Two Minutes Older: Two Approaches to Bhopal

Just thinking about the Bhopal verdict makes me despair. If the worst industrial accident in the history of this country can be treated in such a cavalier manner, with every indication – going by the Nuclear Liability Bill – that lessons are wilfully not being learned, what can we hope for?

From the law and the institutions associated with it, the answer is: not much. I will resist the temptation to quote Dickens here. Instead, I will invoke Gandhi. In 1922, he was arrested for ‘attempting to excite disaffection’ against the British government on the basis of three articles he wrote in Young India. In his statement to the judge of the Bombay High Court, Gandhi pleaded guilty on all charges. “The only course open to you, the Judge, is […] either to resign your post, or inflict on me the severest penalty if you believe that the system and law you are assisting to administer are good for the people". He also said, "I hold it to be a virtue to be disaffected towards a Government which in its totality has done more harm to India than any previous system."

Many things have changed since 1922. For one thing, being a democracy, we can no longer openly acknowledge that the law serves, not justice, but those in power – as it always has done. It is capable of acting swiftly when it wants to – such as when it made it possible for Warren Anderson to leave the country. Equally, it is capable of a superb, deliberate bungling: after 26 years Bhopal is, in the eyes of the judiciary, the equivalent of a traffic accident.

If we believe that the central figures in this tragedy ought to be the people who died that night in December 1984, or those who suffered and still suffer severe health problems with no affordable healthcare in sight, or those who still drink the water contaminated from the chemicals that leached into the ground in subsequent decades, we are clearly wrong. What the people of Bhopal need is not justice but – according to the US Assistant Secretary of State Robert Blake – ‘closure’. Some newspaper editors clearly agree; an editorial in the Indian Express suggests that we build a memorial to the dead and then move on.

As extralegal activism goes, it’s hilarious. As a solution, it’s a pretty rotten one.

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People frequently demand solutions. ‘What’s the solution?’ they ask, impatient for results! action! (even closure!) If something is wrong and someone is complaining, it is clearly not enough to talk it out and think it through. There must be a tangible outcome of all this bleeding-heart talk and thought – even if it’s only a memorial. After all, in the absence of outcomes, how is one to quiet the conscience, put it all behind and return to the alluring call of the daily grind?

There! I said the word: conscience. Real change requires that we examine our conscience – a Pandora’s Box out of which emerge words such as ethics and morality. These are words that have fallen into disuse, but the present is always a good time to polish and wield them again.

We have grown used to thinking most things are someone else’s responsibility; that, once we have paid our taxes, we have done our civic duty. To bring the conscience into public life is to acknowledge that our responsibilities are more far-reaching than we had supposed. It is not enough to want the law to do something; we have to do something ourselves, every time, both individually and collectively.

Action is not difficult: where Bhopal is concerned, there are many ways to help and can be found at bhopal.net. But action is easy enough – there is always something to be done, in some way.

The really difficult thing about using one’s conscience is that it will not let one rest. There can be no talk of closure because one does not cease to be responsible. And this is precisely why it can be a more effective alternative to waiting and expecting the law to work. The law is not set in stone. It can change course. It’s our job to see that the course is not one of least resistance.

(An edited version of this in Zeitgeist, the Saturday edition of The New Indian Express.) 

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Extra reading

In no particular order. These are things I was thinking about while writing this piece

1. Hari Batti'' Bhopal post (of which there are many, but I'm picking this one). 

2. Juan Cole, talking about oil, but there are things about responsibility in there. [H/T: JP]

3. Rajesh Kasturirangan on expanding the moral commons.

4. Ananya Vajpeyi's review of Mithi Mukherjee's India in the Shadows of Empire: A Legal and Political History 1774-1950.

5. From SACW, a letter to Obama.

6. Mitali Saran's excellent column from a week or more ago.


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I have to confess a certain discomfort with my use of the word 'we', as if I knew exactly who I was speaking for. My own inaction doesn't translate into everyone else's, nor can I claim to speak for more than a small number of people.

I also realise that I am sticking my neck out considerably, writing the way I am. I consider this a risk worth taking, however. At any rate, it feels better than wittering on about mangoes.

all Bhopalis

If Bhopal had happened five years after it did, I could have been one of those on the AP Express on the night of 2nd/3rd December. It's not likely, because it was not vacation time and chances are that I would have been in Delhi.

In fact, I was in school. One way of dealing with one horror following another (the massacre of Sikhs just a little over a month earlier) was to talk about it with charts and drawings, the way Time magazine and India Today learnt to do. It keeps events at a distance: you can talk about Methyl Isocyanate with drawings of cells and arrows and forget for the moment what it does when it enters the body.

I was not in Bhopal, but I could have been in that town whose station I passed six times every year for ten years. One of the uses of this kind of thinking is to make the thought it could have been me real, if only for a short time.

I'm not linking because everything can be googled: among them, Vidya Subramaniam's article in today's Hindu about Anderson and how he's escaped extradition.

As Copenhagen is a word that's going to be heard more often in the next few days, it would be good to remember that amongst all the talk of carbon and footprints and offsets and emissions, there are other things - relevant to Copenhagen - that no one will bring up. Dow and Union Carbide before them were polluters who never paid: the people of Bhopal did. Not just with their health, but with the years they might have had to live a different life.

I was going to say something about migration caused by environmental disasters and human rights issues but I can just let off a unsupported screed. It is germane to the issue of Bhopal: maybe I will just point you to an old post instead where I talk about it a little bit toward the end.

I'm not sure what the point of this post is - I hope to just remember that there has been no justice even after 25 years; that for all the talk about emission cuts and environmental responsibility, we're nowhere close to drawing a line under that chapter; that it could happen again; that we need to think about what we intend to do, individually and collectively.

Update: Indra Sinha in the Guardian; Hari Batti for the entire week (do check out the Yes Men links)..