Five Past Midnight in Bhopal
Page 7
This piece of purple prose concluded with an exhortation: “Write to us for a brochure entitled ‘The Exciting World of Union Carbide.’ In it you’ll find out how our resources in the different domains of carbon, chemical products, gases, metals, plastic goods and energy continue daily to work new wonders in your life.”
“New wonders in your life.” This eloquent promise was soon to find a spectacular opportunity for fulfillment. It was at a time when India was trying desperately to banish the ancestral specter of famine. After the severe food shortages at the beginning of the 1960s, the situation was at last improving. The source of this miracle was an apparently unassuming batch of Mexican grain. Christened Sonora 63 by its creator, the American agronomist and future Nobel peace prize winner, Norman Borlang, the grain produced a new variety of high-yielding corn. With heavy ears that were not susceptible to wind, light variation or torrential monsoon rains, and short stems that were less greedy, this fast growing seed made it possible to have several harvests a year on the same plot of land. It brought about a great change, the famous Green Revolution.
This innovation suffered serious constraints, however. In order for the high-yielding seeds to produce the multiple harvests expected of them, they needed lots of water and fertilizer. In five years, between 1966 and 1971, the Green Revolution multiplied India’s consumption of fertilizer by three. And that was not all. The very narrow genetic base of high-yield varieties and the monoculture associated with them made the new crop ten times more vulnerable to disease and insects. Rice became the favorite target for at least a hundred different species of predatory insects. Most devastating were the small flies known as green leafhoppers. The stylets with which they sucked the sap from young shoots could destroy several acres of rice fields in a few days. In the Punjab and other states, the invasion of a form of striped aphid decimated the cotton plantations. Against this scourge, India had found itself virtually defenseless. In its desire to promote the country’s industrialization, the government had encouraged the local production of pesticides. Faced with the enormity of demand, however, locally manufactured products had shown themselves to be cruelly inadequate. What was more, a fair number contained either DDT or HCH (hexachlorocyclohexane), substances considered so dangerous to flora, fauna and humans that a number of countries had banned their use.
Finding themselves unable to provide their peasants with a massive supply of effective pesticides, in 1966 Indian leaders decided to turn to foreign manufacturers. Several companies, among them Carbide, were already established in the country. The New York multinational was interested enough to dispatch one of its best scouts from its sales team to New Delhi. It chose the young Argentinian agronomical engineer, Eduardo Muñoz. After all, hadn’t this engaging sales representative managed to convert the whole of South America to the benefits of Sevin? Muñoz promptly proved himself up to the task by inaugurating his mission with a masterstroke.
The legendary emperor Asoka who had spread the Buddha’s message of nonviolence throughout India would have been amazed. On a winter evening in 1966, the hotel in New Delhi that bore his name welcomed the principal executives of Carbide’s Indian subsidiary company along with a hundred of the highest officials from the Ministry of Agriculture and the Planning Commission. These dignitaries had gathered to celebrate the quasi-historic agreement signed that afternoon at the Ministry of Agriculture in front of a pack of journalists and photographers. The contract would arm Indian peasants against aphids and other insects destroying their crops. To this end, it provided for the immediate importation of 1,200 tons of American Sevin. In return, Carbide undertook to build a factory to make this same pesticide in India within five years. Eduardo Muñoz had negotiated this agreement with a high-ranking official named Sardar Singh, who indicated he was impatient to see the first deliveries arrive. He was, as his turban and bearded cheeks indicated, a Sikh, originally from the Punjab. The peasants of his community had been the first victims of the marauding insects.
As chance would have it, the Carbide envoy was able to satisfy the hopes of his Indian partner sooner than anticipated. Discovering that a cargo of 1,200 tons of Sevin destined for farmers in the locust-infested Nile Valley, was held up in the port of Alexandria by overzealous customs officers, the Carbide envoy managed to have the ship diverted to Bombay. Two weeks later, the precious Sevin was received there like a gift from heaven.
The euphoria subsided somewhat when it was discovered that the Sevin from the Egyptian ship was actually a concentrate that could not be used until it had undergone appropriate preparation. In their own jargon, specialists called this process “formulation.” It consisted of mixing the concentrate with sand or gypsum powder. Like the sugar added to the active substance in a medicine to facilitate its consumption, the sand acts as a carrier for Sevin making it possible to either spread or spray the insecticide as needed. There was no shortage of small industrial units in India that could carry out this transformation process. But Muñoz had a better idea. Carbide itself would make its Sevin usable, by building its own formulation factory. No matter that the Industrial Development and Regulation Act reserved the construction of this kind of plant for very small firms and only those of Indian nationality, he knew he could comply tacitly with the law by finding someone to act as a front man.
Like anywhere else in the world, there is no shortage in India of intermediaries, agents, compradores prepared to act as go-betweens for any kind of business. One morning in June 1967, a jolly little man turned up in Eduardo Muñoz’s office.
“My name is Santosh Dindayal,” he announced, “and I am a devotee of the cult of Krishna.” Taken aback by this mode of introduction, the Argentinian offered his visitor a cigar. “I own numerous businesses,” the Indian went on. “I have a forestry development company, a scooter concession, a cinema, a gas station. I’ve heard about your plan to build a pesticide factory.” At this point in his account, the man assumed a slightly mysterious air. “Well, you see, it so happens that I have entrées all over Bhopal.”
“Bhopal?” repeated Muñoz, to whom the place meant nothing.
“Yes. It’s the capital of the state of Madhya Pradesh,” the Indian continued. “The state government is eager to develop its industry. It could well be useful for your project.”
Drawing vigorously on his cigar, the little man explained that the people running Madhya Pradesh had set aside an area for industrial development on vacant land north of the capital.
“What I’m proposing is that I apply in my name for a license to construct a plant that can transform the Sevin your friends have imported into a product that can be used on crops. The cost of such an undertaking shouldn’t be more than fifty thousand dollars. We can sign a partnership contract together. You do the work on the factory and then you can give me a proportion of the proceeds.”
The Argentinian was so pleased he nearly swallowed his cigar. The proposal was an excellent first step in the larger industrial venture he was counting on launching. It would provide an immediate opportunity to make Indian farmers appreciate the benefits of Sevin, and give the engineers in their research departments in South Charleston time to come up with the large pesticide plant that the Indian government seemed to want to see built on its land. Suddenly, however, a question sprang to mind.
“By the way, Mr. Dindayal, where is this town of yours, Bhopal?”
The Indian smiled and pointed proudly to his chest. “In the very heart of India, dear Mr. Muñoz.”
The heart of India! The expression excited the handsome Argentinian. Taking the Indian with him as navigator, he set off at once in his gray Mark VII Jaguar for the heart of the country. To him it was like arriving “in a large village.” The industrial zone designated by the government lay just over a mile from the city center, and a little more than half a mile from the train station. In the past, it had been the site of the royal stables for the rulers of Bhopal. The troops of the sultana infantry had used it as a parade ground. The dark color of th
e soil accounted for the name of the place: Kali Grounds, “kali” meaning “black.” But the term may also have derived from the color of the blood with which the earth was saturated. For it was here that, before thousands of spectators, the kingdom’s executioners used to lop off the heads of those whom the Islamic sharia* had condemned to death.
The Argentinian was not likely to be put off by such morbid associations; two days’ exploring had convinced him. This town of Bhopal held all the winning cards: a central location, an excellent road and railway system, and abundant electricity and water supplies. As for the Kali Grounds, in his eyes they held yet another trump: the string of huts and hovels extending along their boundaries promised to provide a plentiful workforce.
12
A Promised Land on the Ruins of a Legendary Kingdom
The large village the Carbide envoy thought he had seen from inside his Jaguar was in fact one of India’s most beautiful and vibrant cities. But then Eduardo Muñoz had not had time to discover any of Bhopal’s treasures. Since 1722, when an Afghan general fell in love with the site and founded the capital of his realm there, Bhopal had been adorned with so many magnificent palaces, sublime mosques and splendid gardens that it was justifiably known as “the Baghdad of India.” Above all, it was for its rich Muslim culture and tradition of tolerance that the town held a distinguished place in India’s history. The riches of Bhopal had been forged first by a Frenchman, and then by four progressive female rulers—despite the burkahs that concealed them from the eyes of men. The commander-in-chief of the nawab’s armies, and subsequently the country’s regent, Balthazar I de Bourbon, and after him, the begums Sikander, Shah Jahan, Sultan Jahan and Kudsia had turned their realm and its capital into a model much admired in imperial Britain as well as by other African and Asian colonial countries. Not only had the four begums used their own funds to finance the advent of the railway line, they had opened up roads and markets, built cotton mills, distributed vast areas of land to their landless subjects, set up a postal system unequalled in Asia and introduced running water to the capital. In an effort to educate their people, they had introduced free primary instruction for everyone and promoted female emancipation by increasing the number of girls’ schools.
The magnificence of the kingdom and its prestigious capital expressed itself in many different ways. A great lover of literature and herself the author of several philosophical treatises, Begum Shah Jahan attracted distinguished scholars and learned men from countries as far afield as Afghanistan and Persia to her court. The city had supplanted Hyderabad and Lahore as a beacon of renascent Islamic culture that is so rich in Urdu literature, as well as painting and music. Of all the expressions of this heritage, it was to poetry that the begum contributed most. Reviving the tradition of the mushaira, evenings of poetry recitals when the people could meet the greatest poets, she threw open the reception rooms of her palace to all and arranged for monumental performances on the household cavalry’s Lal Parade Ground. There, sixty to eighty thousand poetry lovers, three-quarters of the town’s population, used to come and sit on the ground right through the night to hear poets sing of suffering, joy and the eternal aspirations of the soul. “Weep not, my beloved,” implored one of the Bhopalis’ favorite refrains. “Even if for now your life is but dust and lamentation, it already proclaims the magic of what lies ahead.”
The next to last of these enlightened women rulers, Begum Sultan Jahan, had even created an institution—revolutionary for the time—called the Bhopal Ladies Club. There, women were free to discuss their conditions and their future. The same begum had also given her female subjects the opportunity to go shopping with their faces uncovered by building the Paris Bazaar, a huge shopping center reserved exclusively for women. There they could walk about with their faces uncovered because all the shopkeepers were women. Simply dressed and without bodyguards, the begum herself liked to visit this emporium which was well stocked with items imported from London and Paris.
The British were unsparing in their respect for this remarkable lady. King George V invited her to his coronation and, in 1922, the prince of Wales paid a visit for the inauguration of the Government Council for the Kingdom of Bhopal, a democratic institution quite unique in the princely India of that time. His visit was also intended to thank the begum for having emptied both her private purse and the state coffers to support the British war effort. After all, she had sent her eldest son to represent Bhopal and fight alongside the Allied soldiers in the trenches of the first world war.
Before she passed away, Begum Kudsia, last of the sovereign ladies of Bhopal, nevertheless expressed her regret that her subjects seemed more interested in poetry than industrial projects or affairs of state. Despite the efforts of the economic development agency she had created with the support of the British, in the period between the world wars, very few firms came to Bhopal. Two textile mills, two sugar refineries, a cardboard and a match factory—the sum total was a modest one. Nor did the ascendance of a male sovereign to the throne do anything to rectify matters. The nawab Hamidullah Khan was a charming, cultivated prince but far more interested in decorating his palaces or breeding his horses than in constructing blast furnaces or textile factories. While Mahatma Gandhi was going on a hunger strike to force the British out of the country, he was having a luxury bathroom installed on the roof of one of his hunting station wagons.
On August 15, 1947, the subcontinent’s independence cast the maharajahs and nawabs of the Indian kingdoms into the oubliette of history. The upset was a stroke of good fortune for Bhopal, which found itself promoted to the capital of the vast province of Madhya Pradesh that encompassed all the country’s central territories. Its selection spurred the city into an era of feverish development. It had been chosen for the same three reasons Carbide would select it, twenty years later, as the site of its pesticide plant. Buildings had to be constructed to house the new province’s ministries and administrative bodies, whole neighborhoods had to be built in which to lodge the thousands of officials and their families. A university, several technical colleges, a hospital with two thousand beds, a medical school, shops, clubs, theaters, cinemas, restaurants had to be erected. In the space of five years the population increased from 85,000 to nearly 400,000.
This rise had brought with it an influx of small and large firms from all over India. And now, as the chrome muzzle of a gray Jaguar had just intimated, America was about to step in where only yesterday the last nawab and his guests had still been hunting tigers and elephants. So that, for the occupants of Orya Bustee, as for the hundreds of other immigrants who stepped off the trains each day looking for work, Bhopal at the end of the 1960s, was the promised land.
13
A Continent of Three Hundred Million Peasants and Six Hundred Languages
The City of the Begums greeted the government of Madhya Pradesh’s decision as a gift from the gods. By assigning a five-acre plot of land on the Kali Grounds to the entrepreneur Santosh Dindayal, along with permission to build a factory to formulate pesticides, the government was offering the city all the opportunities that went with an industrial venture. Eduardo Muñoz was quick to pass on the glad tidings to his New York management before hurrying to the bar in Calcutta’s luxurious Hotel Grand to celebrate with his wife Rita and his colleagues. He then set about looking for a team to build the factory. By a stroke of incredible luck, he chanced upon the perfect trio: first Maluf Habibie, a frail Iranian chemical engineer with metal rimmed spectacles, a specialist in formulation techniques for chemical products; then Ranjit Dutta, an engineer built like a football halfback, who had previously worked with Shell in Texas; and finally, the only Bhopali, Arvind Shrivastava who had only just completed his degree in mechanical engineering. The three men set camp in the back room of the Bhopal gas station that belonged to Muñoz’s Indian associate. In two weeks they laid down the sketches for a plant, although “plant” was a very grandiose name for a workshop to house the crushers, blenders and other equipment
necessary for the commercial preparation of the imported concentrate of Sevin.
Like all important events in India, the groundbreaking was marked with a ceremony. A pandit* girdled with the triple thread of a brahmin came and chanted mantras over the hole dug out of the black earth. A coconut was brought, which Arvind Shrivastava decapitated with a billhook. The pandit poured the milk slowly onto the ground. Then the young engineer cut the flesh into small pieces, which he offered to the priest and the onlookers. The brahmin raised his hand and the workmen came forward and emptied their wheelbarrow full of concrete into the cavity. The gods had given their blessing. The venture could commence.
With no complicated pipework, no glistening tanks, no burning flares, no metal chimneys, the building that rose from the Kali Grounds bore no resemblance to the American monsters in the Kanawha Valley. In fact with its triple roof and line of small windows it looked more like a pagoda. Inside was a vast hangar with a range of conical silos mounted on grinding machines. This plant was to provide the Sevin concentrate imported from America with a granular carrier agent adapted to the various methods of diffusion. The Sevin to be sprayed from the air over the huge plantations in the Punjab had to be formulated more finely than the packaged Sevin that was to be spread by hand by the small farmers of Madhya Pradesh or Bengal. Whether granular or fine as dust, the Bhopal Sevin promised to be a unique insecticide, less for its intrinsic qualities than for the carrier agent Muñoz’s engineers had found for it.