The 25th anniversary of a dark day in industrial history is an occasion to reflect upon the crucial role of the state as a monitor and regulator of economic enterprise. When gas leaked from the Union Carbine pesticide factory in Bhopal on the midnight of December 3, 1984, and unleashed poison into air and water to kill over 30,000 and maim hundreds of thousands of exposed people, the world had scarcely encountered a horror of this magnitude in peacetime.
Ironically, the Bhopal tragedy occurred in a country that was an electoral democracy, in which governments were theoretically accountable for their people?s safety and security. Yet, a postmortem of the ghastly gas disaster reveals that the Indian state failed to honour its social contract of protecting citizens against threats to life.
The Bhopal calamity was allowed to occur when the Indian economy was in the throes of the ?licence permit raj?, where politicians and state bureaucrats wielded unlimited power over industrial activity.
Dirigisme was justified for decades prior to the Bhopal accident on the grounds that India was a poor country in which socialist goals could only be achieved if the state took control and acted as a redistributive force.
How did this supposedly paternalistic system?meant to be ?pro-poor? and against ?blood-sucking capitalists??end up overseeing a shameful episode like Bhopal and its aftermath of woefully inadequate rehabilitation, compensation and cleanup of toxic waste?
The warning bells of lax safety norms from the pesticide plant were there for the omnipotent ?raj?s? mandarins to have acted on long before the fateful night of December 3, 1984. From 1976, excess pollution and toxic attacks on workers had been occurring on a regular basis at the factory site, but the super-interventionist Indian state prone to harassing harmless entrepreneurs barely took the opportunity to enforce stricter inspections and standards on Union Carbide?s management.
The state was certainly not unaware of the risks posed by the factory?s accident-prone record, but it did not muscle its will onto Union Carbide. Some low-level local authorities did advise the company to build the plant in another part of Bhopal, out of range of the populated areas, but Carbide refused, saying relocation was ?too expensive?. The story of a cost-cutting and greedy multinational ignoring local laws and placing citizens of developing countries in direct line of harm has been told often enough, but the question arises as to why the Indian state did not up the ante and force Union Carbide to shift or at least improve its safety measures when government officials were cognisant of the ticking time bomb.
Could the company have refused if the chief minister of Madhya Pradesh or the Central government had pressed it to move away from the densely inhabited site? Did the Indian developmental state simply ignore the pre-disaster alarms as entropy that was tolerable because the plant was producing chemical inputs for the green revolution? Or was the neglect more typical of the ?raj? era?total mismanagement, corruption and callousness of the state regulatory machine in the guise of ?socialism??
Socialist regimes, it turns out worldwide, are not necessarily endowed with an alert eye and ear for the plight of the poor. Some of the worst industrial accidents have occurred in so-called ?people?s democracies? that, on paper, govern on behalf of the workers. When the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, which killed thousands through radioactive poisoning, occurred two years after Bhopal in the then Soviet republic of Ukraine, ruling communist party apparatchiks resorted to a massive cover-up of information that denied the very occurrence of the event for the first few weeks.
The very proletariat in whose name the Soviet command economy had been erected were dying in the hundreds but the state was stoically unmoved until the then communist party boss, Mikhail Gorbachev, unleashed informational freedom through glasnost. Chernobyl was a ?turning point?, in Gorbachev?s words, that made him realise the hollowness, inefficiency and lies at the core of the communist economic model.
Communist China has inflicted an even bigger industrial disaster on its own people, but this has barely come to light due to continued censorship and curbs on social activism. Acute radiation exposure at Lop Nor in the far western region of Xinjiang, where China?s nuclear industrial complex conducted at least 45 atomic bomb tests between 1964 and 1996, may have killed upwards of 1,94,000 people, mostly minority Uyghurs, and condemned another 1.2 million victims to slow deaths through leukaemia, cancer and deformities.
For the majoritarian and militaristic Chinese communists, the lives of mostly destitute persons were disposable as long as Lop Nor was generating fuel and helping the state compete with the other great powers in the global ?balance of terror?. While the Indian state and the post-Glasnost Soviet state were at least transparently indifferent and sloppy in fighting for justice for the victims of their own making in Bhopal and Chernobyl, the Chinese communist state continues to obfuscate the ground realities of mass murder in Lop Nor because admitting faults would open the sluice gates to mass outcries for systemic political change.
At the dawn of the industrial revolution in England, when the economy discarded the ?putting out? system for the factory, several new safety and health hazards arose to the detriment of workers and populations living in sooty, smokestack-filled shanties. The monarchical British state permitted steady deterioration of working conditions and could get away with it because, in the words of John Stuart Mill, ?government is always in the hands of whatever is the strongest power in society?.
Controlling state power, abuse and dereliction of social responsibilities remains a monumental task as we mourn Bhopal?s system-induced blight.
The author is associate professor of world politics at the OP Jindal Global University