Memories of a gas leak that still haunt nearly 40 yrs later
Till date, there is little clarity on the actual death toll in the world’s deadliest industrial disaster
In the 11 months before December 1984, India was in tumult. In June, security forces entered the premises of the Golden Temple in Amritsar, the holiest of Sikh shrines, chasing militant leader Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale in an operation ordered by then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Four months later, she was dead, assassinated by her own Sikh security guards, enraged by the insult of Operation Blue Star. Armed mobs then hunted down Sikhs, leaving over three thousand dead.
Despite this horrific sequence of events, nothing could have prepared India for the night between December 2 and 3, when methyl isocyanate began leaking from the multinational Union Carbide’s chemical plant in Bhopal a little past midnight. By the time the sun rose on December 3, the leak had taken the name of the “Bhopal Gas Tragedy”, still seen as among the world’s worst industrial accidents.
As early as December 4, as HT reported on its front page, the numbers had begun to tell the scale of an immense tragedy, but not quite. At least 410 people were killed, most of them instantly, and over 2,000 critically affected, then Madhya Pradesh chief minister Arjun Singh said. At least 20,000 people were in hospital, the army pressed its doctors into service, and those alive in the state capital had inflamed eyes, nausea and breathing difficulties. The first affected were the poor who lived in huts around the plant, and were killed even as they were sleeping. By the morning, the hospitals overflowed with victims and the streets were littered with dead cats, dogs, buffaloes, and people.
Such was the scale of the tragedy that to this day, there is little clarity on the number of deaths. The Madhya Pradesh government said the death toll was above 3,000. In 2010, a curative petition filed by the Centre for enhanced compensation to the victims said the number was 5,295 dead, and 4,944 with serious health problems. Activists have argued that these numbers gravely under-report the crisis, with close to 15,000 dead, and lakhs affected.
In many ways, the gas tragedy was also a baptism of fire for the country’s deeply divided politics, torn asunder by the events of the past year. At the helm was a 40-year-old Rajiv Gandhi, a reluctant politician who had only fought and won his first parliamentary election in 1982 after the death of his brother Sanjay Gandhi, and became Prime Minister in the days after his mother’s death. It was a test that most argue India failed. Even as Bhopal struggled to contain the damage and treat the teeming thousands in its hospitals, four days after the leak, Union Carbide chairman Warren Andersen flew into Bhopal from the United States, and amidst public outrage, was arrested. One day later, in a decision that has haunted the Congressg ppolitically ever since, he posted bail and was allowed to leave the country, never to face trial on India’s shores.
Union Carbide and the government of India spent years thrashing out a settlement agreement, with the latter asking for 3.3 billion dollars in reparations. In 1988, the Supreme Court asked both sides to “start with a clean slate”, and eventually an out-of-court settlement was reached in February 1989, with Union Carbide agreeing to pay $470 million in damages. The only people convicted were 7 Indian Union Carbide employees in 2010, by then in their seventies, under the charge of death by criminal negligence.
In October, the Union government said in the Supreme Court that it is keen to push ahead with its 12-year-old curative petition seeking a review of the compensation. Neither the settlement nor the criminal charges,