Politics of (Im)moderation: The Production of South Asian Identities in the Canadian Apology for Air India Flight 182

Abstract

Moderation, we are frequently told, is the key to a successful and fulfilling life: “everything in moderation,” and you will succeed, find happiness and become a well-adjusted member of society. The self-regulative function of “moderation”— whether in terms of one’s social life, nutritional habits or, in the case of this paper’s focus, political views and actions—has become a standard of capitalist Western citizenship and bourgeois political etiquette since Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. As political theorist Wendy Brown notes in Regulating Aversion (2006), the polarization of the politically secular and liberal versus fundamentalist and radical has emerged as “part of a civilization discourse that identifies both tolerance and the tolerable with the West” (6). Bringing this analysis of social and political moderation to a Canadian context, I examine the use of the “moderate” in Stephen Harper’s 2010 apology for the Canadian government’s belated recognition of the bombing of Air India Flight 182 as a Canadian tragedy. This paper argues that in its supposed imperative of reconciliation, the Harper government does not question the racism against Indo- Canadians that has contributed to the dismissal of the bombing; instead, the government produces a binary between the radical, anachronistic terrorist and the “model minority” South Asian immigrant. The Harper apology not only makes any resistance to Canada’s “multicultural tolerance” irrational, but it also displaces all violent motives onto the foreign, South Asian body. The goal of this paper is to argue against the overt and systemic racism within Harper’s 2010 apology for Flight 182, and question the use of moderation in the political discourse of Canadian “diversity,” a discourse as innocuous and inclusive as it is deceitful, oppressive and even fatal.