This is the story of the worst industrial disaster in world history that took place exactly 25 years ago to this day.
Thousands of people died as the lethal methyl isocyanate (MIC) gas leaked in the early hours of December 3, 1984 from a pesticide factory in Bhopal owned by the US-based multinational Union Carbide?s subsidiary, Union Carbide India Limited (UCIL). The accident happened as a valve in the plant?s underground tank storing MIC broke under pressure. This caused a cloud of deadly gas to float over the city, then home to about one million people. Though no official count of casualties has ever been done, estimates based on hospital and rehabilitation records show that about 20,000 people died and 570,000 sustained permanent or partial injuries due to the gas leak till now.
?Mothers didn?t know their children had died, children didn’t know their mothers had died and men didn?t know their whole families had died,? a Bhopal resident later told BBC.
Probes into the disaster revealed that the tank storing MIC was fundamentally flawed and clear warnings were issued by scientists within the Union Carbide months before the accident that the plant was in bad repair?the storage tank, in particular. The warnings were ignored by the factory management.
Yet, Union Carbide, now Dow Chemicals, has always argued that it was not an accident, per se, but an act of sabotage by an unnamed disgruntled worker. As if to thicken the conspiracy plot, the company has consistently refused to reveal the chemical composition and their health effects of the 40 tonnes of deadly gases released on the disaster day, calling them ?trade secrets?.
Now, even after 25 years, ghosts of the tragedy refuse to go away. ?We are still living with a massive fraud being perpetrated on the victims,? human rights activist P Ramankutty tells me.
The Indian Parliament passed the Bhopal Gas Leak Act in March 1985, directing the Union government to be the sole legal representative of all victims. After four years of legal wrangle first in the US and later in India, the government reached an out-of-court settlement with Union Carbide in February 1989 under which India agreed to drop the case in return for $470 million for damages caused in the disaster, or just about 15% of the $3.3 billion claimed in the original lawsuit.
That was it and it was done.
?You call it compensation for a monumental negligence that caused 3,800 deaths within immediate hours? If there is a stronger word for whoops, it certainly applies here,? Ramankutty says.
The distribution of the disgraceful compensation amount soon became a national disgrace on its own right. ?First, the government arbitrarily fixed the number of gas-affected people at 105,000, including about 3,000 dead. As we know, the reality was different. The payment of compensation to victims did not, however, begin until 1992. The compensation was meant for about 100,000 people, but has been distributed among nearly 600,000. Of the total Rs 7.13 billion (at February 1989 exchange rate, 1 USD = INR 15.24), Rs 1.13 billion was for loss of property and thousands of livestock. The balance Rs 6 billion distributed among 574,000 people works out to a measly Rs 12,410 per victim on average,? Ramankutty adds.
?It will be ludicrous if we take this in terms of compensation alone,? he says. ?It was a travesty of justice done to the principles of human rights from A to Z.?
More than a dozen judges have heard the criminal case against those chargesheeted for the gas leak disaster since it opened at a local court in Bhopal in 1987. But until today, not a single person was held legally responsible for the accident on the charge that was watered down to ?death by negligence? by the Indian Supreme Court in 1996. This is a charge most frequently used in fatalities involving car accidents carrying a maximum sentence of two years, if convicted. Now, no one in India expects a verdict more just than mere symbolic whenever the court delivers the delayed justice.
Meanwhile, advocacy groups say an estimated 10 to 15 people continue to die every month from exposure-related illnesses in Bhopal. The city also has an unusually high rate of children with birth defects and growth deficiency, as well as cancers, diabetes and other chronic illnesses.
But relief efforts are hampered by the lack of research available to medical workers. As Union Carbide declined to share details of the composition of the gases, the government-run Indian Council of Medical Research had set up a makeshift research centre to study their effects on health.
?As they say, nothing comes out of nothing. The government quietly closed the centre in 1994 without publishing its findings. No serious research efforts have been made since then. The problem is two-fold. One, medical institutions neglect their duty to do research. There is also a funding crunch. Two, they have to follow the dictates of political expediency,? as Dr DK Satpathy, who retired this year as director of the state-run Medicolegal Institute in Bhopal, put it to me.
The result? India is still stuck with the treatment method very little modified from day one of the adversity when the country maintained strict controls on every sphere of the economy, including drug licensing.
The clean-up of the closed 67-acre factory site in Bhopal has become another mockery, passed from one state agency to another as it made its way from one court to another. Since 1984, India?s political and legal system has been deadlocked over disposing what experts say a colossal amount of toxic waste buried deep in and around the factory. They believe the waste poisons groundwater and vegetation, and poses incalculable contamination risks to Bhopal residents.
Not one comprehensive study of the depth and spread of contaminants is done yet, adding to the believe-it-or-not stuff the Bhopal legacy wrought. ?Now, every attempt is being made by the government to whitewash the horror. Only recently, two government research bodies came up with guesswork to prove that effects of MIC have been neutralised. I thought make-believe things occurred only in Bollywood movies,? says Atul Kumar Thakur, a Delhi-based freelance journalist currently working on a book about modern Indian history.
?If this is the treatment we got for Bhopal, it?s hard to imagine how our government will deal with a terrorist problem that is far more, and even literally, radioactive,? he says.
For years, the central and state governments had a convenient ruse: the waste should lie untouched awaiting the legal battle that?s currently on in India to settle the liability to dispose the waste. Dow Chemicals bought Union Carbide in 2001 and denies any legal liability. Dow did not purchase UCIL that was renamed and sold out to an Indian company in 1994. In 1998, the state government took over the factory site.
But the otherwise straightforward question of who should pay?taxpayer or polluter?has become India?s own version of dark legal drama what Jarndyce v. Jarndyce was to Charles Dickens? mid-19th century novel The Bleak House.
In 2005, after reports surfaced that tar residue of Sevin, a pesticide UCIL manufactured, was leaking from one of the factory?s rusted storage tanks, the state government collected 386 tonnes of the material for disposal. But its disposal is entangled in a legal case because the neighbouring Gujarat state, where 346 tonnes were planned to be incinerated by a private firm, refused permission. The remaining 40 tonnes were dumped in 2008 in a landfill in Madhya Pradesh state (of which Bhopal is the capital) which environmental activists claim was done in gross disregard for hazardous waste disposal rules.
?The 386 tonnes is just the tip of an iceberg. The real and present danger is the innumerable tonnes of hazardous waste buried in the factory environs,? Thakur says listing points brought out by his independent research.
So, where is the liability case against Dow headed? ?The lawsuit gives the government the perfect alibi for inaction,? says a former senior relief and rehabilitation official of Madhya Pradesh on condition of anonymity. He believes the case will be flogged to legal death, given the involvement of powerful business lobbyists and the government?s complete lack of political will to take them on.
?The government keeps promising strong action, come every Bhopal anniversary. But it has been acting in a manner it?s not accountable to its citizens, just as Union Carbide was to the Indian people,? he remarks. ?Living and working in Bhopal, I had enough tormenting experiences of the gas leak and working for the victims? welfare. The feeling has strengthened in me: since the gas began to leak, had the whole episode not been treated by the authorities as an elaborate cover-up, minus maybe the gas and the innocent people it devoured??
In many ways, the toxic waste is a potent symbol of the moral hazard that has deepened in India?s heart in the last 25 years.
Enjoying his retirement life in the US, Warren Anderson, the Union Carbide CEO at the time of the disaster and against whom arrest warrants for manslaughter are pending in India, would be having a good laugh at the Indian state?s expense.
According to one official in Delhi who requested anonymity because he was involved in Anderson?s extradition case, India has ?iron-clad? evidence to swing the decision in its favour, but refused to discuss details. Yet, he admitted that India is chasing an illusion. ?If you think the US will ever agree to extradite Anderson to India, you must get your head examined,? in his caustic words.
?Have you heard of the legend King Canute and the tide? We are in such a situation here,? he says without explaining.
The stalled status of the case, now comatose, seems especially unfair since documents presented as part of a class action suit against Anderson and Union Carbide in the US in 2002 had laid bare the bitter truth that not only did the company willingly export untested and unsafe technology to Bhopal but also that the move was endorsed by its CEO.
You don?t have to be a cynic to wonder if such a mess could have happened in the US if Union Carbide (or any other company, for that matter) had been responsible for, perish the thought, even a minor industrial calamity causing human death. Or, would the US have acted in such an unconscionable lethargic manner as the India did on a disaster that had taken such a horrendous toll in human life and disrupted livelihoods.
Or, echoing the former relief official in Bhopal, could have you sensed an elaborate cover-up?
Take another man-made disaster, one that marked the 20th year in 2009. On March 24, 1989, the oil tanker Exxon Valdez ran aground on the coast of Alaska, creating the biggest maritime ecological disaster in US history. Exxon Valdez went aground after its heavily intoxicated captain decided to retire to his cabin, leaving an unlicensed pilot to steer the fully loaded, 1,000-foot supertanker through a narrow strait in clear violation of US Coast Guard regulations.
?In the beginning, when the supertaker Exxon Valdez gutted herself on Bligh Reef and vomited 11 million gallons of crude oil into Alaska?s exquisite Prince William Sound, it seemed truly like the ending of a world,? so began National Geographic?s January 1990 cover story titled ?Alaska?s Big Spill?.
Crude oil gushed from the stricken tanker damaged about 700 miles of fragile coastline off the Sound, killing whales, sea otters, millions of fish and birds. The spill had a catastrophic effect on local communities, wiping out their herring fishery and depleting the Alaskan salmon industry by harming one of the richest fishing grounds in the US. So, the fishermen sued, but the case of Exxon Shipping Co v. Baker dragged on and on. The case took five years to come to trial. After nearly 14 years of appeals, the Supreme Court finally drew the curtain on the case in June 2008, reducing the $2.5 billion in punitive damages ordered by an appellate court to just more than $507 million. Yet, for Alaskan communities devastated by the spill, the verdict was an affront, and for some good reasons.
That was punitive damages. Earlier, Exxon spent more than $2 billion in total in clean-up and recovery costs. It paid a further $1 billion in damages and compensation. The ship?s captain, a relapsed alcoholic, was convicted in 1990 on charges of dereliction of duty. After the oil spill, the US led a worldwide effort to make supertankers safer with double hulls. The US maritime disaster management system was overhauled. And most species were restored to their natural health in the Arctic.
Now, the contrast between the two tragedies?one that cost 20,000 lives and half a million people suffering life-crippling injuries, and the other that led to no direct human casualty at all?becomes sharper.
Forget the charade you hear in India about the natural partnership between the world?s biggest democracy and its greatest. For a primer on how the wheels of social justice turn in India and the US, consider their handling of the catastrophes. What is the fail here?
The answer is probably one of India?s biggest moral failings. In case of the Bhopal tragedy these past 25 years, it?s simply that one side?deep-pocketed transnational corporate influence power?had every incentive and the financial means to exploit the Indian political and legal system, and it did so to the fullest. And, in the process, the tenets of fair social justice and human rights got either obscured or totally ignored.
On every front, the Indian state had been tested and communicated only weakness.
?The joke is, ?Under capitalism, man exploits man and under socialism, it?s just the other way round.? The handling of the Bhopal disaster by our socialist democratic republic, as we call it, has reduced the joke to a vast understatement,? Thakur says in a sarcasm-heavy tone.
———-rajiv.jayaram@expressindia.com