Indians angry Anderson never tried over Bhopal leak
NEW DELHI: Campaigners for survivors of India’s Bhopal disaster voiced distress Saturday that former Union Carbide boss Warren Anderson never faced trial over the deadly industrial accident following news the US citizen had died.
Thousands of people were killed when 40 tons of lethal methyl isocyanate gas spewed from the Union Carbide chemical plant in Bhopal, 740 km (460 miles) from India’s national capital just before midnight on December 2, 1984.
“He (Anderson) escaped liability,” Rachna Dhingra, a member of the Bhopal Group for Information and Action, a campaign outfit working with the disaster’s survivors, said.
While Anderson’s family did not announce his death, The New York Times reported Friday that the 92-year-old had died in a Florida nursing home on Sept. 29, citing public records.
“It’s good news — (except) we would have loved it had he been hanged in an Indian prison,” one Bhopal survivor, Shamshad Begum, said in an interview with the Indian Express as Indian newspapers devoted full pages to Anderson’s death.
“He had no right to live as his company took thousands of lives,” said Begum, who lost her four-year-old son a day after the gas leak occurred.
Anderson was chairman of the US-based Union Carbide parent group at the time of the accident.
He flew to Bhopal in central India a few days after the accident and was arrested but he was freed on bail and never returned to stand trial.
In 1989, Union Carbide paid $470 million in compensation to the Indian government. Dow insists all of Union Carbide’s liabilities were settled in the 1989 agreement.
According to Indian official figures, 3,500 people died within days of the accident. But the state-run Indian Council of Medical Research later estimated the immediate number of deaths at 8,000 to 10,000.