A Montreal memorial for the victims of Air India Flight 182, in Lachine, Que., on June 23, 2022.Christinne Muschi/The Globe and Mail
Nisha Thampi is an Ottawa-based physician. Her mother, Vijaya, was murdered in the bombing of Air India Flight 182.
Today is the National Day of Remembrance for Victims of Terrorism, which has been recognized since 2005 as a day to “remember and honour every Canadian whose life was cut short or forever changed by a terrorist attack.” What Canadians might not realize is that we commemorate this on June 23 for a reason. On that day, in 1985, Air India Flight 182 - flying from Montreal to London on its way to Delhi and Mumbai – exploded over the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Ireland, killing all 329 people aboard, including 268 Canadians. It remains the deadliest terror attack in Canadian history.
Forty years later, we mark this grim anniversary at a time of geopolitical tensions and in the aftermath of another horrific Air India crash two weeks ago, in Ahmedabad, India. The bombing of Flight 182 is often presented as a distant tragedy – one that occurred over the ocean and left no survivors, at a time when there was no 24-hour news cycle or social media. The Canadian public was largely shielded from the horrors witnessed by British and Irish recovery teams.
But Flight 182 also represents the tragedy of distance: too many Canadians simply didn’t feel connected to an explosion involving a foreign airline carrying many hyphenated Canadians who did not look like them. The Canadian government perpetuated this: For years afterward, Ottawa declined to confirm that the flight was bombed at all, thus abdicating the responsibility to pursue justice for the 268 Canadian citizens and 61 foreign nationals who perished on the flight, and denying support to families and broader communities whose civil litigation in pursuit of healing needed to prove that the plane was brought down by a bomb.
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It took 15 years for charges to be laid in relation to the bombing, another five years for a trial to end with stunningly light consequences, and another five for an official apology by then-prime minister Stephen Harper. A federal inquiry’s report spoke of a “cascading series of errors,” yet it still excluded expert testimony that alluded to the racist structures that perpetuated harm against victims’ families.
But this was an act of homegrown terror – a plot that authorities now blame on a group of Khalistani militants living in Canada. Yet 40 years on, the tragedy remains largely forgotten in the public memory.
I do not have the luxury of forgetting. My mother was on the flight. My father went on to remarry a woman who had lost her husband, K. Lakshmanan, and daughter, Preethi, in the same bombing. I grew up in a community shattered by this sudden loss and marginalized by the institutional indifference that followed.
Yet, despite these intersections, it took me a long time to engage more fully with this history. As I experienced milestones as a daughter, sister, wife, mother and physician, it became clear that Flight 182 is refracted in my life, my work and my family.
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A view of a section of Air India Flight 182 is shown in this handout photo released on April 27, 2004.
The history of the Air India bombing is difficult to teach and learn. There is the inherent violence, the sheer scale of which is hard to comprehend; less than 5 per cent of the wreckage was recovered but is not accessible to the general public. As journalist Kim Bolan wrote: “I wish that all Canadians could have seen the absolute devastation... to have understood the magnitude of the calamity.” How can we comprehend a tragedy we cannot see? If we cannot understand its magnitude, how can we ever hope to prevent its recurrence?
There is also the disturbing timeline of events indicating that the bombing was preventable – that Canadian authorities failed to adequately respond to warnings about the planned attack. These revelations should challenge Canadians’ sense of identity – and force us to reflect on what it really means to belong here.
It doesn’t help, either, that the framing of the tragedy has strategically shifted over the years. It’s gone from a foreign event to a costly trial to a post-9/11 talking point, always suiting the dominant narrative and offloading the burden of remembrance onto victims’ families.
It is no surprise, then, that a 2023 poll by the Angus Reid Institute found that nine out of 10 Canadians had little to no knowledge of what it called “the worst single instance of the mass killing of their fellow citizens”. Sixty per cent of Canadians aged 18-to-34 had never even heard of this event. As younger Canadians grow more removed from the bombing, there is a real risk that it will fade entirely from our collective memory.
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The story of Flight 182 represents a stark warning against sacrificing human rights and justice for political expediency. This dark chapter should be discussed in Canadian schools, museums and other public spaces to foster the discourse that leads to institutional introspection and accountability, and placed in the context of other difficult histories that have shaped our country. By confronting the bombing and the structures that contributed to the harms afterward, we can better address the historical injustices that live on in the present. We cannot prevent future acts of terrorism if we don’t learn from past ones.
Forty years after Flight 182, Canada now has a choice: Will we finally learn from our history, or are we destined to repeat it?