How the country ignored a terrorist mass murder: Canada Did What? podcast
Where can you slaughter hundreds of people and get away with it? Only in Canada, where authorities bungled the chance to stop an obvious plot to bomb Air India Flight 182 and then failed to bring a single one of the brazen terrorists to justice. It was the most preventable horror in our history, and we seem eager to forget it ever happened — even as more violence brews from the extremists behind the worst Canadian terrorist attack ever.
This is episode 2 of season 2 of Canada Did What?! For previous episodes and seasons please subscribe below.
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Canada Did What? Season 2, Episode 3 unedited transcript
Host, Tristin Hopper: It’s June 4, 1984 in a remote area outside Duncan, British Columbia, a town about an hour’s north of the provincial capital of Victoria.
Suddenly, there’s a very loud explosion. A bomb has just gone off — seemingly in the middle of nowhere.
But a few people are there In fact, five people are known to have heard the explosion that day. The three men who set it off, and two agents for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service — basically our equivalent of the FBI.
The CSIS agents were there because they were surveilling a terror suspect, Talwinder Singh Parmar. He was one of the three men who detonated the bomb.
Parmar had immigrated to Canada in 1970, and he wasn’t particularly shy about his love of terrorism.
The CSIS agents had followed Parmar from his home in Metro Vancouver. They’d seen him board the ferry to Nanaimo, and meet up with a man named Inderjit Singh Reyat
The investigators witnessing that explosion should be the end point of the story, right? You’ve got two Government of Canada counter-terrorism agents who witness some guys walk into a remote area and set off a bomb.
When you’re doing proper counter-terrorism you don’t even want to get this far. You want to catch a perpetrator way back when they’re still devising their terror plot. Or at the very least, when they start trying to acquire bomb-making materials.
You definitely do not wait until they already have the knowledge and wherewithal to produce functional explosives. And are actually doing tests where they blow stuff up.
This is where I should mention that law enforcement had already suspected that a significant bomb plot was taking shape in Canada. They knew there was probably a terrorist attack being planned by a militant group of Sikhs.
Months before, informants had told both the RCMP and the Vancouver Police that B.C.-based extremists like Parmar were intending to build a bomb in order to smuggle it into the cargo hold of an airliner. The extremists were supporters of a Sikh separatist movement, that hated the government in India.
But the story doesn’t end here in woods outside Duncan. Here’s what actually happened. The two CSIS agents disagreed on what they’d heard. One of them thought it was an explosive, but the other thought that it might have just been a gun shot; a lot of people go hunting around Duncan, B.C.
The two agents went into the woods to see if they could find a shell casing. They look around for less than a minute, find nothing, and leave.
So CSIS did nothing.
And that was a terrible, terrible mistake.
Three weeks later, a bomb very much like the one that exploded that day outside Duncan, B.C., blew up in the cargo hold of Air India Flight 182 from Toronto to Mumbai, with scheduled stops along the way in Montreal, London England and Delhi.
The Indians had named the plane the Emperor Kanishka. It was a Boeing 747, the largest passenger airliner in the world at the time. By the time it got over the coast of Ireland, almost all of its seats were filled. That’s where it exploded and fell into the Atlantic Ocean
There were no survivors.
It was — and still is — the worst terror attack in Canadian history.
By June 4, the day of that loud exploding sound in Duncan, B.C., three weeks earlier, it’s a good guess that most of the 307 passengers aboard Air India Flight 182 had already finalized their travel plans. All the while, unbeknownst to them, Canada-based terrorists were testing the bomb that would take their lives.
So, what about the guys who set off that bomb outside Duncan, B.C.? CSIS knew their names; that’s why they were following them. So, obviously they were quickly arrested, convicted and they’re now spending the rest of their lives in the Canadian equivalent of a supermax prison somewhere — right?
Nope. Nobody was ever held responsible for the Air India Bombing. Nobody.
On the contrary — even today you will find instances right here in Canada of Sikh extremists celebrating the Air India terrorists as heroes.
This is the story of one of the darkest and most ignominious moments in Canadian history. This whole thing is awful. And above all, it was preventable. Extremely preventable. Probably one of the most preventable tragedies of the 20th century. Every single step of this story is someone screwing up, some obvious warning being overlooked, some tragedy-preventing action going undone.
The Air India terror attack illustrates the absolute worst this country has to offer in almost every way. And it led to hundreds of innocent people – including 82 children – being murdered in one of the most horrific ways possible.
I’m Tristin Hopper and this is Canada Did What?! And today, we’re going to cover what is almost certainly the biggest institutional failure in Canadian history. A failure that casts shame on institutions including the RCMP, CSIS, the government itself.
And it’s a failure that, I’m very sorry to say, we have not atoned for at all. Most Canadians don’t even know it ever happened. This is the story of how virtually an entire country can just indifferently watch an act of mass murder unfold, and then pretend it never happened.
There is no good way to die in a plane crash, but the least terrible way is for it to happen instantly. Controlled flight into terrain. If you have to be in a fatal plane crash, that’s how you want to go. One moment everything’s fine, then you’re slamming into a mountain at 900 kilometres per hour and you’re dead before you even know anything’s wrong.
Air India Flight 182 was not that. The aircraft experienced what is called explosive decompression. Basically, the bomb caused the plane to fragment into million of pieces in a split second. All air traffic controllers heard was a gust of wind from one of the Emperor Kanishka’s cockpit microphones and then nothing.
The explosion itself killed some passengers, but it didn’t kill everyone.
One second they had been sitting next to family on their approach to London, England. The next, they were burned and had broken limbs. But they were alive, they were conscious and they were tumbling uncontrollably through freezing high-altitude air, the force of the wind tearing their clothes from their bodies as they fell.
The explosion happened about 10 kilometres in the sky. At that height, the air temperature is about minus 40. And it’s about a three-minute freefall to the ground; some passengers were likely aware of what was happened to them right until they hit the surface of the ocean at terminal velocity.
The final death toll, with passengers and crew, was 329 people.
For context, in the whole of 1985, 667 people were murdered in Canada, not including those killed in the bombing. So this one attack was equal to six months of homicides in the whole country.
It’s the worst act of mass murder in our history, and the other contenders aren’t even close. In fact, if you tally up every single gun and knife massacre of the last 50 years – the 1989 Ecole Polytechnique massacre, the 2020 Nova Scotia mass shootings, a terrorist bombing of Yellowknife’s Giant mine in 1992 – you’re looking at fewer than 100 victims total.
The way Air India crashed also meant that its recovery was particularly horrific. There’s not a lot of gore when a plane slams into the side of a mountain. But the disintegration of Air India Flight 182 rained shattered corpses across a massive section off the Irish coast..
For hours, merchant seamen and Royal Air Force helicopter crews worked to pull as many battered and oil-slicked bodies from the ocean as they could. They recovered 131 victims; almost all women and children. Just 13 male bodies were ever found.
A Royal Air Force diver, Mark Tait, would later describe repeatedly jumping into seawater where the surface with littered with chunks of flesh and body parts. At one point, he reached for the body of an older woman in a sari, only for her corpse to come apart in his hands.
A reporter went to the warehouse in Cork, Ireland, where bodies were being laid out for identification. The reporter saw one official break down and scream “that’s enough! I’ve had enough!”
The Air India bombing is often treated as an event whose connection to Canada is incidental.
Sure, it took off from Canada and was destroyed by Canada-based terrorists, but it was an Indian aircraft headed to India, destroyed by an Indian terrorist movement and it mostly had Indians aboard, right? The first Canadian news reports of the tragedy did indeed say that the victims were “mostly Indians.”
But they weren’t mostly Indians. They were Canadians. The plane was mostly Canadians: 268 of them.
Guest, Kim Bolan: We know in those early hours after the bombing that, uh, prime minister Mulroney called Rajiv Gandhi, the Indian prime minister, to offer condolences for the loss of his people, and they were our people, and even the prime minister didn’t know that at the time or seemed to know that at the time.
Tristin Hopper: The disaster left empty chairs at public schools across Ontario and Quebec. Concordia University lost two professors. Montreal’s Loyola High School lost a teacher who had been voted among the city’s best. The International Development Research Centre, a Crown corporation based in Ottawa, lost one of its board of directors.
The bombing took place in late June, just as school was letting out for the summer. So this flight, in particular, was filled with mothers taking their Canadian-born children back to the old country to meet extended relatives, maybe for the first time, to spend their summer vacation with them.
In India, airport terminals became filled with screaming and sobbing as the news was communicated to families who had planned to welcome their Canadian cousins with fruit baskets and flower garlands.
While on the Canadian side, multiple fathers who had needed to stay behind for work learned the shocking news that their entire families had just been wiped out.
Trilok Soni, of Montreal, lost his wife and three children. Toronto’s Ramesh Kapoor lost his wife and two daughters.
Let’s look at who did this. Because the reality is the perpetrators knew what they were doing. The victims of Air India weren’t collateral damage. They were the intended target. The people who did this wanted warehouses filled with bodies and they wanted airport lobbies filled with screaming and sobbing families. And that’s exactly what they got.
They’d actually wanted to take down two airliners that day. The only reason the second bombing didn’t happen is because the timing was off. A second bomb sent from Canada, and intended for Air India Flight 301 – another fully loaded 747 – instead blew up in the baggage handling area of Japan’s Narita International Airport, killing two baggage handlers. Instead of more than 300 dead, the terrorists were planning to kill more than 600 people.
And it was all to be done supposedly for the cause of an Indian separatist movement.
Bolan: When the bombings happened, I was a rookie reporter here in Vancouver. We were all called into the newsroom. We pretty well knew right away that this was likely Vender, Parmar and his group. It wasn’t like, it was a big mystery to us because the warning signs had been there.
Canada’s worst-ever mass murder was committed by people who want to take much of what is currently the Indian state of Punjab and turn it into an independent country known as Khalistan, Land of the Pure.
But Khalistanis are pushing for a country that is very different than the kind of sovereignty being sought by your average Quebec separatist or Scottish nationalist.
Khalistan, by most definitions, would be an ethnically cleansed Sikh theocracy; maybe there would be a few Hindus and Muslims in Khalistan, but they do what they’re told. And right from the beginning, the whole Khalistani movement was deeply inflected with violence.
Just look at the symbology. The spiritual head of the Khalistani movement is a guy named Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale.
In the 1980s Bhindranwale led an armed occupation of the Golden Temple complex in Amritsar – that’s like The Vatican for Sikhism – and used it as a base to stage shootings and terrorist attacks throughout Punjab. Hundreds of people were murdered: Hindus, moderate Sikhs, and, particularly, peace activists calling for Hindu-Sikh brotherhood.
Guest, Ujjal Dosanjh: there was no question that there was terrorism and extremism, violence happening from within the temple that was affecting the life of Punjab. I was there in December ’83, January ’84.
So I’m just doing a picture for you. And I go there and my sons wanted to, you we went to the temple just to show my kids the temple. And we’re walking out of there and after having the communal food, langar, and there are two or three young men carrying two rifles, one on each shoulder and one in their hands. between the three of them, about nine rifles hanging around them. And my middle son says to me, dad, why are they carrying guns in the temple? So he doesn’t speak any Punjabi, at least didn’t at that time. So I said, why don’t you go ask him? So he went and asked them. And of course they didn’t speak English. And that’s how I got talking to them. And they then insisted that I go see Sant Longa, the Pindramala.
And I said, well, I really had no intention of seeing him. I’m actually looking for Longoal, who is in this next building that I’m going to. And they said, no, no, you must see this one. This is the real saint. Anyway, they insisted. And I thought, well, why not? You so we went and we argued for about an hour back and forth and.
He used to insist that you should grow your hair and if you if you don’t grow your hair, you’re a bastard Sikh. You’re not a real Sikh that he used to use that term. So we had we had to go at each other for about an hour and then I left.
People were so afraid even the police wouldn’t touch the bodies. They had their own senior police officer killed in the temple complex, his body was thrown at the gate, out at the gate, and the police wouldn’t touch the body for at least six to eight hours until he actually permitted them to come and pick up the body. That’s how much fear there was. And I’m talking about 83. That had happened before I got there. So, you know, this stuff was happening long before.
Hopper: When Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ordered a military assault on the Golden Temple to clear out Bhindranwale’s men, the violence descended into a full-blown insurgency. It culminated a few months later with Indira Gandhi murdered at the hands of her Sikh bodyguards, in an apparent retribution for the raid.
In the wake of any major national tragedy, it’s natural to start questioning how it could have been foreseen and prevented. But with the Air India bombing, it’s the reverse: It’s still hard to parse through the details of the plot and know that it wasn’t prevented.
I mentioned earlier that intelligence officials knew well ahead of time that Sikh extremists were trying to blow up an airplane. Well, what if I told you that it was even more specific than that. Air India believed they were the intended target, and had even requested extra security for the specific aircraft that ended up blowing apart off the coast of Ireland.
Rescuers were still pulling bodies out of the ocean when Canada’s then transport minister, Don Mazankowski, had to admit that Air India Flight 182 had taken off from an airport that had extra police on hand for the explicit purpose of stopping any Air India planes from blowing up.
Incredibly, luggage had actually been pulled off Air India Flight 182 due to fears it was a security risk. At virtually the exact moment that law enforcement was opening the bags under secure conditions only to find they had saved the plane from harmless electronics like clothes irons and radios, the Emperor Kanishka was being blown up by the suitcase bomb they had missed.
Bolan: They weren’t supposed to check your bags in, uh, for a flight that you didn’t have a confirmed reservation on. Right. And that’s what happened with two bags, uh, on. Ju, uh, June 22nd, 1985 at Vancouver Airport. Uh, so these guys who were checking them in were very persistent and, um, you know, they got them through, right.
Uh, they kind of hassled the agent right at the counter. Um, now the other big thing was in both cases, the passenger who was listed on the manifest for the connecting flight, which were then Canadian Air, you know. Canadian Pacific Airlines, which people don’t even know what it is anymore ’cause it no longer exists.
But the both of the bags were checked into CP air flights that were destined to land and connect with Air India flights. So it was, you know, I can imagine there were people that flew on the CP air flight from Vancouver to Tokyo and from Vancouver to Toronto, who learned afterwards they had a bomb on their plane.
Can you imagine what that would do to you?
Hopper: So we are now at several levels of institutional failure: the shrugged off explosion in the woods, the bomb plot that authorities and the airline knew about but fell short of stopping. The actual bomb getting on the airplane despite supposedly enhanced security
But wait.
It gets worse.
Canadian officials sort of knew that this was all just security theatre, and probably wasn’t going to stop the kind of bomb plot being planned. There’s been two official inquiries into the Air India disaster, and the most recent one concluded that the government knew that Air India’s baggage screening protocols were “were inadequate and were based on unreliable technology and untrained screeners.”
Bolan: The plane landed again in Montreal to pick up more passengers before it headed off over the Atlantic. Uh, there was a bomb sniffing dog at the airport that wasn’t called to duty, even though the dog was there and available. So there were so many missed opportunities to catch this before the devastating thing happened.
Hopper: The first inquiry was a bit more blunt: “almost everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong.”
But probably the most conspicuous warning, by far, more than the plot that officials knew about and more than bombs being constructed and tested in the woods of British Columbia is that Canada had allowed itself to become an absolutely writhing hotbed of Sikh extremism.
Bolan: There was a small group of militants linked to a terrorist organization called the Kelsa, which, uh, started here in Vancouver by a man named Dering Parmar, and they were plotting something more nefarious, which was revenge against what was then the government owned airline. Now these militants. It’s not like they were very cloak and dagger.
They were kind of out in the community saying what they believed. Uh, there were also a lot of people that had been threatened by them and their supporters, including Ujjal Dosanjh, who would go on to become the premier of BC and a federal cabinet minister before the air bombing. He was viciously beaten and nearly died of his injuries. And yet police locally didn’t seem to take these events seriously. They kind of treated it as like a dispute amongst a community. As opposed to criminal acts being committed upon Canadian citizens here in Vancouver, which was in fact the case.
Hopper: The architect of the Air India bombing, as established by two Government of Canada inquiries, is Talwinder Singh Parmar: He was the guy being tracked by CSIS when they heard the test explosion outside Duncan.
But he’s not some lone wolf. At the time, he was the head of Babbar Khalsa, an active Khalistani terror group in India, and he was fundraising for it and directing its operations from the safety of Canada. In 1984, people who spoke Punjabi could hear him preaching that “Indian planes will fall from the sky.”
He was actually wanted in India for murder, but the Canadian government had refused his extradition. Letting him remain at large Canada would out to be another tragic institutional fear.
He wasn’t the only one. The year before the Air India bombing, you could have seen a fellow Vancouver-based Babbar Khalsa member, Ajaib Singh Bagri, deliver a startlingly violent speech at the founding conference of the World Sikh Organization at Madison Square Garden.
“They say that Hindus are our brothers! But I give you my most solemn assurance that, until we kill 50,000 Hindus, we will not rest!” he said in Punjabi.
Dosanjh: What was happening here at that time and remember this is end of ’83 November, December of ’83, there was hate being spewed on radio stations that were running off that telephone line from Bellingham into Canada they were spewing hate against the Hindus, calling them all sorts of names and trying to divide the community that had been won. Now, most people don’t know until about the 1970s — when the first Sikh temple was built in Vancouver from 1908 to about 1970 Hindus and Sikhs prayed at the Sikh temple together and because there was never any difference between the communities. And so then you had this schism that was being perpetrated within the community here.
Hopper: And lest you think all this violent extremism was being conducted on the down low, Khalistanis in the Vancouver area were willing to attack and intimidate anyone who opposed them.
The most famous example being Ujjal Dosanjh, who would later become BC premier and federal Minister of Health. An outspoken moderate Sikh, in Feb. 1985 Dosanjh was attacked and almost killed outside his law office by a man wielding an iron bar … and Dosanjh would continue to receive violent threats in the years after the Air India bombing. The man who was charged with attacking him — but was acquitted — was later convicted of attempting to assassinate a Punjabi minister who was visiting Canada for a wedding.
Dosanjh: Air India happened in February, June ’85. I was attacked in February ’85.
And I wrote letters to the attorneys general of all the provinces and of Canada and the prime minister, essentially saying, I’m afraid that there might be more violence in the community unless you do something, unless the police and the law enforcement and the politicians take some steps to one, enforce the law more stringently to at least provide some public leadership on the issue so that the hate is condemned. Extremism is condemned. I didn’t hear from anybody other than maybe one person when I sent those letters. And it was in April I sent that letter and lo and behold in June Air India happened.
Hopper: Now you could do a whole podcast series on the utter failure of Canadian authorities to successfully prosecute the Air India bombers.
So let’s just say that the most comprehensive book on the legal aftermath, by Kim Bolan, is called: Loss of Faith, How the Air India Bombers Got Away With Murder.
Bolan: The biggest problem that the investigation had according to the RCMP, was the erasure by CSIS of recordings that it had made. Of the actual suspects talking in code the days and weeks before the bombing, and they didn’t want to turn those over to the RCMP because of this bad blood between the two agencies, and they erased all of these recordings.
What was left were just notes that people who had listened to the recordings made. So the notes were, and kind of a log, right, of the different calls and who was calling who at the time. So, I mean, that would’ve been the most compelling evidence recordings of the people plotting it. Um, and, you know, that the, the RCMP, you know, and the public inquiry later were very, very critical of that decision as probably the biggest thing.
Hopper: After the bombing, the house of the presumed mastermind, Talwinder Singh Parmar, was raided and he was questioned. But charges were dropped due to lack of evidence, with Parmar complaining to the press that he was being harassed.
Eventually, he would manage to slip out of Canada entirely and return to India. He was killed in an alleged shootout with police in 1992.
The only person ever successfully prosecuted for the crime was Inderjit Singh Reyat, the Duncan-based bombmaker. And the charge that netted him the most prison time was perjury, for refusing to name his accomplices. He’s had full parole since 2017.
There were obviously co-conspirators. But the only alleged conspirators ever brought to trial – two fellow Babbar Khalsa members – were ultimately declared not guilty due to lack of evidence.
Bolan: I sat through that trial every single day, albeit I knew a lot of the people that were testifying. I knew the risk that they were taking, and, you know, I believe them. But ultimately the judge poked all these holes without really looking at the, you know, overarching theme, which was people were risking their lives to tell the truth in a BC courtroom.
You know, why would they do that? You know that. But as we know, anyone who’s covered court knows witnesses are never perfect after such a long period of time there elapses in memory. Um, so no evidence is going to be, uh, you know, perfect. And, uh, may, they may make slight errors, but every single witness, uh, that had agreed to cooperate with the crown essentially had stories that matched up about who was behind it.
So I thought it was a compelling circumstantial case and that there should have been a conviction. Right. But, uh, the judge saw differently.
Hopper: One factor fuelling a lot of the “lack of evidence” problem was that any witness who was going to testify against them was liable to be killed. That’s what happened to Vancouver-based publisher Tara Singh Hayer, a vocal anti-extremist and a police witness in the Air India case. He was shot and paralyzed in 1988. And then shot again, fatally this time, in 1998. I should mention that Hayer – much like Air India Flight 182 itself – was under special RCMP protection at the time of his death.
Bolan: A colleague of mine, um, Tara Singha, who was both a journalist. Uh, and also someone who had agreed to cooperate with the police because he had some very incriminating information about one of the suspects. He was assassinated, right, November 18th, 1998, and him and I had shared a number of death threats in the months leading up to this, and he always told me, you know, I was much younger.
Don’t worry, you know, it’ll be fine. This means you’re doing your job because people. Are, you know, they’re feeling the heat essentially. Right. Um, you know, so that was just another turning point for me where I thought, wow, you know, someone has lost their life for trying to tell the truth about this case.
And ultimately when it came to the trial, Tara’s evidence was excluded. You know, ’cause they had recordings of him, uh, because the judge deemed it was too prejudicial to the defendants. Given the way he died. So now Tara’s case has become another heir India in that, you know, it’s the only assassination of a journalist.
Dosanjh: Whereas before June of ’84, there was hatred and extremism being preached, violence being preached in the papers, on the radio, but it wasn’t being practised.
After June of ’84, you saw people began to assault people who didn’t agree with them. They began to throw newspapers out of the shops, newspapers that didn’t agree with them. And they began to assault writers.
They began to threaten journalists who would have an opposing view or report something that they didn’t like. And they would threaten to kill them or kidnap their children. That began to happen after June of 84. And some people were beaten up. mean, have a Punjabi writer who is no more with us. He wrote a piece about Pandhra Wale.
He was beaten up in broad daylight in downtown Vancouver. And then, you know, there was a friend of mine who was also man. Rampuri was the writer. Yeah. And then Darshan Gill, who used to run a newspaper, which was sort of peaceful, nonviolent, more secular approach. His home was firebombed.
And of course, they came and assaulted me because I was probably the at that time, the sort of most prominent voice opposing them. I mean, had some standing. I was a lawyer. I was an activist. had run twice for the NDP. So I kind of had some credentials as a public bit of a public figure. And so they would threaten me and write nasty hateful stuff.
Hopper: So to review, we became a safe haven for a violent extremist movement, ignored that they were promising to commit wholesale slaughter … and then failed so hard on basic law enforcement that we not only failed to stop an easily preventable terrorist attack, but we couldn’t even hold anyone to account for the worst act of mass-murder in our history. It was a catastrophic failure of multiple Canadian institutions that led to hundreds of deaths of innocent people and disgraced our country.
Bolan: Without a doubt, it did not need to happen. We know that it’s been well documented, again, by Justice Major and his, uh, recommendations in the public inquiry. And many things have changed and improved in terms of, you know, airline systems and, uh, you know, how flights are booked and, you know, now there wouldn’t be a suitcase getting on a plane without a passenger.
So there are, there have been lots of improvements, but some of his recommendations have. Kind of collected dust over the years too. Uh, that was, uh, what some of the lawyers who were involved in the public inquiry told me recently. Uh, so, you know, we learn, but we also continue to ignore because, you know, it’s just human nature and it’s Canadian nature I think as well.
You know, if something’s not in front of you front and center at that moment, it’s easy to ignore.
Hopper: So was Canada at least shamed into changing its ways after all this?
Uh, no. We learned nothing. Like … at all.
For one thing, we sort of forgot that this ever happened at all.
Let’s compare the Air India bombings to other major acts of terrorism.
The September 11th attacks in the United States. 2011’s Oslo and Utoya attacks in Norway. The 7/7 bombings in London in 2005. People still remember where they were when they happened, and the tragedies became a hinge point in how the countries viewed themselves.
That … didn’t happen in Canada after Air India.
Just look at how the Government of Canada marks the anniversary of the tragedy. Is it called Air India Tragedy day? Never Again Day? Nope. Every June 23 we mark National Day for Remembrance of Victims of Acts of Terrorism. A generic observation of anyone, anywhere who might have been killed by terrorism of some kind.
In 2023, a poll by the Angus Reid Institute asked Canadians if they knew something – anything – about the Air India bombing.
Of the Canadians younger than 34 years old, 61 per cent said they’d “never heard of this until now” when asked what the words “Air India bombing” meant to them.
And Canada still has a massive problem with Khalistani extremism, with the Canada of 2025 looking an awful lot like the Canada of 1985.
Dosanjh: It’s much worse. It’s much worse. Before 1984, the imagery wasn’t as violent. The words may have been hateful, more hateful than violent. But since June 84, the imagery has become much more violent, the rhetoric has become much more violent and extremist. And it had died down as I said, except you now had the uptick during Mr. Trudeau’s time.
You don’t hear from any other temple in the province, right? You only hear it from Surrey because in Surrey they beat the moderates to pulp and the moderate simply physically, the moderate simply left because the police wouldn’t, know, police can’t go into the temple 24-7 and stand guard over people’s safety. So people essentially left. And you have elements that control certain temples.
Hopper: If you live around Vancouver or the Greater Toronto Area, it’s not hard to find Khalistani flags, Khalistani billboards or Khalistani demonstrations … often openly glorifying violence.
Sikh temples in Surrey were holding memorials to Talwinder Singh Parmar only a decade after the Air India bombing. His portrait hangs inside several Sikh temples, And in 2015 one Gurdwar in Surrey, B.C., commissioned a huge triumphalist portrait of Parmar.
Vaisakhi is a Punjabi harvest festival that falls around mid-April. And Vaisakhi celebrations around Metro Vancouver have been notorious for featuring parade floats, banners and even entire pavilions celebrating Khalistani acts of terror.
In the Surrey Vaisakhi parade, in particular, it became routine for the event to feature banners and floats commemorating the terror mastermind Talwinder Singh Parmar as a martyr.
And not only has the Canadian government kept ignoring violent Khalistani extremism as a threat, but political leaders routinely indulge and even celebrate them. With the most charitable explanation being that they don’t even know that they’re doing it.
Dosanjh: Our politicians have basically said, these brown guys with beards and non-beards, they can go fight each other, kill each other, who cares? I mean, I’m not saying they’re saying it openly, but that must be the thinking. Otherwise, why wouldn’t politicians stand up and say, you know what? This is not the kind of Canada we want.
Like, I don’t want that kind of Canada. I came to Canada in 1968. It was different kind of Canada. I mean, yes, there were, you know, problems, but I think we have more problems today than we had then.
Hopper: In 2023, it became a national scandal when Sikh nationalist Hardeep Singh Nijjar was murdered in a hit job outside a Surrey Sikh temple – an event that Canada swiftly blamed on agents acting for India. But here’s some background on Nijjar. He was a wanted terrorist in India due to his alleged association with the Khalistan Tiger Force. And at the time of his murder, he was subject to an active Interpol warrant.
How was he in Canada? He came here in 1997 on a false passport — and was granted citizenship 10 years later.
Anyway, it really puts things into perspective that the Canadian House of Commons held a moment of silence for Nijjar on the first anniversary of his murder.
Clip of Speaker of the House Greg Fergus: Following discussions among representatives of all parties in the House, I understand there is an agreement to observe a moment of silence in memory of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, assassinated in Surrey, British Columbia, one year ago today.
Hopper: Hey, what about the Sikh temple where Nijjar was shot? How did they mark his death?
They have a giant billboard putting his portrait next to that of the Air India bomber Talwinder Singh Parmar, and declaring them both martyrs.
The billboard also explicitly called for the assassination of Indian government officials on Canadian soil. It read “assassination wanted,” and then listed the names and portraits of diplomats based at both India’s embassy and its Vancouver consulate.
And a moment of silence for Hardeep Nijjar is far from the only time Khalistani extremism has pervaded the top echelons of Canadian federal politics.
Remember in 2018, when then Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made an absolutely disastrous trip to India? The event has been remembered mostly for Trudeau’s embarrassingly elaborate costumes: He kept showing up to events where his Indian hosts were all in black suits, but he was clad in gold-embroidered frock coats like an Indian Prince Charming on his wedding day.
But Indian officials took a much darker view of the visit. They’d been hoping it could be an opportunity to discuss all the unchecked Khalistani extremism in Canada. And instead, you get a prime minister showing up dressed like a variety show presenter and dancing the bhangra.
Indian suspicions were not helped when the Canadian delegation brought along a literal convicted terrorist to one of their events.
Among the attendees at a gala in Mumbai was Jaspar Singh Atwal. In 1986, the year after the Air India bombing, Atwal had been in on that plot I mentioned that attempted to assassinate an Indian cabinet minister visiting Canada for a wedding.
Dosanjh: Trudeau gave so much oxygen to them, he didn’t understand the community. so you then suddenly, they were the face of the Indo-Canadian community. Not just the Sikh community. I think Trudeau and his people simply ignored the rest of the entire community except the Khalistanis. Khalistanis became the Indo-Canadian community for him.
You made things worse because you brought in several hundred thousand people a year into the country. And at our mission in Delhi, we didn’t have the capacity to screen a million people a year coming into the country from India. So you have now allowed unscreened visitors, students, immigrants into the country and you have extortions. Right?
It’s just a litany of woes and errors that Mr. Trudeau made and we’re paying for it.
Hopper: And if you really want a sense of how much the Khalistani issue has penetrated Canadian politics, consider tthat the former leader of the federal NDP was an Air India truther — like a 9/11 truther he refused to believe the official story that it was Parmar and his militant Punjabi separatist co-conspirators.
When Singh first entered onto the national scene as leader of the NDP, he said in a CBC interview that we don’t know who the real perpetrator of the Air India bombing even is.
Clip of Jagmeet Singh: “I don’t know who’s responsible but I think we need to find out who’s responsible.”
Hopper: As an Ontario politician, Singh had been denied entry into India in 2013 because of his alleged sympathies for the Khalistani cause. The year prior, Singh had publicly called on Canada to pressure India into commuting the death sentence of Balwant Singh Rajoana, a Khalistani terrorist who had helped organized the assassination of the chief minister of Punjab in 1995. Basically the equivalent of murdering a sitting provincial premier.
This story isn’t just about the failure of Canada to stop an avoidable terrorist attack. It’s about the abject failure of Canadian institutions even today to confront the lethal situation that led to that bombing.
In just the last few years, the visible extremism coming from Canadian Khalistanis is reaching unnerving levels as bad as the time of the bombing. In 2023, a pro-Khalistani parade in Brampton, Ont. featured a float depicting the 1984 murder of Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi.
A giant blood-covered effigy of Gandhi was depicted with her arms up as two men in camo fatigues pointed guns at her. “Revenge,” read a sign.
We’ve even started getting groups of flag-waving Khalistanis just openly attacking Hindu temples. It became international news in November, 2024 when a routine Indian consular event at Hindu Sabha Mandir temple in Brampton, Ont. attracted a group of men group bearing Khalistani flags.
As you can hear in this video, they forced their way through the gates and began attacking worshippers with flagpoles.
Dosanjh: I’m afraid that we have been doing immigration wrong. That’s why you have these movements. You have these movements in other communities as well. They survive because we are doing immigration wrong. We are…
We are not asking immigrants to make a commitment to this country, commitment to the languages of this country, commitment to the values, democratic values, the values of secularism, separation between church and state. Many of these guys, if you go talk to them, they wouldn’t even know what I’m talking about. Right? And that’s why you have these ghettos where those kinds of mindsets perpetuate themselves. And in fact, they’re turning their next generation into fanatics based on their perception of the world. They don’t relate to this world as you and I might be able to. They can’t relate to this world. Sometimes they don’t want to relate to this world. They want to live the way they lived in a village in 16th century.
Whose fault is that? It is the fault of our politicians who don’t say to immigrants when they come, please integrate. Now integration has become a dirty word. When I first came to Canada, integration was a good word. Now everybody thinks integration means assimilation. No, it doesn’t. I can’t assimilate anyway. I’m brown.
Right. But in terms of values, in terms of ability to pick up the newspaper and read and make sense of it, watch news and make sense of it, go out to the park and have a conversation with other people and make sense of it. We need to have political leadership, public leadership. We don’t have public leadership. We haven’t.
Hopper: Meanwhile, if you hold a memorial to commemorate the Air India bombing, there’s a good chance it will be crashed by Khalistanis pushing a conspiracy theory that the bombing was actually a frame-up job by Indian intelligence.
Because while Canada refuses to learn from the Air India bombing, the pro-terror Punjabi separatists seem to have learned that they can be as brazen as they want — and no one will stop them.
Remember one of those Babbar Khalsa members who went to trial as a co-conspirator? Here’s a 2024 speech he gave at Surrey’s Guru Narak temple: “When all attempts and means have failed, then it is totally valid to pick up a sword. Then you can take what is rightfully yours.”
Dosanjh: I believe that the politicians are part of the problem. Because in politics, look, if you have 200 Khalistani votes in a particular writing, they can make a difference in a close race. So I don’t blame them in a sense, but…
I always thought people go into politics to stand for something, right? If our leaders don’t stand for sort of a nonviolent, peaceful, socially cohesive degree of social solidarity in the country, then why go into politics?
Hopper: It’d be tempting to end this podcast on a positive note. Some slight ray of hope, or maybe an inspirational story about triumph over adversity.
Yes, there are scholarships named after Air India victims. and meaningful lifelong friendships were formed between bereaved families and the recovery workers who salvaged what they could of the victims from the sea. And there’s a remote Irish village that’s become a pilgrimage site for the families of Air India victims. It’s the closest point of land to where the plane came down, and locals there still mark the tragedy every year with a memorial ceremony.
But really, there’s no happy ending to this story.
One of the most disturbing findings from the second Air India inquiry, released in 2010, was learning that many of the families of the victims just hadn’t recovered; the interim decades had just been one unending nightmare.
Parkash Bedi lost his entire family. He testified before the inquiry “it looks like I am living, but I am like a dead body moving around.” Concordia University engineering professor Mahesh Sharma also lost his whole family. In 2024, 39 years after their deaths, he was interviewed by the Globe and Mail. “I’m 88 now. I’m all alone.”
Bolan: And a lot of them have a really hard time with the entire month of June because, you know, you just become haunted again by all that happened. And you don’t forget, even though it’s been 40 years. Um, you know, but, uh, they’re honestly so amazing in that, uh, I don’t hear them, you know, swearing or, you know, condemning everyone.
They’re just always trying to get justice for their families. And now. Because we don’t think we’ll ever see another prosecution that has amounted to commemorating them, uh, with permanent memorials in Canada.
Hopper: The Air India disaster is the absolute worst of Canada distilled into a single event. Complacency, sloth, ignorance, cowardice; it’s all there. Anybody who seriously dives into the details of the Air India bombing is never really the same afterwards.
And that’s maybe why we’ve so thoroughly forgotten about it. There are not really any heroes. There’s no satisfying resolution. There’s nothing to be proud of.
It’s 329 people murdered in absolutely nightmarish circumstances, most of them as they were on their way to joyous experiences like meeting a grandparent for the first time or getting married.
And the people who saw virtue and triumph in raining the bodies of these innocent civilians into the North Atlantic not only got away with it, but they’re arguably stronger than ever.
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