Here is something for legal eagles of the government of India to chew on: while Dow Chemical Company denies any responsibility for damages caused by Union Carbide in Bhopal, it has taken over all liability of Carbide for fighting out over 75,000 asbestos related law suits in the US. Dow/Carbide expects to incur liability costs of $839 million in the coming years. They have already spent a whopping $687 million in litigation costs, besides paying out $1,480 million to an unspecified number of claimants till date. Carbide became a subsidiary of Dow through a merger in 2001.

These facts, gleaned from the mandatory annual filing (Form 10-k) for 2009 submitted by Dow to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) of the US on February 19, 2010, clearly establish that Dow has taken over Union Carbide liabilities for bodily damages caused by the latter’s commercial activities. In the case of Bhopal, Dow has consistently claimed that it had nothing to do with the massive gas leak disaster of December 3, 1984 in the pesticide plant run by Union Carbide.

Read the article here.

[Link via @BhopalMedAppeal]

At a meeting in Sweden recently of young people from around the world, a Nigerian woman shared the grief of her people. She said that, every year for the past 20 years, large quantities of oil, as much as that leaking into the Gulf of Mexico from the broken BP oil rig, have been spilling in her country from an MNC’s leaking pipelines and broken rigs. The waterways have become completely contaminated. The waters are so oily they even burn! Water for drinking and bathing is hard to come by. The health of the people has been badly affected. There are no more fish to catch. Agriculture is impossible. Livelihoods are destroyed. The US media is full of anger with BP for the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. She sympathised with the people of Louisiana whose concerns are known to the whole world now, but she wondered if they even knew what had been happening in Nigeria all these years?
The Indian media is filled with anger with Union Carbide and the tragedy of Bhopal. When a rare brown pelican was smothered in oil in Louisiana, the US President said he was looking for someone’s ass to kick in BP. The people of Bhopal, where thousands of human beings were killed, ask the Indian government why no one’s ass has been kicked.

Read the whole thing

Hear ye, o people of India: don’t think you can get away with really bad stuff, because the long arm of the law will reach out and bring you to trial and give you what you deserve. In Bhopal the law heard 178 prosecution witnesses on the stand talk about the estimated 25,000 people who have died or suffered from methyl isocyanate poisoning and its after-effects since 1984; it heard eight defence witnesses mutter darkly about sabotage; it examined 3,000-odd documents; it fast-tracked the whole thing so that only one of the accused died in the process. The law weighed up the evidence, decided the accused were guilty, and then fearlessly sentenced them to the legal equivalent of a wedgie.

Do you really want a wedgie, o people of India?

Read the whole thing.

Yet, the notion that the main injustice to Bhopal is the failure to extradite then UCC chief Warren Anderson from America is mildly ridiculous. Trying to evade the lessons the 1984 Bhopal gas disaster threw up on the tyranny of giant corporations is completely so. Well over two decades after its MIC gas slaughtered 20,000 (mostly very poor) human beings, Bhopal still pays the price of Carbide’s criminality. (Evident from the long-term impact on the health of the gas-affected. And from the poisoned soil and water around the former Carbide plant.) While the Indian government’s appalling Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Bill, if adopted, would give legal cover to such conduct across the country.

Bhopal marked the horrific beginning of a new era. One that signalled the collapse of restraint on corporate power. The ongoing BP spill in the Mexican Gulf — with estimates ranging from 30,000-80,000 barrels a day — tops off a quarter-of-a-century where corporations could (and have) done anything in the pursuit of profit, at any human cost. Barack Obama’s ‘hard words’ on BP are mostly pre-November poll-rants. The BP can take a lot of comfort from two U.S. Supreme Court judgments in the past two years.

[Read the whole thing.]

Who knows what one swift decision might lead to?

I wonder if those who grant licenses to chemical industries can even picture the possibilities contained within those factories where hazardous chemical compounds are being manufactured. I know I couldn’t have imagined it – boxes of inanimate matter leading to deaths and birth defects even at a generation’s remove… and all it takes is a signature on a piece of paper. A license, a clearing of bureaucratic hurdles, a dismissal of all fears about pollution. A paper – whether in triplicate or not – got signed. And then thousands and thousands of dead mutilated bodies.

Or one signature that led to the imposition of a national emergency. Which led to an overriding of all objections to every state decision – whether from rival politicians, or bureaucrats or the press or activists. Which led to the granting of a license. Which led to…

What exactly the Emergency had to do with the Bhopal tragedy has not been investigated but according to this press release, “on 1st January 1970, Union Carbide Company had applied for industrial license… The company did not get industrial license for more than 5 years. There must have been sufficient reason to withhold permission for industrial license. After the imposition of Emergency, the company was granted the license on till (sic) 31st October, 1975″.

The release is up here . It makes a few other points about state culpability. It quotes Mohan P Tiwari, Chief Judicial Magistrate, Bhopal, whose statement says: “(z) It is worthwhile to mention here that the Government of India and the Team of Scientists admittedly was never permitted to visit the Plant at Verginia, (sic) USA. No brochure, or any other documentary evidence demonstrating the similarity between the two plants at Verginia and Bhopal has been produced before the court by the defence.”

I personally think the victims of 1984 would be perfectly justified in suing the state of Madhya Pradesh and the Government of India. Dow, Union Carbide, Anderson, and the local managers are all guilty and should be punished. But so is the state – for not inspecting the factory and insisting on better safety measures, for not insisting that their scientists be allowed to visit the American plant if they felt it was necessary before granting a license, and for not investigating this whole business of who cleared the project in 1975 and who renewed that license in 1982.

[cross-posted]

It was always about powerful people and hidden motives. Since the verdict, and the public howl of rage, some of these characters have been emerging, like the slug, into the light. Justice Ahmadi, who in 1996 diluted charges against the Indian accused, asks why, if he was wrong, did the CBI not challenge him for 14 years? All those years Bhopal campaigners asked the same thing and got no answer. Now BR Lall, former Director of the CBI, reveals that he was ordered in writing by the Ministry of External Affairs not to try too hard to extradite Anderson. When asked why he did not speak out before, he said, ‘About the hawala case I wrote a book, I made all the evidence public. So what is so great that about every case that I should go to public?’

What is so great? Twenty thousand dead? Half a million affected? One lakh still seriously ill?

In July 2004, a US intelligence agent in Mumbai reported to Washington that Indian ministers, for political reasons, would pretend to be pro-extradition. Other documents show that the US Departments of Justice and State colluded with Carbide’s public relations people and Indian authorities on a strategy for saving Anderson. “Hope it works,” one judicial officer remarked.

Read the whole thing.

Delhi has set the gold standard for cynicism. It operates on four axioms: public memory is a dwarf; anger is effervescent; media can be massaged at the appropriate moment; any public crisis can be assuaged with crumbs, while the promotion of private interests continues off-screen.

Jairam Ramesh’s promise of a Green Tribunal in Bhopal is a classical instance of a crumb dipped in the pickle of hypocrisy. Where was this or any other tribunal in the last 26 years when the dead, the deformed and blind babies and the stillborn fetuses were a reminder that justice must be done? Or is this tribunal meant for the next onslaught by the dogs of chemical war upon the sleeping slums of Bhopal? Who was Veerappa Moily trying to fool when he claimed that the case against Warren Anderson had not been closed? Why doesn’t he keep the case open for a few more years, until God closes the chapter by taking Anderson away to whichever destination has been allotted to the butcher of Bhopal? A Group of Ministers has been appointed — merely to buy time until the return of amnesia.

Read the whole thing.

Join us for an Evening of songs of Freedom and Justice !

After 26 years and nearly two generations of untold sufferings, nightmares, pain, trauma, lost livelihoods and a historic fight for justice from Bhopal to all across the world the verdict is : to two years imprisonment and a fine of Rs. one lakh each under section 304(a), imprisonment of 3 months and a fine of Rs.250 under Sec 336, 6 months and Rs.500 under Sec 337 and 2 years and Rs.1,000 under Sec 338; all the sentences to run concurrently and UCIL to pay a paltry 5 Lakh rupees.

It’s shame for the judicial system and another blot on the secular, socialist democratic traditions of the country. It’s an insult to those who died, continue to die and rubs salt to unhealed wounds of those survived and who have struggled in face of unsurmountable odds for all these years. The citizens of Delhi and the whole country are enraged at this travesty of justice and petty politicking which has marred the worst industrial disaster in human history.

We call upon you all to join for an evening to express yourself on the streets of Jantar Mantar in words, verses, banners, posters, poems, songs or actions… we will perform a die-in action too demanding justice in Bhopal and light candles in memory of those who died and salute to those who continue to struggle and suffer. Let us join hands and stand up for justice in Bhopal.

If you’re on Facebook, the event page is here.

Leave a comment here if you’re organising, or know of, events elsewhere.

I spent some time on the Bhopal website. They have a timeline tool. It shows you a page crowded with information on what happened during the gas tragedy in December 1984. On the right, there is a horizontal bar with forward/backward arrows in neon green. I clicked on the forward arrow.

There was nothing. And nothing. And nothing. And nothing.

Then there was something, a little something. In 1989. Criminal charges against Carbide. Then a little further on, in 1991, the Supreme Court review of the Carbide settlement. Then, in 1992, the reopening of the criminal liability case. Then in 1993, Union Carbide and Warren Anderson were declared ‘absconders’ from the law.

And then nothing. And nothing. And nothing. All the way to now, and nothing.

While keeping my finger on the click button of the mouse, arm began to hurt. I was irritated and frustrated at staring at the blank screen. I wanted to speed things up. Move on. Move on to the point where something happened. Why was 1989 taking so long to turn into 1991? Why was 2002 not moving into 2005. Why was 2005 dragging? I found myself just wanted to give up. Shut the window. Look at something else. Plenty of other ways to waste time on the internet.

And then I began to wonder – what is it like for nothing to happen if you are on the timeline?

When 1989 never ended. Where 2005 never quite began. And if it did, it looks no different from 1985, or 2009. What happened to time, if (almost) nothing was all that happened?

What must it be like to sit there and wait for something to happen, and not even be able to click a button. Not be able to shut windows. Not be able to waste time because so much of your time, your life, your patience, your body has already been wasted.

And as for what happened in 1989? This.

…the Indian Supreme Court unilaterally, without giving the victims a chance to make their case, imposed a settlement to the amount of $470 million, with the government to make up any shortfall. The government had asked for $3 billion from Carbide. Carbide executives vere delighted; they speedily transferred the money to the government. That was in 1989. The first victim did not see the first rupee of Carbide’s money until Christmas of 1992, eight years after the night of the gas. A total of 597,000 claims for compensation have been filed. As of May 1996, the government has passed rulings on only about half of them – 302,422 – and awarded compensation for injuries to 288,000 Bhopalis…

Although the government isn’t releasing figures about the average amount of awards, the welfare commissioner’s office told me that the maximum compensation awarded for deaths is 150,000 rupees ($4286), except in a handful of cases. Mohammed Laique, a local lawyer who has been representing claimants from the beginning, gave me the standard rates of compensation. For most deaths, the amount awarded is 100,000 rupees ($2857). For personal injury cases, 90 per cent get 25,000 rupees, or $714 (the award bestowed on most of the survivors I spoke to directly).

Read the whole piece. It talks not only of the tragedy of poison gas. It talks of the tragedy that us. India. Our courts, our bureaucracy, our people. Us.

Cross-posted here.

(Published in the Annual Magazine-Redefining Limits SCM batch 2009-2010. Reprodcued here courtesy Deepti Khera)

On December 4, 1984 the city of Bhopal in Madhya Pradesh witnessed an extraordinary exodus. Every train, every bus, every vehicle leaving the city was packed with people. For in the early hours of the morning, over 40 tonnes of deadly methyl isocyanate, and other poisonous gases such as hydrogen cyanide, leaked from a pesticide factory, owned and run by the Union Carbide Corporation, USA, now Dow Chemicals.

Naturally, the trains coming into the city were almost empty. But on board one of them was Sathinath Sarangi, better known as Sathyu, who had been taking a break from the rigours of a PhD in engineering, in his village, Paliyapitariya,in Oshangabad district.Sarangi says, “I heard of the Bhopal gas tragedy on the radio. I immediately decided to visit Bhopal. It was simply out of curiosity to know what was happening in the city. I decided to go there for a week. But what I saw that day was much more terrible than what I heard on the radio. People were wandering down the road with swollen eyes, tears streaming from them. Many were hobbling as if in pain. Some had fallen down and found it impossible to get up.”

Sarangi had not been motivated by anything nobler than a vague desire to see what he could do to help. He says, “I had other plans, a thesis to complete. But once I came to Bhopal there was no going back.”

Sarangi is now a founding trustee of the Sambhavna Trust studies on the ongoing health impacts on the victims. He is the one who has been constantly fighting against the injustice, staging demonstration, filing cases and lobbying against any other future Bhopal. He is the one who is committed to fight unless the people get justice. He has been arrested, threatened, charged in court for many false allegations and humiliated. But he soldiers on.

It has been 25 years of Bhopal gas tragedy, one of world’s worst industrial disasters. Though it is often said that time is the greatest healer, the passage of time has only magnified the problem. Year after year, government after government, election after election, they hear promises which evaporate once the ballot boxes are emptied.

The tragedy continues. Women do not conceive and when they do, a high percentage have birth defects. Blindness, fused fingers or toes, missing limbs, cleft lips are some of the symptoms of the havoc that the cocktail of gases has unleashed in the survivors’ DNA. Many have disrupted immune systems and succumb to opportunistic infections.

The question you see in Salma’s eyes is clear. Is there any justice for the survivors? Warren Anderson, who was Chief Executive Officer of the company, lives in comfort in the USA. He is wanted by Interpol and the government of India on charges of manslaughter but that does not stop him from living the good life. Greenpeace International tells us that his yearly golf club membership alone is three to four times the compensation paid to those survivors who were lucky enough to get any money.

And this is the man who ran a plant that blatantly disregarded security. Sarangi recounts the list of what went wrong. The plant was badly designed. It was located in a high population density area. Safety measures were ignored. In order to increase profits, personnel were reduced.

He says, “There is ample evidence of “double standards” being followed by the American multinational. Bhopal’s sister plant in West Virginia is far superior in storage, production and safety systems. There are enough documents to show that Union Carbide and its seniormost officials knew that the factory in Bhopal was a ticking time bomb and did nothing because they did not want to spend money on a plant that was yet to yield big bucks.”

And so the gases leaked, and covered almost all of the city of Bhopal, exposing 500,000 people to these deadly gases.. About 8,000 people died in the first three days. More than 23,000 people have died so far. And people continue to die today. About 120,000 to 150,000 continue to be ill from the exposure.

The worst began after the tragedy. The officials of the company refused to disclose what gas it was. According to them this was “highly confidential information”, even though thousands of people were dying. They maintained it was just like tear gas and the impact would not last long.

In the initial years the government actively discouraged independent efforts in medical relief, monitoring and research. But Sarangi managed to open the Jana Swasthya Kendra in 1985. It was actually raided by the police and all documents were confiscated. He was jailed for 18 days.

But Sarangi refused to give up his fight. For he knew things were getting worse. Every day. Official research showed that the number of dead and those with exposure-related illnesses had actually gone up in the years after the disaster. There were manifestations of “new” diseases such as tuberculosis, cancers and reproductive problems among young survivors.

Meanwhile, government hospitals had no treatment protocol for exposure-specific illnesses and no means to monitor effect of therapies. With help from voluntary doctors and other researchers, he carried out a survey that showed that the chronically ill survivors were being routinely prescribed potentially harmful drugs, thus compounding their exposure-related problems. Official research on long term effects of exposure had been abandoned.

Under such circumstances he started Sambhavana Trust in the eleventh year of the disaster, when most people had begun to forget. He says, “It started with the understanding that by including treatments based on ayurveda and yoga, involving individuals and communities in the improvement of health and health care, introducing participatory monitoring and research methods and other innovations, it was possible to create a workable alternative to the Bhopal medical establishment.”

By now the Sambhavna Trust has treated over 23, 000 gas disaster survivors and people exposed to contamination. It also provides health education, training in medical and survey skills to health volunteers in a population of over 20,000. Sambhavana grows herbs and manufactured high quality ayurvedic medicines. Apart from this it carries out medical research to establish damage caused to the children of gas-exposed parents and to people drinking contaminated ground water and on the efficacy of yoga in treatment of exposure-induced injuries. It also runs an informal school with 50 children from Oriya Basti.

The Central and State governments have always tried to downplay the human and environmental damage caused by the disaster. “The major reason for the health problems is the contaminated water that the people of the affected area are forced to drink. Though the government’s stand is that Dow is liable to clean the land, the government has hardly taken any action.”

He points out that, the Central Government has agreed to set up an “Empowered Commission on Bhopal” for long-term rehabilitation of gas disaster survivors and those exposed to contamination. Although this happened in August 2008, the Commission is yet to be set up. In 2008 when Sarangi with survivors and victims marched to Delhi and when these people were quietly demonstrating there, they got another gift from the government. All of them, including the children, were put behind bars. “That’s the government stand on the issue,” he says.

In the last four months, Minister of State for Environment and Forests Jairam Ramesh and Madhya Pradesh Urban Administration and Development Minister Babulal Gaur have publicly stated that there was no toxic contamination due to the chemical waste from Union Carbide. Sarangi believes that the state government has also been criminally negligent on the issue of providing clean water to the people in the communities with contaminated ground water. The money to provide piped water was provided in 2006 and the state government has so far postponed the deadline four times and still about 18,000 people are drinking contaminated water.

But Sarangi will not give up. He says, “Unless these people are punished, the message to the corporate world goes out: you are free to kill for your benefit.” Sarangi did meet with the officials of Dow Chemicals. His meeting put him behind bars; the company took him to court for distributing a Bhopal Gas Tragedy fact sheet at their shareholders’ meeting.

This does not slow him down. “It keeps me going. It has made me more hopeful, which is weird,” he says. “But there’s hope because even under these circumstances, things are possible. You have the government, the corporations, and the legal system against you. The scientific bodies are apathetic. Medical institutions don’t care. And yet things have been done and victories have been won.” His optimism gleams as he recites lines of his own poem:

Yes.
I am a rabid Optimist
For me
Every tree that continues to stand
Every stream that continues to flow
Every child that runs away from the home
Is an indication
that the battle is not only on
It is being won.

Today I woke up to a strange conundrum
Am I a Bhopali or am I not
It takes a few seconds to say I am one
on a Facebook page
And it costs nothing
But I can’t bring myself to -
at least not yet
I know Facebook is good and Twitter is better
To reach out to people and
get them to care about causes that matter
But I can’t bring myself to -
at least not just yet.

It costs nothing and is simple to do
As simple as pressing a button which
says I AM A DUDE
or I HATE LUV STORYS
As costless as a tarot reading
Or consulting Anita the online psychic
Not as entertaining as playing Poker
or Scrabble
but better perhaps than that
Farmville thing
But I can’t bring myself to -
at least not yet

“Oh stop being such an insufferable prig”
A little voice whispers
and I try not to shout back at it
The numbers and the statistics -
The full magnitude of the disaster
The complete travesty of justice made
For I know, I know these numbers only
because of an invite to that FB page
So I decide I will join cause
Press that button on that FB page
But I can’t bring myself to -
at least not yet.

First, I’ll take a few minutes
and write out a cheque
I know money is not everything
It will not bring back the dead
Or make us citizens of another nation
where justice is subverted less
But money’s language is less ambiguous
It says I am sorry for your pain
And sorry for my own helplessness
in the face of it
In the complex arithmetic of my life
This is the number I have been able to put
to our brotherhood
It is little but I hope that somewhere
it will all add up

So for the moment
I am not a Bhopali,
not just quite yet
I’m just an old fashioned woman
trying to make my way around
supporting causes
in a new fangled world.
But I do hope to get there soon.

This is my first letter to you. I have to confess, I didn’t much care when you won the election. It may have been history in the making but it was American history and I live too far away to care. I didn’t wear Obama T-shirts. I didn’t read the book. I didn’t buy the ‘Change’. Call me cynical. Goes with the job description.

But today, I feel compelled to write to you. You’re having a problem with oil spills. I don’t know how you’re going to deal with it but you’ve been promising compensation and not just ‘nickel and dime’ stuff. Which is good. By and large, the US seems to take accidents, the disabling of human beings and monetary compensation pretty seriously.

I also read about some plans to compensate veterans, those who worked to test nuclear weapons. It says here that the compensation could be pretty generous.

But your people have always fought for proper compensation and establishment of liability. One of your worst disasters was the Texas City Disaster of 1947, in which 581 people died. I don’t need to tell you why etc. But compensation claims were filed against the USA and – I’m wiki-quoting here – “the district court found the United States responsible for a litany of negligent acts of omission and commission by 168 named agencies and their representatives in the manufacture, packaging, and labeling of ammonium nitrate, further compounded by errors in transport, storage, loading, fire prevention, and fire suppression, all of which led to the explosions and the subsequent carnage. On June 10, 1952, the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned this decision, finding that the United States maintained the right to exercise its own “discretion” in vital national matters. The Supreme Court affirmed that decision.”

But, “Congress acted to provide some compensation after the courts refused to do so… When the last claim had been processed in 1957, 1,394 awards, totaling nearly $17,000,000, had been made.”

Are you counting the zeroes, Mr Obama? That was the year 1957.

Before that, when the South Fork dam burst in 1889, “victims suffered a series of legal defeats in their attempt to recover damages from the dam’s owners. Public indignation at that failure prompted a major development in American law—state courts’ move from a fault-based regime to strict liability.”

More recently, the 2008 Chatsworth train collision caused 25 deaths. Wikipedia tells me “Lawyers quickly began filing claims against Metrolink, and in total, they are expected to exceed a US$200 million liability limit set in 1997… An attorney representing two of the victims agreed, saying payouts could range from $5 million to $10 million per death or serious injury.”

You people are talking $5 million per death. And here, in my country, we are talking 55 cents per death.

I recognize that this is a failure of our justice system. Ours, not yours. But I pose to you a moral question. Is it okay to shield a wanted man in a case of this kind? Warren Anderson might be a US citizen. But we’re talking over 22,000 lost lives. Enough zeroes, Mr Obama, what do you say?

It’s a mess you’ve inherited, I know. But what would your legal stand be if your daughters, 26 years later, were giving birth to deformed kids, all because Anderson wanted to save a few dollars ($37.68 to be precise, on one critical process)? What would you have done with blinded babies?

Could it be that you are too busy to know that your government has not lifted a finger to extradite a certain Mr Warren Anderson even though there’s a new you, heading a government of ‘change’.

Take a look at this: “On 20th July official sources from the government of India announced that the May 2003 extradition request had been turned down on “technical grounds”. A month later the State Minister for External Affairs, E. Ahmed, claimed the request had been rejected because it failed to satisfy some clauses of the India-US extradition treaty… Warren bhai, who first ignored an Interpol summons to the Bhopal courts some sixteen years ago is, as ever, as silent as the gas cloud released from the factory that a ‘high standard of evidence’ shows the company he ran was at such pains to control. We examine some of the evidence and speculate on how it can be that the world’s most infamous corporate accused is still getting away with culpable homicide…”

And yes, culpable homicide it is.

“After Ashraf’s death (from a chemical poisoning accident at the factory), Union Carbide management sent a team of US engineers to conduct a ‘business confidential’ safety audit. The May 1982 report identified 61 hazards, 30 of them major and 11 in the dangerous phosgene/MIC unit. Safety measures were improved at Carbide’s MIC plant in West Virginia, but not in Bhopal, where, incredibly, Carbide responded to the death of Ashraf Khan by intensifying its cost-cutting in the most dangerous areas of the plant.”

Do I need to spell it out for you, Mr Obama? Just read the bold lettering if you are short on time. US engineers conduct a safety audit. They see a dangerous situation at their chemical factory. They go about making arrangements to cut risks to American lives. They go about increasing the risk to Indian lives.

Should we just spell it out now, Mr Obama. Its called racism. R-A-C-I-S-M.

Your guys – American citizens whom your government is unwilling to arrest and hand over to my country’s law system – knew what they were doing. And I want them punished, sir. Ideally, with imprisonment. But most certainly with a big, fat fine. Not nickels and dimes, sir.

Now look at this: “Dow set aside $2.2 billion to meet Carbide asbestos liabililities in the US. However it bluntly refuses to accept Carbide’s liabilities in Bhopal – or even admit that they exist.”

You know, there is a famous Hindi film dialogue that I quote often. Roughly translated, it is this question: Is your blood, blood, and our blood water?

So Mr Promised Change, how much my life is worth? Is it worth as much as an American life? White, brown, black, whatever. You choose. Decide how much criminal culpability can be established, and what you – as the first representative of the the USA to the rest of the world – should do about this mess. Let Anderson negotiate his own way to freedom if he can. Let him decide how much his freedom is worth. Don’t let him decide how much poor Indians are worth. Dow has said they would prefer to stand trial in India, after all. Send the officials over. They’ve a lot to answer for, and whole lot to pay for.

Warm regards

Annie

P.S. Separately, would you consider passing a law that forbids Dow/Union Carbide from leaving the USA? A kind of business internment? In the interest of world peace, security and human rights, it would be helpful if those guys were forbidden from doing business in developing countries. While you’re at it, you could intern Monsanto too. We’ve got enough sh*t to deal with and would appreciate not having to deal with your sh*t. We can’t afford it. If you can, you keep it.

(originally posted here)

The iconic Amul girl lends her support to Bhopal.

Courtesy Rahul DaCunha, da Cunha Communications

25 years it took to come to this conclusion?

As Indra Sinha says in The Guardian’s Comment is Free

The company fined $11,000 for causing the deaths of more than 20,000 people? That’s 55 cents a death. What of the quarter of a century of suffering endured by more than 100,000 sick survivors? Eleven cents apiece. As criminal damages go, never has a lower price been set on human life and health.

Twenty-six years after the Bhopal gas tragedy which claimed thousands of lives, a local court trying the case would pronounce its verdict on June 7.
Chief Judicial Magistrate Mohan P Tiwari said Thursday he will pronounce the judgement on June seven on the toxic leak from the Union Carbide India Limited (UCIL) factory (now defunct), after the arguments of prosecution, CBI, and defence of eight accused drew to a close in the 23-year-old trial.
During the trial, 178 prosecution witnesses were examined and 3,008 documents were exhibited.
CBI counsel C Sahay has argued that the world’s worst industrial disaster occurred due to defective design of the UCIL’s factory and poor maintenance.
Sahay told the court that the Union Carbide Corporation, USA, surveyed the UCIL’s Bhopal factory in 1982 and found serious safety and maintenance lapses on nearly 10 counts.
He contended that even after UCC experts’ team visit adequate safety measures and maintenance work did not take place in the UCIL.

In another attempt to gain legitimacy in India, Dow are sponsoring the College of Engineering, Guindy’s Kurukshetra ‘Techfest 2010′. IIT Delhi and Kanpur have returned Dow’s money and it is never too late to do the right thing!!!
Why not send a polite email to the dean or vice-chancellor and suggest just that!
Vice Chancellor
Mannar Jawahar
Email: vc AT annauniv DOT edu
Dean, CEG, Dr. M. Sekar
Email: munusekar AT annauniv DOT edu

From the Facebook wall of the Bhopal Medical Appeal

On the 25th Anniversary of the Bhopal Gas Disaster, Kids for a Better Future tried to give hundreds of hearts to DOW Chemicals. With new hearts, the hoped that the heartless company would finally take responsibility for its mess in Bhopal, where they have killed 25,000 people and left another 150,000 seriously ill. Scared silly of these kids, the company closed down its offices for the day and ran for cover.

There’s also a photo album here, and a report here.

All links courtesy Akash and Gautam Mehta. As their father (who, by the way, wrote this a few days ago), said to us via email, “My children, Gautama (14) and Akash (11) are involved with activism around the Bhopal issue. Their work shows that Bhopal is not forgotten in America, and there’s a second generation that’s taking up the struggle for justice.”

(The Kids For a Better Future website)

We exchanged a few comments, but I continued thinking about the issues — not just Bhopal, but the lack of interest in the 25th year anniversary. A couple of days later (i.e., today) I posted a comment at my blog which I’m re-posting here:

There’s been so little traffic at that website … it’s very sad. This is where I think we’ve got to recognize the worth of raving and ranting — in a world where the squeaking wheel gets greased, they are the squeakers.
I am NOT good at raving/ranting and I resist “hearing” those who do. So I guess I’m not good at either end of the spectrum. I think it’s atrocious that Bhopal gets so little attention. Why is it so? In my opinion it’s because there’s a deep-seated cultural abhorrence towards criticizing “home” and “family”; many Indians transpose their feelings towards HOME/FAMILY onto the country they belong to — without thinking their feelings through. There has to be SOME reason why so few writers/artists/film-makers have chosen Bhopal as their subject!

A more cynical reason: no catastrophe of similar proportions has occurred in Western democracies, hence there are no ballads/films/novels from which Indians can make their localized imitations …

But WHY isn’t there a greater sense of shame, horror, repugnance?

I didn’t like Indra Sinha’s ANIMAL’S PEOPLE — I found it crudely polarized in the familiar Bollywoodian style,so that we’re left with a cast of grotesques and one-dimensionals. Still — at least it was written, at least it’s there to be critiqued and dissected!

There should be many more.

I drew posters for the street exhibition in Bombay immediately after the news broke. That’s the extent of my involvement. I don’t have any valid excuses to offer. I can only complain, about myself and about others. But hey — at least I’m complaining!

So that’s what I posted at my blog — but after posting it, I continued to feel angry. So I thought I’d port that little spark of anger across here, to this blog, in the hope of engaging at least a couple of others on the subject of WHY — i.e., I’m looking for further answers to the question I asked myself in the above comment — WHY Bhopal doesn’t inspire more than a shrug of the shoulders, a sigh, a shake of the head.

I found myself saying: Maybe I should think back to what it was like, that year. We had seen the storming of the Golden Temple; the unrest in Punjab following the riots;  then on October 31st,  the terrible news of Mrs Gandhi’s assassination ; and finally, the abomination of the anti-Sikh riots. All of that had happened in the weeks just preceding that night of December 3rd.

I can remember the numbness that overcame me. It was truly, unbearably, extreme. I felt I simply couldn’t face one more horror and yet, as the news came out of Bhopal, the pictures, the accounts, it was like a relentless tide. The anti-Sikh riots had already been that, for me and now, here was something more terrible, more enormous — even though I had already thought that, during the anti-Sikh riots.

It may be cheap to mention this — but I am actually crying as I write this — and I am neither patriotic nor given to emotional outbursts. I’m not even sure why I’m crying: is it because the road we have traveled since then has only grown worse and worse — and that today most of us are truly so deadened with overload that we simply can’t feel anything any more? I’d like to think it’s because I had forgotten what it was to feel that sense  of doom, as if a black curtain were falling over a particular idea I’d had about the world we lived in and in particular the country I belonged to; that I am distraught to be reminded of the desolation I felt then.

“Wake up people of Bhopal, you are on the edge of a volcano!”

In September 1982, Bhopali journalist Raj Keswani wrote a terrifying story, the first of a series of articles, for the city’s Jansatta daily. Bhopal was about to be annihilated. “It will take just an hour, at most an hour-and-a-half, for every one of us to die.”

Keswani’s information came from worried staff at the Union Carbide factory, where a worker, Ashraf Khan, had just been killed in a phosgene spill. The first world war gas was used in the production of MIC (methyl-isocyanate), a substance 500 times deadlier than hydrogen cyanide, and so volatile that unless kept in spotless conditions, refrigerated to 0C, it can even react explosively with itself. Cooling it slows reactions, buys time, but MIC is so dangerous that chemical engineers recommend not storing it at all unless absolutely necessary and then only in the tiniest quantities. In Bhopal it was kept in a huge tank, the size of a steam locomotive.

Far from the shining cathedral of science depicted in Union Carbide adverts, the Bhopal factory more closely resembled a farmyard. Built in the 70s to make pesticides for India’s “green revolution”, a series of bad monsoons and crop failures had left it haemorrhaging money.

Read on.

गीतांजलि
भोपाल

To complement Animal’s indomitable spirit in this issue, artist Venantius J Pinto gives life to his ferocity, seemingly riding on the River Styx in a netherworld of frustration and despair. Yet somewhere lurks the ability to perceive and derive strength from rejection and the denial of compassion.

Animal in Bhopal By Indra Sinha
Regional winner of the 2008 Commonwealth Writer’s Prize, Indra Sinha, in this exclusive for Himal resurrects Animal, who continues to be boundless, refusing to accept the restraint of human law, custom or convention.

December 1984 By Sathyu Sarangi
Many of the battles begun 25 years ago, in the aftermath of catastrophe, continue today.

The specious ‘corporate veil’
Interview with H Rajan Sharma, international lawyer practicing in New York, currently lead counsel in a class-action litigation against Union Carbide.

IN the Mumbai kindergarten my son went to, the children never had to clean up after themselves; that was the servants’ job. So I really liked the school my son attended when we moved back to Brooklyn, where the teachers made the children tidy up at the end of the day. “Cleanup time, cleanup time!” my 6-year-old sang, joyfully gathering his scraps. It’s a wonderful American tradition: you always clean up the mess you made.

and

Union Carbide and Dow were allowed to get away with it because of the international legal structures that protect multinationals from liability. Union Carbide sold its Indian subsidiary and pulled out of India. Warren Anderson, the Union Carbide chief executive at the time of the gas leak, lives in luxurious exile in the Hamptons, even though there’s an international arrest warrant out for him for culpable homicide. The Indian government has yet to pursue an extradition request. Imagine if an Indian chief executive had jumped bail for causing an industrial disaster that killed tens of thousands of Americans. What are the chances he’d be sunning himself in Goa?

The Indian government, fearful of scaring away foreign investors, has not pushed the issue with American authorities. Dow has used a kind of blackmail with the Indians; a 2006 letter from Andrew Liveris, the chief executive, to India’s ambassador to the United States asked for guarantees that Dow would not be held liable for the cleanup, and thanked him for his “efforts to ensure that we have the appropriate investment climate.”

and

The survivors of Bhopal want only to be treated as human beings — not victims, not greedy money-grabbers, just human beings who’ve gone through hell and are entitled to a measure of dignity. That includes concrete things like cleaning up the mess and providing health care for the sick, and also something more abstract but equally important — an acknowledgment that a wrong was done to them, and an apology, which Bhopalis have yet to receive.

That was another fine thing my son learned in the Brooklyn school: when you’ve done something bad, you should say you’re sorry. After a quarter of a century, Dow should acknowledge that it is responsible for a very big mess. And now, it’s cleanup time.

Read the whole piece.