Forgotten Disaster

Few Canadians commemorate the 1985 Air India bombing, the biggest terror attack in the country’s history

- JORDAN MICHAEL SMITH

LAST JUNE 23, Chandrima Chakraborty was on Toronto’s waterfront, visiting the city’s small memorial to Air India Flight 182. On that date in 1985, a bomb, hidden in a checked suitcase, detonated on the Toronto– Montreal–London–Delhi flight, killing all 329 people on-board — the vast majority of them Canadians.

Chakraborty makes a habit of visiting the monuments to the attack that are scattered throughout the country, in Ottawa, Vancouver, and Montreal. On each anniversary, she often runs into a few others, invariably family members of the dead. Chakraborty is always asked the same question: Which of her relatives was killed? When she gives her answer — none — the mourners seem taken aback: they never imagined that someone unconnected to the event would care enough to visit. Thirty-five years on, few Canadians seem to remember the largest terrorist attack in their country’s history at all.

The public apathy around Air India began immediately. In the days following the bombing, then prime minister Brian Mulroney phoned his Indian counterpart to express condolences — odd, considering 280 Canadian citizens had been murdered. Demonstrations of grief or solidarity in the country were scarce at the time — later, a 2007 Angus Reid poll found that less than half of respondents considered the attacks a Canadian event. The bombing was followed by a botched police investigation and failed criminal trials. It appears that, for those left behind, there has been no justice, not even the catharsis that can come from a nation mourning in solidarity — as was the case this January, when a Ukraine International Airlines jet was shot down by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, killing 176 people, including eighty-five Canadian citizens and residents.