“December second, between ten o’clock and midnight, will be the most propitious time for your children’s union,” he announced.
31
The End of a Young Indian’s Dream
The document was stamped “BUSINESS: CONFIDENTIAL” and dated September 11, 1984. Addressed to the person in charge of Union Carbide’s engineering and safety department in South Charleston, it was signed J.M. Poulson, the engineer who, two years previously, had headed the safety audit of the Bhopal factory. This time Poulson and the five members of his team had just finished inspecting the storage conditions of several hundred tons of methyl isocyanate at Institute 2, deep in the Kanawha Valley, home to more than two hundred and fifty thousand Americans.
The document revealed that the Institute plant was suffering from a number of defects and malfunctions: vibrations likely to rupture sensitive piping; potentially dangerous leakage from various pumps and other apparatus; corrosion of electric cable sheathing; poor positioning of several automatic fire extinguishers in sectors of prime importance; faults in the filling systems to the MIC tanks, etc. In short, deficiencies that proved that safety at the flagship factory left a lot to be desired. The document also claimed that the actual health of personnel working in Institute was at risk. Poulson and his team had in fact discovered that workers in the MIC unit were often subjected to chloroform vapors, especially during maintenance operations. There was no monitoring system to measure the duration of their exposure, despite the fact that chloroform was a highly carcinogenic substance. The report stipulated that an interval of fifteen minutes would constitute dangerous overexposure. All the same, the investigators considered these risks relatively minor in comparison with the danger “of an uncontrollable exothermic reaction in one of the MIC tanks and of the response to this situation not being rapid or effective enough to prevent a catastrophe.” The document gave a detailed list of the circumstances that could make such a tragedy possible. The fact that the tanks were used for prolonged storage was conducive to internal contamination, which was likely to pass unnoticed until precisely such a sudden and devastating chemical reaction occurred. The investigators had actually found that the tank’s refrigeration system introduced minuscule impurities, which could become the catalysts for such a reaction. They had discovered that these impurities could also come from the flare meant to burn off the toxic gases at a height of 120 feet. In short, the most modern plant, one that Carbide had counted among the safest in the whole of the United States’ chemical industry, appeared to be at the mercy of a few drops of water or metal filings. “The potential hazard leads the team to conclude that a real potential for a serious incident exists,” declared the document. In his accompanying letter, Poulson gave the names of sixteen Carbide executives who should receive copies of his report. Strangely, this list made no mention of the man to whom it was a matter of primary concern. Jagannathan Mukund, managing director of the Bhopal plant, with three tanks permanently holding sixty tons of MIC, would remain ignorant of the concerns expressed by the American engineers and, in particular, of their recommendations to counteract a possible catastrophe.
The plant on the Kali Grounds was a little like his baby. It was he who had set down the plans for the first formulation unit. It was he who had bought the splendid palace from the nawab’s brother to turn it into an agronomical research center. Together with Eduardo Muñoz and several other fanatical pioneers, Ranjit Dutta had laid the foundations for the beautiful plant right in the heart of the City of the Begums. As far as this engineer with the physique of a football player was concerned, his time spent in Bhopal had been a magical period in a richly successful career. After leaving India in 1976 to work in Carbide’s American agricultural products division, Dutta had repeatedly returned to the site of his first love. Every year he vacationed there with his family, boating on the waters of the Upper Lake, listening to poets during the mushairas in Spices Square, and dreaming beside the illuminated outline of the factory whose funnels he had designed. *
Now, at the age of fifty-four, he was vice-president in charge of the agricultural products division at the company’s headquarters. And that summer of 1984, at the time when the team of investigators led by Poulson was compiling its report, the Indian engineer had just come back from a pilgrimage to Bhopal. This time, however, the man who loved the city so much returned sad and disappointed.
“I didn’t like what I saw during that visit,” he later recounted. “I saw the approaches to the factory overrun with rubbish and weeds. I saw unoccupied workers chatting for hours over cups of tea. I saw mountains of files strewn about the management’s offices. I saw pieces of dismantled equipment lying about the place. I saw disorientated, unmotivated people. Even if the factory had temporarily stopped production, everyone should have been at their workstations getting on with maintenance work… . It’s strange but I sensed an atmosphere of neglect.”
As soon as he got back to Danbury, Dutta tried to relay this impression to his superiors but, oddly, it seemed none of them wanted to listen. “They probably thought I was harboring some sort of grievance against the local management,” he would say, “or that I wanted to take over the running of the factory again. But I only wanted to warn them that strange things were going on in Bhopal, and that people there were not doing their jobs as they should.”
It would not be long before Dutta had an explanation for this apparent indifference. If no one at the top of Union Carbide seemed interested in the neglect to which the factory had fallen prey, it was for a reason: in Danbury the Bhopal plant had already been written off. Dutta would have formal confirmation of the fact at the conference, which, every year, assembled the heads of the company’s agricultural divisions in the Connecticut countryside. At this meeting, in August 1984, marketing strategies for products made by Carbide throughout the world—sales prices, methods of beating the competition and acquiring new clients—were discussed and agreed upon. The topics included the Bhopal factory. As early as 1979, the economic viability of the plant had been subjected to extensive debate. One of the various options management considered was simply stopping its construction but because of the late stage in the building process, this idea had been abandoned. Five years later, the situation had further deteriorated. The plant was now losing millions of dollars. The sales prospects for Sevin in 1984 did not exceed a thousand tons, half the amount for the preceding year and only a fifth of the plant’s total production capacity. It was a financial disaster. At the August 1984 meeting, therefore, approval was given for a liquidation program. In fact, the multinational was counting on getting rid of its costly Indian factory by moving its installations to other third world countries. Brazil, for example, could accommodate the phosgene, carbon-monoxide and methyl-isocyanate units. As for the Sevin formulation and packaging works, Indonesia seemed the ideal place for them to be relocated.
In the autumn of 1984, Carbide’s vice president for Asia sent a top-secret message to Bhopal. He wanted to know the financial and practical feasibility of dismantling and moving the plant, “taking into account the moderate price of Indian labor.”
The task of gathering the necessary information was entrusted to the Hindu engineer Umesh Nanda. Nine years earlier, a brief advertisement in the Times of India had enabled this son of a modest industrialist in the Punjab to fulfill the dream of all young Indian scientists of his generation: that of joining a renowned multinational. Now, he was charged with shattering his own dream. “Dismantling and shipping the Sevin production unit should not pose any problem,” he responded in a telex to his superiors on November 10. “The same would not appear to be true of the MIC unit, however, because of extensive corrosion damage.” Nanda warned that the unit could be reassembled only after repair work involving considerable expense was completed. The Indian’s telex provided the answers to Carbide’s queries. It also confirmed what had been Rajkumar Keswani’s worst fears. The beautiful plant had been abandoned.
After a two-year absence, Raj
kumar Keswani was back in Bhopal. He was not yet aware that Carbide had decided to write the factory off and was preparing to transfer parts of it to other third world countries. Ever more alarming information from his contacts inside the plant prompted him to sound a fourth alarm, entitled “BHOPAL ON THE BRINK OF DISASTER.” This time he really believed that his article would rouse public opinion and convince the authorities. Jansatta, the regional daily that ran his piece, was not a local journal but one of India’s biggest newspapers, and a part of the prestigious Indian Express group. Once again, however, Keswani was a voice crying alone in the wilderness. His latest apocalyptic predictions provoked not the slightest interest in the public, any more than they incited the municipal authorities to take any safety measures. The journalist sought an explanation for this latest failure. “Wasn’t I convincing enough?” he asked himself. “Do we live in a society where people mistrust those interested in the public good? Or do they just think I’m putting pressure on Carbide to fill my own pockets?”
The wheel of destiny was turning. In a few weeks’ time, Keswani’s round face would appear on all the world’s television screens. He would become the youngest reporter ever to receive the Press Award of India, the highest possible distinction accorded to a journalist of the subcontinent.
32
The Vengeance of the People of the Kali Grounds
Not for the world would she have missed her meeting with the ordinary people of India. Every morning before leaving to perform her onerous duties as prime minister of the world’s most populous democracy, Indira Gandhi received those who came to seek a darshan, a visual contact, with the woman who embodied supreme authority. The encounter took place in the rose- and bougainvillea-laden garden of her residence on Safdarjang Road, New Delhi. For the sixty-seven-year-old patrician who for seventeen years had ruled over a fifth of humanity, such morning gatherings were an opportunity to immerse herself in the multifaceted reality of her country. Draped in a sari, she would move from group to group, speaking first to peasants from the extreme south, next to a delegation of railway workers from Bengal, then to a group of young schoolgirls with long braids, and thereafter to a squad of barefoot sweepers who had come from their distant province of Bihar. The mother of the nation had a few words to say to each group. She read the petitions presented to her, responded with a promise and posed graciously for souvenir photographs. As in the days of the Mogul emperors, the most humble parts of India had, for a moment’s interlude, daily access to the seat of power.
That morning of Wednesday October 31, 1984, promised to be a splendidly clear, bright autumn day. A soft breeze rustled the leaves of the neem trees in the vast garden where a privileged few waited to receive their morning darshan. They were joined by a British television crew who had come to interview the prime minister. On the previous evening, Indira had returned from an exhausting electoral tour of Orissa, the native state of most of the refugees in Orya Bustee. In the presence of the thousands of followers who had come to hear her, she had concluded her speech with surprising words. “I don’t have the ambition to live a long life, but I am proud to live it serving the nation,” she had said. “If I were to die today, each drop of my blood would make India stronger.”
At eight minutes past nine, she walked down the three steps from her residence into the garden. She was wearing an orange sari, one of the three colors of the national flag. On passing the two sentries on either side of the path, she pressed her hands together at her heart in a cordial namaste. The two men wore traditional Sikh beards and turbans. One of them, forty-year-old Beant Singh, was well known to her; for ten years he had formed part of her closest bodyguard. The other, twenty-one-year-old Satwant Singh, had been in her service only four months.
A few weeks earlier, Ashwini Kumar, former director general of the Border Security Force of India, had come to see Indira Gandhi to express his concern. “Madam, do not keep Sikhs in your security service,” he had urged her. He had reminded her that Sikh extremists had sworn to get back at her for the army’s bombardment and bloody seizure of the Sikhs’ most sacred sanctuary, the Golden Temple of Amritsar. On June 6 of the previous year, the attack had killed 650 Sikhs. Indira Gandhi had smiled and reassured her visitor. Indicating the figure of Beant Singh in the garden, she had replied, “While I’m fortunate enough to have Sikhs like him about me, I have nothing to fear.” Skeptical, the former police executive had insisted. Irritated, she ended their meeting. “How can we claim to be secular if we go communal?” she demanded.
On that thirty-first of October, she had scarcely finished greeting the two guards when the elder pulled out his P-38 and fired three bullets point blank into her chest. His young accomplice promptly emptied the thirty rounds in the magazine of his Sten gun into her body. At least seven shots punctured her abdomen, ten her chest, several her heart. The mother of India did not even have time to cry out. She died on the spot.
Just as the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi thirty-six years previously had done, the news plunged the nation into painful stupor. By the middle of the afternoon, every city in India had become a ghost town. In Bhopal, a twelve-day period of mourning was decreed. All ceremonies, celebrations and festivities were canceled, while cinemas, schools, offices and businesses closed their doors. Flags were flown at half-mast. Newspapers published special editions in which they invited readers to express their despair. “INDIA HAS BEEN ORPHANED,” proclaimed one of the headlines. Another paper wrote, “In a country as diversified as ours, only Indira could guarantee our unity.”
“We will no longer hear the irresistible music of her eloquence …” lamented Bhopal’s people recalling her recent visit for the inauguration of the Arts and Culture building. “The realization of this project will make Bhopal the cultural capital of the country,” she had announced to applause and cheers of “Indira Ki Jai!” The city’s companies, businesses and organizations filled the newspapers with notices expressing their grief and offering their condolences. One of the messages was signed Union Carbide, whose entire staff, so it declared, wept for the death of India’s prime minister.
That afternoon, the shattered voice of the governor of Madhya Pradesh resounded over the airwaves of All India Radio. “The light that guided us has gone out,” he declared. “Let us pray God to grant us the strength to remain united in this time of crisis.” A little later the inhabitants of the bustees gathered around the transistor belonging to Salar the bicycle repairman. Arjun Singh, chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, who had made them property owners by granting them their patta, was also expressing his sorrow. “She was the hope of millions of poor people in this country. Whether they were Adivasis, harijans, inhabitants of the bustees or rickshaw-pullers, she always had time for them and a solution to offer to their problems… . May her sacrifice inspire us to continue to go forward …”
It was not until the next day, however, when the funeral was held, that the residents of Bhopal along with all the people of India really became conscious of the tragedy that had befallen their country. For the first time in history, television was going to broadcast the event all over the nation. Anyone who had access to a set, whether through some zamindar, * organization or club would see the images relayed live. All at once an entire nation was to be joined together by media communion. At daybreak, at the behest of Ganga Ram, owner of the only TV in the bustees, Kali Grounds huts were empty of all occupants. Belram Mukkadam and the shoemaker Iqbal had stacked several of the teahouse tables on top of one another and covered them with a large white sheet, a symbol of purity and mourning, and then decorated their makeshift altar with garlands of yellow marigold and jasmine flowers. Then they had positioned the set high enough for everyone to see the screen.
Since the early hours of the morning, the crowd had been gathering in silence outside the teahouse: men on one side, women and children on the other. Before the ceremony started, they watched silently as representatives of the country’s different religions succeeded one another, reciting pra
yers and appealing for forgiveness and tolerance.
Suddenly, a murmur rose from the assembly. Wide-eyed, the residents of the Kali Grounds were witnessing an historic event: the transportation to the funeral pyre of the woman, who, only the previous day, had ruled the country. The litter, covered with a bed of rose petals, jasmine flowers and garlands of marigolds, filled the screen. Indira Gandhi’s face, with the veil of her red cotton sari set like a halo around it, emerged from an ocean of flowers. With her eyes closed and her features relaxed, she radiated an unusual serenity. The screen showed hundreds of thousands of Indians massed along the funeral route leading to the sacred banks of the Yamuna River, where the cremation would take place. The cameras lingered on tearful faces, on people clinging to street lamps and branches of trees or perched on rooftops. Like waters coming together again in the wake of a ship, the crowd rushed in behind the funeral carriage—ministers, coolies, office workers, businessmen, Hindus, Muslims, even Sikhs in their turbans, representatives of all the castes, religions, races and colors of India, all united in shared grief. For three hours this endless river swelled with fresh waves of humanity. When, finally, the procession reached the place where a pyre had been built on a brick platform, the residents of the Kali Grounds watched as a groundswell surged through the hundreds of thousands of people gathered around their fallen leader. To Padmini, all those people looked like millions of ants in a nest. To old Prema Bai, who remembered seeing photographs of Mahatma Gandhi’s funeral, it was the finest tribute to any servant of India since the death of the nation’s liberator. Among the crowd of television viewers, a woman with short hair said her rosary. Sister Felicity had wanted to share the sorrow of her brothers and sisters in the bustees.
Five Past Midnight in Bhopal Page 19