AI-171 Anniversary: Families Demand Memory and Accountability
One year has passed since Air India flight AI-171 plummeted onto a medical college campus in Ahmedabad, extinguishing 260 lives in an inferno that should never have happened. Today, the families of the victims refuse to be silenced. Their dignified pursuit of truth and justice carries a lesson that resonates far beyond India's borders: no people can build a stable future upon the erasure of their past.
A Mother's Unbreakable Resolve
Sitaben Patni bears the physical and spiritual scars of the tragedy. Debris from the aircraft destroyed her tea shop and severely burned her body. But her deepest wound is invisible. She watched her 12-year-old son, Akash, burn to death under a section of the crashed aircraft's wing, powerless to save him.
Akash had brought his mother lunch and fallen asleep under a tree on the grounds of BJ Medical College. Moments later, the aircraft hurtled from the sky. The wreckage scattered, thick smoke engulfed the campus, and boiling fuel splashed across Patni's body as she ran toward her child.
It was all black smoke. Then I saw a wing of the aircraft hit my son.
Her husband, Suresh Patni, translates her words with quiet anguish.