Book on Air India bombing
short-listed for literary prize

Kim Bolan has been tracking the Air India Kanishka story for 20 years

BY A CORRESPONDENT
April 22, 2006

On June 23 1985, Air India Toronto-Delhi Boeing 747 Flight No 182 'Kanishka' exploded over the Atlantic Ocean, over the Irish coast. A bomb was detonated in the cargo bay, which blew up the plane and killed 329 people on board, most of them Canadians. Now, 20 years later, a book on the Air India Kanishka bombing has been shortilisted for one of the highest literary prizes in Canada. The book details the denial of justice to the people who were killed in the biggest pre-9/11 air attack which the world had faced. The masterminds of the attack walked free in 2005, when a judge did not find enough evidence to convict them. Kim Bolan has a different viewpoint.

Kim Bolan of the Vancouver Sun was a cub reporter assigned to cover the developments in the wake of the Air India Kanishka disaster. Her enterprise and investigation over the last two decades brought her face to face with Khalistani separatists in Punjab, as well as witnesses in US, UK and Canada. Kim Bolan interviewed dozens of members from the victims' families, to recount the tale of the most horrific air attack Canada ever faced.

The Khalistan movement of the early 1980s had led to the infiltration of the Golden temple in Amritsar, which prompted India's ten prime minister to order an Army offensive on the temple to smoke out the terrorists. About 800 militants and 200 soldiers were dead at the end of the offensive, driving a deep wedge between the Sikh and Hindu communities in North India. Indira Gandhi's Sikh bodyguards shot her dead, following which anti-Sikh riots swept North India. To take revenge of the massacre of Sikhs, Babbar Khalsa's Canadian unit decided to attack and terrorize the Indian state.

The mastermind of the Air India Kanishka bombing was arrested in 1991 in Bombay, where he was - so says the police - killed in a police encounter. Babbar Khalsa chief Talwinder Singh Parmar, who had by then started his own terrorist outfit, was gunned down. But his assistants in Canada roamed free.

The Air India bombing etched a scar in the minds of the Canadian populace. The trail which dragged on for ages, finally ended in a 10-year sentence for the bomb-maker (who pleaded guilty), but the conspirators walked free. Now, Kim Bolan's book details the story of the Air India Kanishka bombing, its trial and how the suspects escaped.

Throughout the Kanishka trial, the people who dared to speak up as witnesses and journalists were threatened with death. Some of them paid with their life. Kim Bolan herself had to go through threats to herself and her family during the time she worked in the book.

Along with four other finalists, now Bolan's account of the Kanishka tragedy and its aftermath vies for the Writers' Trust of Canada's Shaughnessy Cohen prize for political writing. TalkingTarmac toasts the journalist's courage to withstand threats to life to bring out a superb book.