In the summer of 2010, then Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper, marking the 25th anniversary of the Air India Flight 182 \u201cKanishka\u201d tragedy, apologised for the \u201cinstitutional failings\u201d that led to the country\u2019s worst act of terrorism. That statement is now unavailable on the Canadian government\u2019s website, or if still there, it has been buried so deep it can\u2019t be found.<\/p>\n
This year, a pair of new projects documenting the tragedy will be launched by McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, which will make this apology available to for easy public access, among other material.<\/p>\n
These projects are being spearheaded by Chandrima Chakraborty, associate professor of English and Cultural Studies at the university, who said the principal objective is to make Kanishka \u201cpart of a larger public memory\u201d.<\/p>\n
Chakraborty became aware of the ignorance among young Canadians about this terror attack, which claimed 329 lives, during interactions in her classroom. The first of the projects, a website memorialising the tragedy, is expected to launch this spring. The second, and more ambitious initiative, will be a \u201cphysical and digital repository\u201d of artefacts linked to the tragedy at the university library, the first of its kind in the country. That will formally come into being around autumn.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe effort is to fill the silence that is there and to have a sustained public debate on the events as well as to broaden a sense of inheritance and responsibility for the bombings, because it is not just an Indo-Canadian tragedy,\u201d Chakraborty said.<\/p>\n
The attempt is to \u201creach an audience beyond those directly affected\u201d by the tragedy, she said. The archival repository at McMaster University will include primary and secondary material, including that donated by members of the families of the victims.<\/p>\n
A couple of other projects that Chakraborty has been involved with in recent years will segue into these larger efforts. Among those are an international conference hosted at McMaster University in 2015, which was, she said, the \u201cfirst scholarly conference\u201d in Canada on the tragedy. The testimonies of members of the victims\u2019 families were videotaped at the conference and will feature in the archives, along with others gathered since.<\/p>\n
But the archives will remain \u201ca work in progress\u201d, she said, since new material will be added as it becomes available.<\/p>\n
Chakraborty was also one of three co-editors of Remembering Air India, published by the University of Alberta Press last year. While that does include \u201clayman commentary\u201d, it can also be brought \u201cto the curriculum, almost like a textbook,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
They also obtained permission from the Canadian Privy Council to feature Harper\u2019s apology in that book and since it now appears to have vanished from official government websites, it will be also figure in the forthcoming documentation projects, serving the purpose of \u201cfilling in the gaps and also the erasures\u201d, she said. Ultimately, these will help create a permanent \u201cpublic record\u201d of the tragedy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In the summer of 2010, then Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper, marking the 25th anniversary of the Air India Flight 182 \u201cKanishka\u201d tragedy, apologised for the \u201cinstitutional failings\u201d that led to the country\u2019s worst act of terrorism. That statement is now unavailable on the Canadian government\u2019s website, or if still there, it has been buried […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":19577,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19576","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19576","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19576"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19576\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19578,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19576\/revisions\/19578"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19577"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}