Hence, he was on the priority list of family members called on by the Commission to testify on the first day, when public hearings commenced at Ottawa's Victoria hall.
Ramakesavan lost a dear friend Dr Akhand Pratap Singh and his family of four in the tragedy. It was fate and his destiny that must have taken Dr Singh with his family on Flight 182, as Ramakesavan testified.
Singh was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia. After his fellowship, he returned to India to teach at a leading Indian university, came back to Canada as a visiting professor at a Canadian university only to quickly return to India "because he had received a promotion in his job and was all too eager to start his duties."
In a very emotional testimony, Ramakesavan told the Commission how he still gets the "image of my friend helplessly tumbling down the sky screaming, in desperation -- 'What is happening here...' That imagined voice still pierces my ears, twenty-one years after the tragedy."
As nothing substantial happened with the police investigations into the tragedy, Ramakesavan became a leading member of the victims' families support group -- 'The Citizens Alliance for Public Inquiry into Air-India Disaster'.
In 1988, he took the lead, with active support from Dr Yogesh Paliwal, who lost his son in the Air-India tragedy, to organise a demonstration outside the House of Commons in Ottawa.
As luck would have had it, to make matters worse, on the day of the demonstration on June 23, 1988, Dr Paliwal had a massive heart attack and died. But his family wanted the demonstration to go on as planned as that, they deemed, was Dr Paliwal's last wish, said Ramakesavan.
Then he went on to describe before the Commission all the ups and downs in their dealings with the government, with the Royal Mounted Canadian Police (RCMP). How nobody in Ottawa listened to the family members and how the Canadian media started attributing the lack of interest on their part to racism.
"One serious problem we faced was repeated attempts by journalists in attributing a racist angle to the RCMP failures and the government's callousness," he said, conceding "they were right."
Ramakesavan emphasised that "we were adamant about keeping racism out of our struggle because we wanted to battle it out on the higher plane of right and wrong, justice and injustice."
He was present inside the Victoria Hall when several other family members asked why it had taken 21 years for the government to finally announce a public inquiry.
In an interesting point, Ramakesavan told the Commission that the victims' families could not understand as to why during their discussions with the RCMP, the Mounties would call the tragedy at Narita airport in Tokyo -- in which 2 baggage handlers died as 'Narita Bombing' -- and the death of 329 people as the 'Air-India crash'.
"If it was merely a crash then there was no need for the involvement from RCMP or our long protracted struggle for justice," Ramakesavan told the Commission of Inquiry.
His "primary hope is that this inquiry will answer questions that continue to haunt the victim's families" and those, inter alia, being whether "the tragedy was indeed preventable; whether the erasure of wiretap tapes was a deliberate cover up or bungling by the Canadian Security Intelligence Agency; what role did racism play in the negligence both preceding and following the tragedy..."
The testimony from family members will continue the whole week. The Commission has also called British and Irish sailors who were actively involved in the rescue operation, taking the bodies of innocent victims out of the cold, treacherous Atlantic waters.
The Irish people are the true heroes for the victims' families who from the first daybreak of June 23, 1985, after hearing the BBC news bulletin, opened their homes and their hearts. Many of them continue to be present at the annual prayers at Ahisksta, the memorial for the 329 victims.
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