Below: Judge John Major
1984
Jumping to Conclusions:
Judge John Major and the Air India Bombing Inquiry
T. SHER SINGH
DAILY FIX
Wednesday, June 27, 2012
There’s a story of an avid researcher who set out to determine the impact of music on a grasshopper.
He set a grasshopper on the floor.
He seated himself a couple of feet behind it, and played a few bars on a flute.
The grasshopper promptly sprang forward to a point half way down the room.
Good, noted the researcher: the grasshopper has a normal response to music.
Now, he mused, let me introduce some variables and see what happens.
He broke the left rear leg off the grasshopper and set him down on the original spot, pointing him in the original direction.
He once again played a few bars.
The grasshopper leaped forward, though this time his path of flight had clearly veered to the left.
The researcher dutifully noted that the grasshopper continued to respond normally to music even with the loss of a limb, though his flight path had changed somewhat.
Next, the researcher broke off the other rear leg of the grasshopper, set him down on the marked spot, and began to play the flute.
Nothing happened.
The researcher kept on playing for a few minutes, at times getting louder, then getting closer, and finally even changing the tune.
To no avail. Still, there was no response whatsoever. The grasshopper merely sat there.
Aah-hh-h, observed the researcher, and quickly jotted down in his log book: When you break off both of the rear legs of a grasshopper, he goes deaf.
* * * * *
The researcher, they say, went on to study law. Became a lawyer.
He pleased the politicians. So they made him a judge.
He didn’t make waves as a judge. After a few years, he retired.
The politicians - who were looking for a way to show the world that they had indeed done an investigation into the bombing of Air India Flight #182, but didn’t want the truth to out - hand-selected this judge, pulled him out of retirement, and got him to head the Public Inquiry.
Judge John Charles “Jack” Major looked at little else but the missing legs, measured no response to the music … and dutifully, predictably, obligingly, declared that the grasshopper must therefore be deaf.
Conversation about this article
1: Baljit Singh Pelia (Los Angeles, California, U.S.A.), June 27, 2012, 7:35 AM.
He fits well into the group of many justices of the Supreme Court of India that led the commissions investigating the pogroms of 1984, concluding no one in particular was guilty of killing several thousand Sikhs over a period of three days all over India. The world is deaf after all, and blind.
2: N. Singh (Canada), June 27, 2012, 2:54 PM.
I am surprised the Indian government didn't give this judge the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman award. He must feel cheated!
3: Manjit Singh (Canada), June 27, 2012, 8:00 PM.
N. Singh ji, he did go to India and Chandigarh and delivered talks on the Air India Inquiry. (I think Ujjal Dosanjh was present with him when he was in Chandigarh.
4: Irvinder Singh Babra (Brampton, Ontario, Canada), June 28, 2012, 7:23 AM.
Justice Ian MacPherson in Vancouver had judged well and acquitted all those falsely accused of the Air India bombing, in the court trial in 2005. All others have been bogus inquiries.