The chief suspect in last year's terrorist bombings that killed 329 people over the Atlantic Ocean and two baggage handlers at Tokyo's Narita Airport says he is innocent and can sleep with a clear conscience.

Talwinder Singh Parmar said in an exclusive interview that, based on his dealings with police, he knows he is the person the Canadian Government and police investigators are pointing to when they say they know who masterminded the plot to explode bombs simultaneously on two Air- India Boeing 747s.

"Yes, I know that," Mr. Parmar said, agreeing with a reporter that he is the chief suspect. "But why don't they charge me? . . . I can sleep at night. I did not kill 329 people."

Mr. Parmar was interviewed on Thursday at the Hamilton-Wentworth Regional Detention Centre, where he is being held on another matter.

Royal Canadian Mounted Police officials interviewed later refused to comment on Mr. Parmar's statements, saying only that he was entitled to his views.

Corporal Pierre Belanger, a RCMP spokesman in Ottawa, said in a telephone interview: "We can't comment on this . . . he may be trying to elicit information that he is the main suspect."

Privately, however, many police sources have confirmed Mr. Parmar's belief that he is under suspicion.

They believe that he and collaborators intended to blow up the planes on the ground at Heathrow Airport in London and at Narita Airport with few or no deaths.

However, the London-bound plane was almost two hours late in taking off from Canada and the luggage in Japan exploded, possibly while being tampered with by the baggage handlers who were killed.

Mr. Parmar, 42, of Burnaby, B.C., a father of three, is the head priest of the Babbar Khalsa (Lions of the True Faith), a fundamentalist Sikh group. Though between 150,000 and 200,000 Sikhs live in Canada, only 50 to 100 of them are Babbar Khalsa activists.

Mr. Parmar bears the title of Jathedar, or commander of a Jatha (a band of devotees), who leads them in battle to rectify the injustices done to Sikhism.

"Parmar is the clear and unequivocal leader (of a terrorist cell in the Babbar Khalsa). . . . (He) is the one who gives the orders," Hamilton Crown attorney Dean Paquette told a judge during Mr. Parmar's most recent court appearance.

The Babbars are one of the most vocal groups in demanding a separate Sikh homeland carved out of the Indian state of Punjab. They have argued that the Sikh minority is being slowly forced to convert to Hinduism, the religion of the majority of Indians, as part of a Hindu revival sweeping India.

Mr. Parmar, who arrived in Canada in 1970 and is a Canadian citizen, was in his usual high spirits during the 30-minute interview at the modern jail in Hamilton's north end.

But the regal air that once characterized the machinist-cum- preacher was missing. When not in jail, Mr. Parmar usually wore an extra-high yellow-and-blue turban with a shiny metal clasp and a flowing robe, seventeenth-century Sikh battle dress.

In jail, he was dressed in a regulation blue T-shirt and turban supplied by Ontario's Ministry of Correctional Services.

Telephone receivers on either side of a bullet-proof glass sheet connected Mr. Parmar and a reporter. The conversation was conducted in Hindi. Every now and then, the prisoner would throw in an unsavory English epithet to describe the Indian Government.

Mr. Parmar, who speaks Punjabi and Hindi, understands enough English to communicate with his jailers and to read newspapers. He has asked for a three-month newspaper subscription while in the Hamilton jail.

Currently, he is being kept in solitary confinement for his own protection. He has told jailers, with whom he seems to get along amicably, that without the protection, he would be assassinated by Indian Government agents.

"At any given time, India has at least 10 agents after me," he said. "They would assassinate me if they got the chance."

Police sources said this fear of assassination is the main reason why security continues to remain tight when Mr. Parmar appears in court.

Indeed, the spectre of the Indian Government and its agents looms large over the entire Air-India investigation. Both the police and the radical Sikh community believe agents close to the Indian Government had some hand in the airplane bombings, their intention possibly being to destroy the Sikh independence movement.

While police have strongly indicated to Mr. Parmar that they suspect him of being an agent of the Indian Government, it is Mr. Parmar's contention that police have been misled by Indian Government propaganda aimed at Sikhs in general and at himself in particular.

A third element in the investigation is Indian Government pressure on Canada to lay charges in the case.

Mr. Parmar's current living quarters are a far cry from his $250,000, mortgage-free home in Burnaby. For a Grade 10 dropout who grew up in the little farming village of Panchta in Punjab playing soccer and Kabaddi - a vigorous contact sport - he has done well for himself.

"God is great. He gives me the money," Mr. Parmar said when asked about the source of his funds. "In 1972-73, I owned a nine-bedroom home."

Over the years, he has worked at a lumber yard, built and sold several homes similar to his own and worked at his brother-in-law's janitorial company. He registered the Babbar Khalsa as a religious body in 1984, but is still waiting to obtain tax exempt status for it, he said.

Though he has never been charged with anything directly related to the airplane bombings, the past year has been one of constant police surveillance, charges, custody and court appearances for Mr. Parmar.

The day before he was arrested on the charges that put him in the Hamilton jail, Mr. Parmar was interviewed at a fellow Babbar's residence in Mississauga.

"Look at that white van out there," he said, indicating he suspected police were watching his activities.

Mr. Parmar is being held in Hamilton without bail on a charge of conspiring with six other Babbars to commit terrorism in India.

Among the allegations (based largely on wire-tapped telephone discussions and other bugged conversations) put forward by the RCMP are charges that the seven men were planning to explode bombs in India's Parliament in New Delhi, kidnap the children of a member of Parliament to force him to plant the explosives and derail trains.

The original suspicions against Mr. Parmar and the Babbars arose from surveillance mounted against them by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service on June 4, 1985, 19 days before the Air-India crash off the coast of Ireland.

Agents of the civilian spy agency told a British Columbia court that they followed Mr. Parmar that day to Duncan, B.C., to a marine electronic workshop, the workplace of another Babbar, Inderjit Singh Reyat.

The agents testified that there was another man with Mr. Parmar and that after picking up Mr. Reyat, the three men drove at great speed to some nearby woods where the agents heard an explosion that sounded like a shotgun going off.

Police testified recently at Mr. Parmar's bail hearing in Hamilton that they obtained a statement from Mr. Reyat that Mr. Parmar asked him to design time bombs for use in India.

In November, despite advice to the contrary by several investigators who thought such moves were premature, the RCMP task force in Vancouver conducted a series of raids on Sikhs. Mr. Reyat and Mr. Parmar were arrested and charged with illegal possession of explosives.

The charge against Mr. Parmar did not proceed to trial; the prosecutor told the court in April of this year that he had no evidence to try the preacher. Mr. Reyat was fined $2,000 for possessing a stick of dynamite and an old handgun, but the judge - in the face of extensive publicity in the media linking the charge to the Air-India crash - emphatically ruled out any connection between the case and the crash.

"They (the CSIS agents) had two different stories," Mr. Parmar said in last week's interview. "One said the third person was my son (Jaswinder, 16) and the other said it was a man called Surjit Singh. . . .

(Police sources confirmed that initially CSIS agents did believe that the third man was Mr. Parmar's son.)

"There was no person called Surjit Singh (a name police said Mr. Reyat gave them for the third man). The police made up the name. . . . Reyat was scared, he was forced to make all those statements."

"I did go to Duncan, but I went alone. . . . Reyat was going to convert my car (a fully loaded Chrysler) to propane. He was going to give me a discount on the labor cost, but it would still have cost me $1,600. . . . He later sent me all the receipts. . . .

"We did not test bombs," he said. "Why would we test bombs?"

He said charges against him and the others in Hamilton and against five Montreal Sikhs added up to nothing but harassment.

(Three of the Montreal Sikhs were freed after being held for a month when police found that they had no evidence against them.)

Mr. Parmar said examples abound of how India fabricated charges against him and his group and how the Canadian police believed the trumped-up charges.

He cited the information sent by a Punjab police official about outstanding warrants against Mr. Parmar in India, charging him in the slaying of two policemen.

Mr. Parmar said that, among other matters, the policeman said in a sworn statement that Mr. Parmar's father's name was Jarnail Singh when, in fact, it is Janiat Singh.

Further, Mr. Parmar said that, according to the recent testimony of an RCMP corporal, that when questioned about this error, the Indian police official said Jarnail was the English version of the Punjabi Janiat.

"Janiat is Janiat in English, Hindi and Punjabi," Mr. Parmar said. "This shows you how eager they are to get me."

As a result of the Indian charges, Mr. Parmar was held on an extradition warrant in West Germany for more than a year in 1983-84. He was pointed out by Indian Government agents who had been following him.

The West German court eventually refused to extradite Mr. Parmar, a Canadian citizen, and sent him back to Canada.

Mr. Parmar said the West German court found no evidence against him. Indian officials told Canadian police that the court found that Mr. Parmar could not be ensured a fair trial in India.

"They (the Canadian police) know who did it (blew up the Air- India plane). They know it was agents of the Indian Government. Why don't they go after them?"

After the first criminal charges against him were dismissed last April in British Columbia, Mr. Parmar said in an interview that the Mounties who arrested him also accused him of being the Indian Government agent who organized the Air-India bombing.

"I told them to beware, that I was only the agent of the Sikh community," he said.

Last week in jail, he raised his clenched fist slowly in a royal fashion from the other side of the glass partition and said over the telephone: "This hand represents the Sikh community. That is why they are all after me."