It took only a few minutes to dismantle the joint. Just as he was fitting the new component, however, Ashraf saw through his mask a small quantity of liquid phosgene spurt from the upper side of the piping. A few drops landed on his sweater. Aware of the danger, he rushed into a shower cabin to rinse his clothing. It was then that he made a fatal mistake. Instead of waiting for the powerful jet of water to complete the decontamination process, he took off his mask. The heat of his chest immediately caused the few drops of phosgene still nestling in the wool of his sweater to vaporize. Apart from a slight irritation of the eyes and throat, which rapidly disappeared, Ashraf felt no discomfort at the time. He did not know that phosgene has a stealthy way of killing its victims. First it gives them a sense of euphoria.
“I’d never seen my husband so voluble,” Sajda Bano later recalled. “He seemed to have forgotten the accident. He took us out in the car to visit a small country house he wanted to buy beside the Narmada River. He was as cheerful as he was during the first days of our engagement.”
Then, all of a sudden, he collapsed, with his lungs full of a fierce flood of secretions. He started to vomit a gush of transparent fluid mixed with blood. Panic-stricken, Sajda called the factory, who had him taken by ambulance to the intensive-care unit Carbide had helped set up at Hamidia Hospital. He was placed on an artificial respirator where his agony continued. He threw up more and more fluids, up to four and a half pints an hour. Soon he did not even have the strength to expectorate.
Sajda had to push aside some of her in-law’s family to get to her husband’s bedside. “He was as white as a sheet,” she would remember, “but when he sensed my presence, he opened his eyes and tore off his oxygen mask. ‘I’d like to say goodbye to the children. Go and fetch them!’ he whispered.”
When the young woman came back with the two boys, the dying man took the youngest in his arms. “Son, how do you fancy a fishing trip?” he asked, forcing a smile. The effort set off a violent bout of coughing. Then came a succession of rattles and a last sigh. It was all over. Bhopal’s beautiful plant had claimed its first victim. It was Christmas day. For the young woman who had come from a far distant province to marry a Carbide man, three months and thirteen days of mourning were about to begin.
The entire factory grieved for its martyr. One of those most affected by the accident was its managing director. “We had nothing to reproach ourselves for,” Warren Woomer would say. “Mohammed Ashraf had been properly trained for the dangers of his profession. By neglecting to put on his rubber coat and taking off his mask too soon, he had broken safety regulations. It was the first time in my life as an engineer that I’d lost one of my men. I’d had people injured but never a death. It was the kind of situation where you had to know exactly what had gone wrong because it must never be allowed to happen again. No matter what the circumstances of the accident.”
Two employees took it upon themselves to provide a response to the works manager’s questions. Thirty-two-year-old Hindu Shankar Malviya and thirty-one-year-old Muslim Bashir Ullah led the firm’s main trade union. Both came from very poor families in the Bhopal bustees. Their energy and readiness to intervene on behalf of their comrades had made them immensely popular. In a strongly worded letter, they formally accused the local plant’s management of being responsible for their comrade’s death. There was in fact an internal safety regulation that prohibited the storage of phosgene while the unit manufacturing it was not in production—as was the case at the time of Ashraf’s accident. There should not have been any gas in the pipes whatsoever. Yet, despite this regulation, a quantity of phosgene had been left in the tanks, and no one had warned the unfortunate operator. Even though Woomer punished the supervisor on duty, the company was liable for the accident in the view of some employees. According to the two trade union leaders, the accident pointed irrefutably to a decline in safety standards at Carbide. They were, therefore, going to ask the government of Madhya Pradesh to recategorize the factory immediately as a facility that produced high-risk products, and thus subject Carbide to much stricter safety requirements.
“For the first time people became aware of something that all our safety campaigns had been unable to make them appreciate: that the substances they were handling were deadly,” Kamal Pareek would say later. “But this time the danger had a face to it.”
On February 10, 1982, a little over a month after the death of Mohammed Ashraf, another accident occurred. Twenty-five workmen were poisoned and were rushed to the hospital. Fortunately there were no deaths to mourn. Gas had leaked from a phosgene pump. The fact that none of the victims had been ordered to wear protective masks while working in a sensitive area further outraged the two trade union leaders. The management defended itself by stating that leaks resulting from this type of mechanical failure never exceeded the toxicity level above which such incidents were likely to be fatal. Malviya and Ullah said they tried in vain to find out how and according to what criteria this “level,” which did not feature in any of the company’s manuals or official documents, had been determined. “It was one of many mysteries surrounding Carbide’s procedures in Bhopal,” they stated.
Their fury was not to abate. On October 5 of the same year, a third accident struck the factory in the middle of the night. This time it occurred in the unit producing methyl isocyanate. As an operator was opening a valve in a MIC pipeline, the joint linking it to several other pipes unexpectedly broke, releasing a huge cloud of toxic vapors. Before evacuating the area, the operator set off the alarm siren. A few seconds later, in accordance with the procedures set down by Kamal Pareek, the voice of the supervisor in the control room ordered a full evacuation of the plant. The position of the wind sock on top of the factory’s mast indicated a moderate wind blowing north–northeast. All those inside the factory took off as fast as their legs would carry them in the opposite direction, toward the Kali Grounds’ bustees.
The Mangala Express regularly wrested the residents of the bustees from their slumbers. Each evening, they dreaded the din it made as it went by. Only the elderly midwife Prema Bai did not suffer from its racket and that was because she was deaf. Her neighbors maintained that the noise of a herd of elephants trampling the hovels in her alleyway would not wake her. Yet it was she who gave the alert that night.
“Get up! Everybody up! There is a pandemonium at Carbide!” she shouted, running from hut to hut, her white widow’s sari flying out behind her.
Prema Bai had been the first to have heard the distant howl of the siren. Awakened by her cries, the neighbors got up one by one, grumbling. They were angry at being woken for a second time. Everyone strained their ears in the direction of the muffled howling coming from the plant.
“Perhaps someone’s set fire to it somewhere,” said a grinning Ganga Ram, who harbored a deadly hatred of Carbide.
“Calm down, friends!” intervened Belram Mukkadam. “We hear that siren nearly every day. It’s not sounding for us but for the guys inside the factory.”
“It may even have set itself off,” ventured the tailor Ahmed Bassi.
“All the same, it’s going,” interrupted Salar the bicycle repairman. “We should find out more.”
“You’re right, Salar,” the sorcerer Nilamber agreed, fiddling nervously with his goatee.
A voice then rose up from the ground. Rahul had just arrived on his wheeled board. He had taken the time to arrange his bun and put on his necklaces. “Look here, my friends, why does that siren frighten you?” he asked. “We hear it nearly every day!”
“Yes, but tonight it’s sounding without stopping,” interjected Sheela, Padmini’s mother, visibly disturbed.
The crowd was growing by the minute. Tousle-haired and barefoot, people who had been rudely awoken were arriving from Chola and Jai Prakash. Old Prema Bai’s cry had spread from alley to alley.
Ratna Nadar, Padmini’s father, bent down to Rahul. “Do you know what they make in that factory of Carbide’s?” he inquired.
Ra
hul appeared surprised by the question. “We should be asking you. You’ve been working there every day for two years.”
The little man appeared to think, then shrugged his shoulders in a gesture of helplessness. “No, I’ve no idea. No one’s ever told us.”
Rahul moved his plank forward into the middle of the assembly. His reputation as the best informed man in the bustee commanded attention.
“Well, I’m going to be the one to tell you what Carbide is making on the Kali Grounds,” he declared. “I’ve asked some big shots and I can assure you there’s nothing to be afraid of. Carbide makes medicine for sick plants. Small white granules to get rid of the insects that attack them and steal the harvest off the poor bastards who planted them. And little white granules aren’t dangerous to anybody. Except the blasted little creatures in the plants.”
Ratna Nadar could still see the hordes of black aphids that had devoured his field in Mudilapa. “You mean to say that all those pipes, all that machinery, all those sacks of powder that go off on trucks, are just to kill those bloody little …” His throat constricted with emotion.
“You’ve got it, brother,” confirmed Rahul. Pointing a bejeweled hand at the illuminated factory, he assumed a solemn tone, “You can go back to bed, friends. That siren isn’t for us!”
Scarcely had the legless cripple finished speaking than five men surged out of the darkness beside the railway track. Haggard, ghastly, exhausted, with their eyes starting out of their heads, they looked like specters in a horror film. One of them was dragging an unconscious comrade. Other escapees came up behind that first group.
“Get out of here! There’s been an accident,” gasped a man who had stopped to recover his breath. “The plant’s full of gas. If the wind starts to blow in this direction, you’re all done for.”
Belram Mukkadam raised his stick above the heads about him. He had tied his gamcha, a cotton scarf, to it and was waving it about like a flag.
“Let’s move out!” he cried. “Follow me! Quickly!”
The semblance of a procession formed behind him. No one panicked because, for all the howling of the siren, it was still difficult to believe in the danger. Before leaving, old Prema Bai lit incense before the statue of the god on the small altar at the end of the alleyway. It was then that a potbellied individual with a shaggy beard and a scarlet turban appeared. With the help of his two sons, the moneylender Pulpul Singh was carrying his most precious possession. He would never have left home without the safe to which he alone knew the combination.
The frequent soundings of the plant’s alarm siren did not seem to shake the confidence of the engineers running the factory. As for the local government authorities, they confined themselves to writing to the two trade union leaders to assure them that the safety of Carbide workers “would be subject to close investigation at the opportune moment.”
With the exception of the unfortunate Ashraf, the accidents had claimed no deaths either inside or outside the factory. At Carbide, these accidents were seen, therefore, as the teething pains experienced by any new plant. The two trade unionists did not share this opinion. They had six thousand notices printed, which their members posted on the walls of the factory and all over town. “BEWARE! BEWARE! BEWARE! ACCIDENTS! ACCIDENTS! ACCIDENTS!” Written in red, the poster said, “The lives of thousands of workers and hundreds of thousands of residents of Bhopal are in danger because of the toxic gases produced by Carbide’s chemical plant.” The notices listed the accidents that had occurred, and claimed that Carbide was violating both Indian labor laws and its own safety standards through understating the danger and poor maintenance. In order to truly mobilize public opinion, however, the Hindu union leader Malviya was counting on a much more effective weapon. Mahatma Gandhi had successfully used it to induce the British to agree to his demands. It consisted of offering one’s life to one’s enemy. Malviya announced that he was embarking on a hunger strike.
26
“You Will Be Reduced to Dust”
So the frail little man with the dark skin had actually dared to do it. For a week he had lain stretched out on a piece of khadi, a coarse cotton cloth, outside the entrance to the factory. With the nape of his neck resting on a stone, a pitcher of water beside him, he was the embodiment of the Carbide workers’ revolt against the working conditions that they believed were responsible for the death of one of their comrades. Every morning at dawn, five workers took their place beside Malviya to fast with him for twenty-four hours. Before going to their workstations, the other employees would gather around the strikers to show their solidarity. “Har zor zulm key takkar mein sangharsh hamara nara hai! We will fight against all forms of oppression!” hundreds of voices shouted in unison.
For the multinational that had built a large part of its reputation on the slogan “Safety First,” these hunger strikes and the accompanying demonstrations were unacceptable blackmail. The reaction was swift and drastic. All political and trade union meetings inside the factory were banned. D.S. Pande, the dynamic head of personnel, had no reservations about setting fire to the tent that served as the main union’s command post. In the ensuing scuffle several people were injured, among them Pande himself, with the result that the trade union leaders were promptly laid off. Without renouncing the fight, Shankar Malviya and Bashir Ullah kept up their action outside. Meetings and processions denouncing the death of Mohammed Ashraf and demanding better safety were held one after another throughout the city, seriously denting the company’s unanimously respected image in the public eye. Curiously, neither Warren Woomer, nor his Indian assistants appeared unduly alarmed at this fierce outbreak of discontent. After all, wasn’t this kind of labor unrest to be expected in Indian firms, where workers had been known to lock their bosses in their offices for weeks? But at Carbide, the fact that an ordinary worker could lie down on the pavement and defy the world’s third largest chemical giant felt like a crime of lèse-majesté; a crime that impugned the ideal of “giving India’s peasants a hand” dreamed of in New York; a crime that destroyed the myth that working for Carbide was the best possible sign of a prosperous karma; a crime that diminished the prestige of the uniform with the blue-and-white logo a whole generation of young Indian graduates dreamed of wearing.
“I knew the factory wasn’t perfect,” Warren Woomer would say later, “but we were constantly improving it. Until Ashraf’s death we’d had an excellent safety record unique in the company’s history.” The American works manager could see no reason why this situation should deteriorate. He had blind faith in his colleagues. After all it was he who had trained them in Carbide’s celebrated safety culture. He knew that the four hundred pages of notes they had compiled on their return from Institute were their bible. A man’s death was a dreadful blow but it should not cast disgrace upon the whole system. Despite the budget cuts to some of the equipment at the time of construction, Woomer was convinced that he commanded one of the safest ships in the modern industrial fleet. And the factory management dismissed these demonstrations as just a campaign by agitators in search of higher salaries and shorter working hours.
It was one of thousands of weekly newspapers that India published in its innumerable languages. Bhopal’s Rapat Weekly was in Hindi, and its modest circulation—six thousand copies— gave it very little impact in a mostly Muslim city where the predominant language was Urdu. The reliability of its investigative journalism and its independent voice had, nevertheless, earned the Weekly a fringe readership with a taste for scandal. Digging into the latter was the particular slant the founder and only editor of the Rapat Weekly had chosen.
The son and grandson of journalists, thirty-four-year-old Hindu Rajkumar Keswani belonged to a family originally from the province of Sind, who had come to Bhopal after the partition of India in 1947. At sixteen he had left college to contribute to a sports journal, then worked at the city news desk of the Bhopal Post. For years this indefatigable investigator had reported on the minor and major events that occurred in t
he City of the Begums. After the Post folded, Keswani had sunk his savings into the creation of a small weekly to serve the true interests of Bhopal’s citizens. For this man mad about poetry, botany and music, the threat posed by modern industry to the safety of the city was very real. The discovery of irregularities in the allocation of industrial licenses drove him to look for collusion between Carbide and the local authorities. The mysterious fire in the alpha-naphthol unit had already tickled his curiosity. The poisoning of Mohammed Ashraf clinched the matter. He embarked upon an investigation that might have turned him into a savior, if only people had listened to him.
“As luck would have it, I knew Ashraf,” he would recount. “He lived just next door to the fire station where I’d set up my office. He often had comrades from work round to his house. Together, they would talk about the dangers of their profession. They spoke about toxic gases, deadly leaks and the likelihood of explosion. Some of them made no secret of their intention to resign. I’d thought the plant was producing an innocent white powder, like the one I used to protect the roses on my terrace from greenfly, and I found what they said terrifying.”
No sooner had he carried his friend Ashraf to his grave, than the journalist rushed to see the deceased’s colleagues. “I wanted to know whether his death was an isolated incident or the result of some failure on the part of the factory.”
Keswani gathered enough witness statements to accuse Carbide of negligently violating its own safety standards. Bashir Ullah, one of the dismissed trade union leaders, even managed to smuggle the journalist inside the site at night. As he went through the various production units, he could smell phosgene’s odor of freshly cut grass and methyl isocyanate’s aroma of boiled cabbage.
Five Past Midnight in Bhopal Page 15