Permanent links
Daily links
Journal sitefeed
Movies sitefeed
del.icio.us sitefeed
RSS
3 December 2004
Twenty years onwards after the Bhopal episode
Today marks the twentieth anniversary of the Bhopal/Union Carbide gas tragedy episode. On the night of 2 December, 1984 on account of some carelessness of one of the workers at Union Carbide, methyl iso-cyanate gas leaked and wreaked havoc on the city's residents. From that day onwards, Bhopal has always been associated to the world with the ghastly maladies and hazards attending mankind that are the undesirable concomitant of our aggressive avowal of the cause of industrial growth and economic development. The Union Carbide India Limited plant in Bhopal manufactured pesticide and was a joint venture between Union Carbide, a now-defunct American firm purchased by Dow Chemicals, and the Government of India. In the year 1984, when the License Raj was in its heyday such joint ventures were the order of the day. What this meant was that companies from outside India could establish joint ventures within the country so long as domestic firms owned a majority stake in the Indian holding. In UCIL's case, the Government of India was one of the domestic owners. To set up such ventures, all that was required was the right kind of connections and the right kind of money to appease all the middlemen in the massive bureaucratic jumble that began with purchasing land and capital equipment to registering the company to procuring cheap labour. Also, in the year 1984 -- though it has not significantly improved since -- standards on industrial equipment were lax and scarcely enforced. We were and continue to be a happy-go-lucky people who are scarcely aware of such trifling details as minimal safety guarantees or emergency routines as was also recently evidenced in the Kumbakonam fire episode. Our third-world nonchalance, averseness or perhaps apathy to the value of life with there being such a preternatural abundance of it amidst us and hard-nosed preference for self-advancement must have been godsends to UCIL and many other companies similarly engaged in India's past. Labour was cheap and illiterate, so there probably was no point in educating it of the heavy responsibility that lay in the hands of the workers who operated the valves and storage-tanks in the deep underground entrails of UCIL's corpus. The valves themselves were probably substandard and given to easy coercion by its gaseous constituents but then the company was blessed by the government and did not have to abide by the strict and severe regulations it would have faced elsewhere in Europe or the United States when it came to purchasing equipment and ensuring proper safeguards.Some may think and have consistently argued so that the tragedy in Bhopal was a result of blind capitalism on Union Carbide's part. The government however, being an agent and instrument of the people's power, has rarely been reprimanded for having allowed this to pass. The fault does not lie entirely in what transpired on that fateful day on the 2nd of December in 1984; it goes back a long way. It is rooted in our insensitivity, in our corrupt living, in our reconciliation with having to be ruled and administered by mediocrity. It does not behove us to be apportioning all the blame with Union Carbide unless we consider introspection into how and whether Bhopal really changed anything in India. Sure, there have been no major industrial tragedies on the scale of Bhopal's in the twenty years to date but our callousness can hardly be claimed to have died. Once again, I look to Kumbakonam to make my case but there have been incidents much more severe, much more damning -- take for instance the by-now regular stampedes at the Kumbh Melas, hooch tragedies, building collapses, fire accidents in cinema-halls, railway accidents. Ultimately, while it is all well and good to take offence when we are called Third World unless we seek to rescue ourselves from the rut of contempt for life and a parochial world-view that the so-called First World thinks we are inured to, we hardly deserve a better epithet.
But let us stay a while longer on the Bhopal episode. What happened in the years that have passed? Union Carbide folded up and was purchased by Dow Chemicals. India took Union Carbide to court and won damages worth $475 million which were deposited by Dow Chemicals as part of its having acquired Union Carbide's liability. Dow subsequently promptly averred that they took no further responsibility for the episode. Let us set aside the question of how the monetary damage was estimated -- it is an unfathomable conundrum to estimate the loss to property and life over a period of twenty years and surely the foreseeable future on account of the incompetence of a few in 1984. What begs asking is if there is any point in trying to hold Dow Chemicals accountable for further compensation once the monetary damages have already been settled? Surely, the argument cannot have any ethical underpinnings for that is going to be hard to demonstrate in a court of law and even if it did one can hardly expect a publicly-owned company to act in deference to the moral inclinations of a few. It is my belief that once the damages had been settled on, Dow was not required to owe up to any wrongdoing (and that too merely for acquiring a company that sinned in the past). The second issue which is hardly of any consequence but is being pursued upon only perhaps to bring psychological succour to those that continue to suffer is that of India pursuing the extradition of Warren Anderson, Union Carbide's CEO at the time of the disaster and unfortunately for the government, a United States citizen.
The twentieth anniversary of the Bhopal gas tragedy is not one to be spent in futile clamouring for a fair ear -- even though that is perhaps the sole profession of and spotlight opportunity for a few rabid "social activists"; it ought to be spent in contemplating how best to correct our moral compasses and to reinstil in ourselves some regard for our fellow being while he still lives. It is futile to rail against the spread of globalisation and industrialisation -- we must instead be more pragmatic and focus on how to cope and curb industry where there is real conflict of interest with issues that we hold dearer. I guess with that, I have used up my ration of moralising for this year.
