Bhopal... 25 years have gone and.....

It is 25 years now after one of the worst incidents of manslaughter in independent India. I am not referring here to the murder of Sikhs by the Congress-led gangs in Delhi and elsewhere. It remains a blot on our experience with the rule of the law. But then, I am now referring to the killing of at least fifteen thousand people (the Government of India’s figures have confirmed 15,250 as the number of dead) during the week after December 3 1984, when the poisonous gas began to leak in the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal. It is also a fact that over one lakh people began suffering from respiratory diseases and children born afterwards in that city had congenital diseases diagnosed as due to their parents inhaling the toxins.

All that has happened since then in the quarter of a century are: (1) The plant was shut down; (2) Some money, drawn from the US multinational corporation as compensation to the victims as part of an unfair barter between the Government of India and the company brokered by the Supreme Court has been disbursed to some of the victims. Well that is not all. It is also important to note here that ever since that dark winter morning, when the plant shut down, tonnes of deadly and toxic chemicals were allowed to remain inside the premises, to sink under the soil over the years and contaminate the ground water in as far as a three kilometer distance from where the rusty plant stands now.

In the meanwhile, Union Carbide Corporation sold out its interests in Bhopal including the machines, the chemicals lying in the sumps and elsewhere in the premises and all else to another American corporation called Dow Chemicals. Dow Chemicals bought over Union Carbide in 1999; incidentally, has the operations hub in India located in our own State: It is in one of those swanky buildings in the Guindy region in Chennai. But then, Dow Chemicals, even while admitting that it has purchased all that belonged t Union Carbide Corporation, insists that it will not spend money cleaning up the place in Bhopal. Dow has been maintaining that all the liabilities, in the context of the 1984 disaster have been settled by Union Carbide by way of paying some 470 million dollors being the settlement brokered by the Spreme Court in 1989.

The point I want to make here is that it is a settled law in India as well as the world over that the buyer of an asset also buys up the liability and in this case, Dow Chemicals is bound by law to clean up the mess created by Union Carbide in Bhopal some 25 years ago. For reasons best known to them, the ministers in the successive governments in Delhi since 1999 (that includes the BJP and the Congress) have not been insisting that Dow chemicals act according to settled law. In any case, it is pertinent to state here that Abhishek Manu Singhvi, a vocal face of the ruling Congress, happens to be Dow’s counsel in the Indian courts!

Meanwhile, the New Delhi based Centre for Science and Environment had conducted a study in the recent months in Bhopal. Scientists and activists from the Centre, had gone around the city collecting samples of the ground water there, testing them in laboratories and found huge traces of some such dangerous toxins as mercury, chlorinated benzene compounds and organochlorine. Now, these are metallic toxins that are present in huge quantities in the ground water from even as far as 3 kilometres from where the plant stands and the only reason why they are found is that these toxins, stored in the Bhopal plant over the years since December 1984 have sunk into the ground and mixed with the water in the city.

It is common knowledge that those poor people who consume this water (and they cannot afford to buy water from one of those kinds like Pepsi or Coke) will end up with health problems that are, in fact, a consequence of the 1984 disaster. But then, Dow would argue, through Abhishek Manu Singhvi and other such famous lawyers that they have nothing to do and hence will not entertain compensation claims from these poor people. The CSE’s Sunita Narain, makes a point. That the poisoning that takes place in the present is as dangerous as that happened in December 1984. And if someone there thinks that it is Sunita Narain and an NGO that is making these charges, it is important to point out that studies by the Pollution Control Board in Bhopal have revealed similar results.

The fact is that the Union Carbide handed over the factory to the Government of India in July 1998 (about a year before it was sold to Dow Chemicals) with 8,000 tonnes of toxic effluent and 10,000 tonnes of toxic silt in ponds. And most of these must have sunk deep into the soil contaminating the ground and the water around the place. It is also important to recall that a former Union Carbide employee T R Chouhan had told a US court that between 1969 and 1984, the factory had dumped over 1,900 tonne of chemicals in and around the factory. Another 390 tonne of toxic waste, which was the raw components for the pesticide, has been packed and kept for disposal.

This is a truth that we cannot gloss over now and the sad comment is that none, who have been in power, those in the opposition parties and all those who could have done something to clean up the place had bothered to do that in all these years. It is just another instance that shows the democratic establishment as a sham.