Air India bombers still torment their victims 30 years onJune 23 never comes easily for the families. Thirty years on, they feel the same anguish they felt after Air India Flight 182 was blown apart. What remains, too, is the sense that they have been abandoned.
Yes, they eventually got a judicial inquiry — but its recommendations now gather dust.
And 30 years after the bombing?
"Does anyone — does Canada herself — remember the faces of the murdered?" asks Shipra Rana, writing from Toronto to mark the day when she lost her sister in the bombing.
Do people realize even now, she wonders, that the 329 victims were mostly Canadian citizens? And yet, Rana writes, there are people in Canada who still openly revere the men who placed the bomb.
"Today, we see such propaganda being passed around."
Then, she resorts to all-caps to convey her feelings: "NO ONE HAS THE GUTS TO STOP THEM."
Portrait of a martyred bomber
Here's part of what she's talking about: the large poster placed outside a temple in Surrey, B.C., in honour of — yes, in honour of — Talwinder Singh Parmar.
Talwinder Parmar
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Talwinder Singh Parmar is portrayed as a martyr outside Dasmesh Darbar Temple in Surrey, B.C.
The poster is a permanent fixture on the exterior of the Dasmesh Darbar Temple. The photograph of it was taken last Friday, June 19. To passers-by, it's just another portrait of some saintly stalwart of the Sikh religion.
Actually, about the only thing the defence, the prosecution and the judge all agreed on at the Air India trial in Vancouver was that Parmar was the mastermind of the Air India bombing.
That makes him the worst mass murderer in Canadian history, by far. And he is publicly celebrated to this day as a shaheed — a martyr — by his devotees.
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