Ahmedabad plane crash rekindles painful memories for AI Kanishka pilot’s widow

On Thursday afternoon, Amarjit Kaur Bhinder sat in front of the TV the entire day. There had been a plane crash in Ahmedabad killing 241 people. And Amarjit had to relive the pain she had felt 40 years ago.

“It appeared to me that it has happened again,” she says softly, her voice weighed down with memory.

Amarjit is the widow of Captain SS Bhinder, the first officer on Air India’s ill-fated Kanishka Flight 182. On June 23, 1985, the flight — travelling from Canada to India — was destroyed mid-air by a terrorist bomb, killing all 329 on board.

That day, Amarjit, 36, was waiting in Mumbai, expecting a call from her husband. He had told her that he would call when he reached London. The phone did not ring.

“I kept waiting. He had promised me to call,” she recalled. “Instead, a family friend, actor Veerendra, came to our house and broke the news. He kept asking me, ‘Where is Paaji? Which route was he flying?’ Then I just knew. No one survives a mid-air blast.”

Their daughter Jasleen was 10 and son Ashamdeep just seven.

This June, like every June since that nightmare, she finds herself reliving the pain. But the Ahmedabad crash pierced deeper.

Her son, Ashamdeep, now Captain Ashamdeep Singh Bhinder, is a pilot with Air India — he flies a Boeing 787 Dreamliner, the same make that crashed in Ahmedabad.

“It didn’t occur to me that it had happened to others. It felt like it was happening to me all over again,” Amarjit says. “We can understand the grief of the people left behind. Gradually, we will hear their stories. But their pain…You can’t explain it.”

The month before the Kanishka bombing, the family had vacationed in the US, full of laughter, dreams and travel plans. And then, everything was shattered.

Still, she carried on. Amarjit took a managerial job at Air India to support her children. She managed to persuade her daughter to choose a path other than aviation. But her son had his mind made up. “He wanted to be a pilot from the age of two. I couldn’t stop him,” she says. Her daughter is married to a Singapore Airlines pilot.

And yet, for all the years that have passed, justice has not been done.

In 2004, Amarjit travelled to Canada to attend court hearings. “Both Ripudaman Singh Malik and Ajaib Singh Bagri walked free. We never got justice,” she says.

“Other families still hope, still press for more investigation. But I don’t think anything concrete will happen now. It’s been 40 years,” she says.

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