Tracing Acts of Terror

The public inquiry by a retired Canadian supreme court judge John Major into the explosion aboard Air India Fight 182 over the Irish Sea in June 1985, which was released on Friday, may appear to serve no purpose. The tragedy occurred 25 years ago. There were no survivors— 328 Indians died. The culprits — Sikh terrorists — have been punished.

But the Canadian government and the public felt the need to know whether something could have been done to foil the terrorists’ diabolical plan. The answer that judge Major has given is that the Canadian Mounted Police (CMP) and the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS) had enough actionable intelligence to prevent the disaster, and that the two agencies could not act because they did not share the information that each one of them had. Does it sound familiar?

This was indeed more or less the conclusion that the Subrahmanyam committee had arrived at in its inquiry into the Kargil fiasco. There was no coordination among the different intelligence agencies, it said. It should perhaps lead to the conclusion that governmental agencies are universally inert and inept. The conclusion should not come as a surprise. But it is necessary to determine the facts that led to failure. Major’s report should alert both governments and the public that terror attacks can be foiled if information that is available with the different agencies is put together and used. The lessons are not lost because of the lapse of time, in this case 25 years.

In India we have a tradition of commissions of inquiry in many of the major disasters, but very rarely are these reports made public and discussed. The Ranganath commission which inquired into the anti-Sikh riots in Delhi in October 1984 in the wake of the assassination of Indira Gandhi did not dwell on whether timely deployment of forces could have prevented the massacre. There is the Srikrishna commission on the communal riots in Mumbai but there has been no public discussion about it. Similarly, the Liberhan commission on the demolition of Babri Masjid in December 1992 does not say whether the state and central governments could have taken timely action.

Unfortunately, no commission of inquiry has looked into the causes of the lethal gas leak at the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal in December 1984. There has been no inquiry into the post-Godhra riots in Gujarat in 1992. The conclusions would bring home the painful truth of where governments failed. It is a necessary first step to sit up and take note, and plug the loopholes.