New film throws spotlight back on Kanishka bombing

Toronto: Sturla Gunnarsson's powerful film on the Kanishka bombing, Air India 182, premiered at the Hot Docs Festival recently. Vancouver-based Gunnarsson, who is originally from Iceland and whose wife is Punjabi, has put a number of members of the victims' families in front of the camera, sharing their pain and anguish with the viewers.
They never got such a chance earlier, said Gunnarsson, who made the feature based on Rohinton Mistry's book Such a Long Journey, and whose films have won an Oscar nomination, Emmy, Genie and Gemini awards, a Prix Italia, and best film prizes at numerous festivals.
Gunnarsson said he was able to gain 'unprecedented access' to people involved and to key investigators from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
In Air India 182, he has used voice tapes of conversations between the Air India flight's cockpit and control towers in Toronto, Montreal and Shannon airport in Ireland. CSIS surveillance video tapes are used too, and it is shown how the surveillance at Babbar Khalsa leader Talwinder Singh Parmar's home was discontinued a couple of days before the Air India tragedy of June 23, 1985.
That surveillance post, it is stated, was dismantled the moment then Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi returned to India after his visit to the United States. The American Federal Bureau of Investigation had shared with the Canadian law enforcement agencies intelligence that there could be an attempt on Gandhi's life by Sikh terrorists.
Talwinder Singh ParmarThe film shows how Liberal lawmaker Ujjal Dosanjh, who was at the time working as an attorney, was beaten up and left half-dead outside his law office for speaking up against Sikh extremism. He was in hospital for several weeks.
"The Canadian authorities," Gunnarsson said, "were turning a blind eye to that [Sikh extremism] because they didn't want to be accused of meddling in the internal affairs of the Sikh community."
Why a film on Kanishka now? "Over the course of the 20 years of investigations, there were all kinds of conspiracy theories, rumours, there was a mountain of information -- but it was all kind of meaningless information. There was no clear narrative as to what actually happened," the filmmaker said, adding that the books that have been published on the tragedy 'are all in disagreement with one another.'
21/05/08 Ajit Jain/Rediff

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Categories: Air India - International May 2008, Foreign May 2008, NACIL May 2008