New Year’s Day this year marks the 45th anniversary of the crash of Air India’s Boeing 747, the “Emperor Ashoka”, which went down off the coast of Bandra on 1st January 1978. Over the last 7 years, several articles have appeared in various media about the tragedy, primarily in the Bandra Buzz.
In a string of recent developments, our national carrier was sold to the Tata Group and is soon to be merged with Vistara Airlines, also a part of the Tata Group. There has been a resurgence of interest in the aviation industry among the general public. Many have suddenly become experts in the field and specialists of sorts in all things Air India.
Sadly, knowledge and recognition of the air crash that hit so close to home, has not been one of the positive results of such increased interest. In the past 7 years, my attempts to have a memorial plaque erected in the general vicinity of BJ Road (Bandstand) have come to naught. Much talk has resulted in nothing concrete (no pun intended). A tangible reminder of a disaster very much part of Bandra’s local history would go a long way in educating and reminding people about this tragic event. For all the heritage walkers and nouveau historians that seem to be flooding Bandra these days, this event is regrettably forgotten less than half a century since it happened.
While the number of gardens (some new and some re-named), monuments, displays and even plaques have grown exponentially in Bandra over the past 7 years, there has been no need seen to take up the matter of a memorial plaque with two sentences dedicated to the memory of the 213 souls that perished in the waters off Bandra. As the saying goes “Dead men tell no tales”; I guess the same can be extrapolated to dead men casting no votes, and writing no cheques.
In 7 years one has come to realize that sadly there is close to zero interest in commemorating a local disaster. While victims of air crashes around the world are remembered with memorials and markers, the same does not hold true in our local culture. Ironically, when the “Emperor Kanishka”, the sister ship of the “Emperor Ashoka”, was destroyed in a terrorist bombing in 1985, memorials were erected by several nations touched by the tragedy, including Canada and Ireland. Regrettably, India has a public memorial for neither disaster; a fact lamented by my father, who flew the Boeing 747s for Air India, including the “Ashoka” and the “Kanishka”.
Also observed is a level of misinformation associated with the disaster. Some people (yes, even hardcore “Bandraites”) to date stubbornly insist that they saw the airplane crash while at a New Year’s Eve party at the Sea Rock Hotel. It is always a struggle to convince them that the crash happened on the night of 1st January 1978, not 31st December 1977. Hopefully, their New Year’s Eve party didn’t last over 24 hours. There also are other urban legends that have emerged, such as the family of one of the crew members seeing, from the terrace of their building in Bandra, the airplane crash into the waters close to Bandra’s Bandstand. And of course, a slanderous claim, one that hits below the belt, in that one of the pilots was inebriated before the flight.
Since my first article about the almost forgotten air crash appeared in the Bandra Buzz in 2017, I have been fortunate enough to have been contacted by the next of kin of several victims – pilots, flight attendants, passengers, as well as first responders – Canadian helicopter pilots of a company named Okanagan Helicopters, who were at that time contracted to fly their choppers to the Bombay High oil rig, and who searched the dark waters off Bandra to find the wreckage and possible survivors on that fateful night. All of these people had one thing in common – a regret that this event has never been given the recognition it deserved. In that, we all have failed.
So as a memory of this very local incident slowly dies out in the collective minds of the general public, one hopes that someday Bandra will have a tangible memorial to the victims. We owe it to the 213 victims and Bandra’s local history. Hopefully, when the 50th Anniversary of the Bandstand Air Crash comes around, I’ll have a better story to tell.
