[Reader-list] Tehelka on Bhopal

Tapas Ray [Gmail] tapasrayx at gmail.com
Tue Jun 22 13:30:58 IST 2010


An outstanding piece ... apologies if someone has already posted this here.

Tapas


<http://www.tehelka.com/story_main45.asp?filename=Ne260610coverstory.asp>

For A Few Pieces Of Silver

AS NEW SKELETONS FALL OUT OF THE OLD BHOPAL GAS TRAGEDY, SHOMA
CHAUDHURY AND SHANTANU GUHA RAY TRACK HOW JUSTICE IS STILL BEING
SUBVERTED TO PROTECT THE “INVESTMENT CLIMATE” IN INDIA

SOMETIMES THE breaking news is not as important as the old record. In
a small, box-shaped room in the shanty colony of JP Nagar in Bhopal,
Leelabai, a tiny sparrow of a woman, sits crying. She doesn’t care
about Warren Anderson. She lost her ailing 27-year-old daughter a
month earlier to an undiagnosed disease. Her frail 23-year-old son
looks like he’s 14 and her one-year-old grandson is lying on the floor
sucking at a pacifier. Her husband is a day labourer. “It would have
been better if my children had died right then. We bring them up with
so much difficulty, it’s worse to lose them at this age. And what’s
the point of having all these hospitals in our name if they can’t even
diagnose why we are dying. They might as well shut the hospitals and
let us die in our homes.”

Leelabai is just one of lakhs of people across three generations
who’ve been destroyed by the evil white cloud that floated out of the
Union Carbide factory in 1984. Hazrat Bi, who sits next to her, had
left her sleeping four-year-old son behind in the rush to escape that
night. By the time she raced back to find him, he was unconscious.
Although he survived, he grew up to have a deformed child. Such
stories replicate endlessly through the colony. Survivors suffering
from breathlessness, failing eyesight, painful stomachs, missing
limbs, angry skins. Children of exposed parents born with incapacities
of varying degrees.

In far-away Delhi, Brigadier Jitender Pal Sud, another survivor, sits
in a wheelchair completely paralysed. “The gas did not kill me in one
clean stroke. Its grip on my body has increased over the years; it’s
eating away at me gradually.” But it is pointless to talk of the
suffering of these people because, as it turns out, it seems the real
story of Bhopal 1984 is not the devastation it brought. Or the
legitimate search that should’ve been undertaken to ensure such a
thing never happens again. The real story of Bhopal is the perceived
impact it had on India’s “investment climate” and the distorted, ways
in which successive Indian governments have worked to manage that.

SOMETIMES THE breaking news makes little sense without the old record.

Over the last week — ever since a Bhopal trial court read out its
verdict on the criminal case against Union Carbide functionaries on
June 7 — there has been a series of shocking confessions. Twenty five
thousand people dead, 5 lakh affected and the accused only get two
years in jail and bail on a bond of Rs 25,000? This was too little
justice to stomach for the world’s worst industrial disaster. The
verdict seemed to unlock a sleeping consciousness. Outrage spilled
across the country. Key people, silent for too long, began to speak
up. Old facts tumbled into the media: how Warren Anderson, the CEO of
Union Carbide USA and now chief absconder, had been flown into Bhopal
on December 7, 1984, arrested ceremoniously at the airport, taken to
the Union Carbide guest house, given tea, then on the orders of then
Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Arjun Singh, put on a State aircraft
back to Delhi and out of India to safety.

... Contd.


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