who did it or why. It was treated almost as a community matter—i.e. don’t ask.Nor is the Air India bombing an isolated instance. During the summer of 2005, Toronto experienced an onslaught of gang-related killings, nearly all of which involved members of the black community. Virtually everyone in the city knows that the violence is coming primarily from Jamaican gangs, but the political and journalistic discourse over the issue is truncated into ridiculous generalities (“Violence is bad, let’s hire more police officers from the visible minorities, etc.”) because admitting that the overwhelming majority of the victims and the killers are black constitutes racial profiling. Nearly 90 percent of the unsolved murders in the city over the last four years come from the city’s visible minorities, and a slightly smaller percentage of all the murders are visible minorities. It’s turning Toronto into a safe city for white people, but a singularly dangerous one for everyone else.

In an egalitarian democracy, that isn’t good enough. And neither is what happened with the Air India bombing trial. We need an inquiry that will create a social language that will enable us to begin to make things right. Kim Bolan’s thoroughly decent book, with its strengths and its flaws, should serve as one of the first documents deposited.