Racism played a role in the 1985 Air India tragedy: Dosanjh says

Ottawa: Liberal MP Ujjal Dosanjh says he's shocked but not surprised that police did not take seriously warnings that Sikh extremists planned to blow up an Air India jetliner two decades ago.
In the months preceding the 1985 bombing of Air India Flight 182, Dosanjh said it was clear that police didn't understand or care about tensions within British Columbia's Indo-Canadian community.
"There was at that time a basic perception (that) here are some brown guys with turbans fighting each other, maybe hurting each other," Dosanjh said Thursday.
"The rest of the society really didn't know the culture, didn't know the language, didn't really know the issues, didn't in fact care very much. And that permeated throughout the (police) forces . . . I'm not blaming them but that was the environment at that time."
Dosanjh, a former B.C. premier and federal cabinet minister, has direct personal experience with how the authorities dealt with violence in the Indo-Canadian community.
Just months before the Air India bombing, Dosanjh was brutally and repeatedly bashed on the head with an iron rod in the parking lot outside his law office. The beating came after he had spoken out against Sikh extremism.
"I felt at that time, being an activist right in the middle of things, that law enforcement officials right across the country and the politicians didn't really give a damn about me or anybody else in that part of the community because, you know, it was a small community, didn't matter."
Dosanjh said that only after the Air India bombing did Canadian law enforcement officials and politicians begin to take the matter seriously and, even then, not as seriously as they should have.
03/05/07 Joan Bryden/Canadian Press/Canada.com, Canada

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Categories: Air India May 2007, Foreign May 2007, Safety May 2007