Bill Sundhu (Image Credit: CFJC Today)

By Michael Reeve

AIR INDIA FLIGHT 182

‘Recognize this as a Canadian tragedy’: Sundhu remembers the 1985 Air India bombing

Jun 23, 2023 | 4:13 PM

KAMLOOPS — On this day 38 years ago, Canada suffered the deadliest terrorist attack in our nation’s history.

“In this case, there was a failure to protect the innocent, failure to convict the guilty and a failure to really get at the truth,” said Kamloops lawyer Bill Sundhu.

When terrorists detonated a bomb aboard Air India flight 182 in June of 1985, all 329 souls on board were killed. Two-hundred-eighty of them on the flight out of Montreal were Canadian citizens of Indian origin. Because of that attack, June 23 is recognized as National Day of Remembrance for Victims of Terrorism. However, a new report from the Angus Reid Institute shows that 9 out of 10 Canadians admitted they have little-to-no knowledge of the attack.

Sundhu, a member of the Sikh community, said after the attack the nation did not properly respond.

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“At the time, our prime minister (Brian) Mulroney telephoned the Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, to express his sympathy, and the reply to him from the Indian prime minister was, ‘Sir, most of the people on the flight are your people — Canadians.’ Canadians and the media, politicians, seemed to treat it as a foreign tragedy,” said Sundhu.

Sundhu, who was a sitting judge at the time of the trial in the early 2000s, noted a litany of failures in the trial, which ended in the acquittal of the defendants, including one who called Kamloops home.

“I really felt that it was a system failure from our intelligence agencies, to the police and our justice system. A great many Canadians felt that even the outcome of the trial was a travesty of justice. Now that’s how our system works — we have protections for accused persons. But I believe at the time there was a poll that 70 per cent of Canadians had lost faith in the judicial system,” recalled Sundhu.

In the recent poll from Angus Reid, only one out of five Canadians surveyed said they were aware the incident was the worst act of terrorism in the country’s history, and more than half of those under age 35 said they had never even heard of the bombing at all.

“These kinds of things need to be in our education curriculums just as we honour our war dead who fought in the great wars, Korean war, Afghanistan and so forth, our peace-keeping history. We need to recognize that this, the Komagata Maru, the Air India bombing, they are part of our history. The struggles, the losses, and also the victories we have in this country. It’s about being truthful,” said Sundhu.

The message that Sundhu hopes Canadians will take with them on today’s sombre anniversary is one of compassion and understanding that the country needs to learns from it’s past.

“My concern would be, have we really learned the lessons? Because no country is immune to the potentiality of serious mass crime and acts of terrorism. We live in a global world, we live in a multicultural society and so the lesson that we ought to have learned, I think we need to take them seriously,” said Sundhu. “But most importantly is commemorate and recognize this as a Canadian tragedy.”