The unending tragedy of Bhopal
Soutik Biswas
[ the
Indian government sued the company
for $3bn but settled for 15% of the amount]
[ a
proud city and its people cheated and
betrayed by a country]
Twenty five years and
several thousand dead and disabled men, women and children later,
answers to most of the thorny questions about the world's most horrific industrial tragedy are still blowing in the wind in
Bhopal.
Why
has the compensation to the victims been so paltry? Why is there a
thick fog over the extent of contamination of groundwater in the Union
Carbide factory neighbourhood? Caught between NGOs and a secretive Big Government, nobody is quite sure what is
happening.
And
above all, many ask why those responsible have been allowed to go free?
After all, they say, money - whatever the amount - cannot compensate
for a crime of such magnitude, whether committed because of negligence or sabotage. If this happened in
the West, campaigners say, the company would have been held to account,
perhaps driven to bankruptcy by compensation claims. But since this is
India and the poor are dispensable, justice in Bhopal has been a travesty.
Also what about the blot to
Bhopal's image and its inglorious reputation as a 'gassed' dystopia?
Locals say the city lost its innocence after the tragedy. "Life in
Bhopal had been laid back and gentle. But the gas tragedy changed all
that. Nowadays everybody whinges, that's all that they do," says Raj
Kumar Keswani, the city's best-known journalist. "Also, the tragedy
divided the people. In a strange way, people who got compensation are
often reviled by people who didn't."
Mr
Keswani should know. He has lived all of his 59 years in Bhopal and was
the only journalist who cried himself hoarse for two years before the
tragedy, saying the Union Carbide plant had lax safety procedures and
that the city was "sitting on a
volcano". He had written a series of articles on
the doomed plant, petitioned the courts and worked the politicians.
Nobody listened to him.
After
the tragedy he challenged the government, accusing it of a sell-out to
Union Carbide - the Indian government sued the company
for $3bn but settled for 15% of the amount - and Mr Keswani became a mythic hero of sorts: Dominique Lapierre, for example, mentioned him in great detail without once
talking to him while writing another best-seller. "He wrote that I used to go around in a
car with a bagful of CDs because I was a music lover. Those days, as a
struggling journalist, I had an old scooter and CDs hadn't even come to
India," Mr Keswani laughs. This is one of my favourite Bhopal stories -
it tells you how fact and fiction blur in the chaos of India.
The
gas tragedy, in a perverse way, actually ended up oiling parts of the
grassroots economy of Bhopal. As thousands of dollars of still
inadequate compensation money poured in, this sleepy city was
transformed, say its residents. Bhopal never had an economy of its own
to speak of apart from one state-owned behemoth; the city of Indore to
its west was always the commercial hub. Also, Bhopal belongs to one of India's most backward states -
Madhya Pradesh - with human development indicators comparable to
sub-Saharan Africa.
Twenty-five
years later, Bhopal is a mini boom town, largely a result of India
opening up its economy and partly because of the money that flowed in
after the tragedy. It got some decent new hospitals, property grew and
the city became the headquarters of a powerful vernacular media group
which also publishes Harry Potter in Hindi. New malls are coming up and
dozens of new private colleges - most of which are now suffering from
lack of students - have opened up. Finally, Bhopal appears to giving its
bustling cousin Indore a run for its money
Today,
a street-smart, English-speaking social activist and darling of the
international media and a street-fighting, hardboiled activist help the victims, in their own way, to live and fight
for compensation. Maimed by gas, Bhopal's lost generation struggles to
survive and to make sense of what is happening around them - pictures of
children whose futures have been snuffed out by the gas make one's
blood boil and leave a feeling of numbness and helplessness.
An anniversary like Bhopal's should be a solemn time to remember the
dead and pledge to help the living dead, not become circuses of the kind
they have become today. 1984 was India's annus horribilis - the army
stormed the Golden Temple, Mrs Gandhi was assassinated, Sikhs were
massacred in revenge - but, in hindsight, Bhopal must count as the greatest tragedy of them all.
The story of Bhopal, as Mr Keswani says,
is a story of a proud city and its people cheated and
betrayed by a country and the world. For
India, it is a collective shame and a disturbing reminder that its poor
don't matter. Most of the time anyway.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/soutikbiswas/2009/12/twenty_five_years_and_several.html
Thanks & Regards,
Sudhir Srinivasan
B.Arch, Dip.ID, Dip.CAD, Dip.PM, AIIA, IIID, ARIAI
| Architect |
