By Gurmukh Singh, IANS
Toronto : Fireworks were witnessed at the reopened Air India blast public inquiry here Thursday as sharp exchanges took place between a government lawyer and a Toronto University professor over the alleged racial bias in the Canadian response to the Air India case.
At issue Thursday was a study, prepared by the professor at the behest of the families of the victims and released last December.
In it, Sherene Razack has concluded that systemic racial bias affected Canadian response – from the plot threat to the criminal investigations – to the bombing which killed 329 people on board Kanishka on June 23, 1985.
Blasting the report, government lawyer Barney Brucker said Razack drew “unsubstantiated” conclusions from “selective documents” given by the families of the victims.
“You really don’t know what happened in this case, professor, other than what’s been fed to you in these documents,” he said during her cross-examination.
Hitting back, Razack said: “That is a particularly contemptuous way of putting it, but my knowledge is based on the reports that I read.”
Defending her report, she said systemic racism and stereotyping indeed guided Canadian response to the plot and investigations, leading to acquittal of suspects. When there was such a high threat, she said, more attention should have been paid to bomb-carrying unaccompanied suitcases loaded in Vancouver and transferred at Toronto airport.
“There would have been increased vigilance in Toronto if people had felt the threats to Air India were real,” Razack said.
Despite the Sikh extremism before the bombing, she said: “You find a kind of disregard for this that arises out of people being locked in their own world and without a chance to challenge their homogeneity. Air India in these instances is not really seen as credible or believed.”
When the tragedy happened, she said, Canadian authorities were slow to grasp its magnitude and took two long decades to order a public inquiry.
Obliquely hinting at then prime minister Brian Mulroney’s condolence message to Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi even when most victims were Canadian citizens, Razack said: “There was no powerful symbolic gesture that would indicate to Canadians that this is a Canadian tragedy.”
When the government lawyer referred to various testimonies lauding officials for their response, she said she didn’t blame individuals.
“There is evidence that some Canadian officials acted heroically” and her report lauded those “worked very hard” and “felt very strongly that they had not discriminated”, she said.
Friday is the last day for the public inquiry when lawyers from the families of the victims make their submissions.
After that, John Major will start work on preparing the final report, which will be presented in the spring.
The Air India bombing was blamed on Sikh extremists who wanted to avenge the Indian Army action at the Golden Temple in Amritsar.
While plot mastermind Talwinder Singh Parmar was killed in India, suspects – Ripudaman Singh Malik and Ajaib Singh Bagri – were acquitted. Only Inderjit Singh Reyat, who helped make the bombs, has been jailed.