Bhopal ruling heightens sense of betrayal

Abdul Jabbar Khan chokes up when he walks underneath the steel pipework and corroding tanks of the Union Carbide plant in the Indian city of Bhopal.

The memories of the thousands of dead from a deadly poison gas cloud that erupted when water accidentally entered a methyl isocyanate storage tank 26 years ago are too fresh. In one of the world’s worst industrial accidents, Mr Khan lost three family members and suffered damage to his eyesight.

The community within an 8km radius of the plant lost between 8,000 and 30,000 people, by various estimates. Some were gassed instantly as they slept, others died lingering and painful deaths in the years that followed.

“In my view this is a graveyard,” Mr Khan says between long silences. “We should make this a big memorial like the Nazi concentration camps or Hiroshima nuclear bomb site.”

A court verdict this week brought the accident’s sorry history sharply to light. Many, including senior Indian officials, were taken by surprise by how open the wounds inflicted by the accident remain. A local court in Bhopal convicted one of India’s top industrialists, Keshub Mahindra, and seven other people of criminal negligence over the gas leak. The former members of Union Carbide’s senior management in India were each sentenced to two years in jail and fined Rs100,000 ($2,130, €1,765, £1,456). Mr Khan attacks the ruling, saying: “This Bhopal judgment will be quoted in courtrooms everywhere in the favour of multinationals.”

The Union Carbide pesticide plant to this day looks as if it has been recently abandoned and is hauntingly intact. In the control room hangs a board explaining what to do when alarms sound. Outside, the excavated giant black tank in which the deadly chemical reaction took place lies like a beached submarine. More tanks lie nearby in a cracked underground concrete bunker rent open by extreme heat, their dials burst.

A few hundred metres away, in the suburb of JP Nagar, blighted families store a disturbing collection of medical records, death certificates and compensation grants alongside family photos in their tightly packed dwellings. Shams Saad Begum, a 28-year-old widow, received Rs100,000 for her son, Raja, and Rs25,000 for her husband, Mohammed Saieed. Locals complain that poisons continue to leach into the groundwater.

Satyanath Sarangi, president of the Bhopal Group for Information and Action, attributes renewed interest in the accident to the debate about corporate liability in light of BP’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and proposed legislation in India that would cap compensation in case of a nuclear accident.

“There’s been a groundswell of outrage,” says Mr Sarangi. “All the charges against the US parent company were extinguished after the settlement . . . But if European companies are held accountable in the US, why not US companies when they are abroad?”

According to Jairam Ramesh, India’s environment minister, 325 tonnes of toxic material lies at the site along with a bitter legacy that has intractably linked Bhopal, a once beautiful lakeside city, with Union Carbide, now part of US multinational Dow Chemical.

The site, now the property of Madhya Pradesh state, bears testament to a rehabilitation that never happened and the halting legal process to bring those responsible to book.

After paying $470m compensation in 1989, Union Carbide, based in Danbury, Connecticut, wiped its hands of responsibility, much to the anger of locals. They view Warren Anderson, the company’s elderly American former chairman, as the city’s bogeyman and hang effigies of him from gallows on Bhopal’s streets. The sense of betrayal is also trained on the Indian government.

The central and state governments have over the years bickered about compensation and its disbursement. “The state government says we don’t have the money. The centre says we gave you the money and you have not used it,” says Rachna Dhingra, a campaigner with the Bhopal Group.

The court sentence, in the eyes of Mr Khan and others who believe the plant was mismanaged and used untested technology, was paltry. The surviving seven defendants – one died as the case proceeded – may still be years away from imprisonment as they are expected to appeal. The judgment is also likely to be challenged by activists who want to press on with charges of “culpable homicide” and seek Mr Anderson’s extradition.

Union Carbide said this week that its executives were not responsible for the plant’s operation, only those of its Indian subsidiary.

Robert Blake, a senior US state department official, urged India not to allow Bhopal to damage warming US-India relations.

Some Indian politicians have quickly turned on Washington. Brinda Karat, a senior member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) described the US response as that of an “imperial power full of arrogance speaking to its subjects.”

Mr Khan, the wall of his verandah papered with the apocalyptic pictures of the semi-naked Bhopal dead, many of them children, is less articulate but more fair. He ascribes failure to the Indian government, the judiciary and multinational business operating at the cost of poor people, and fears the consequences of this week’s light sentences in the Bhopal sessions court.

“This is a bad ruling. It has a bad affect on India and other poor countries,” he says.