Five Past Midnight in Bhopal

by Dominique Lapierre; Javier Moro

  Today Bhopal has some one hundred and fifty thousand people chronically affected by the tragedy, which still kills ten to fifteen patients a month. Breathing difficulties, persistent coughs, ulcerations of the cornea, early-onset cataracts, anorexia, recurrent fevers, burning of the skin, weakness and depression are still manifesting themselves, not to mention constant outbreaks of cancer and tuberculosis. Chronic gynecological disorders such as the absence of menstrual periods or, alternatively, an increase to four or five times a month, are common. Finally, retarded growth has been noted in young people aged between fourteen and eighteen, who look scarcely ten. Because Carbide never revealed the exact composition of the toxic cloud, to this day medical authorities have been unable to come up with an effective course of treatment. Thus far, all treatments have produced only temporary relief. Often overuse of steroids, antibiotics and anxiolytics serves only to exacerbate the damage done by the gases. Today Bhopal has as many hospital beds as a large American city. Without enough qualified doctors and technicians to use and repair the ultramodern equipment, however, the vast hospitals built since the disaster remain largely unused. An inquiry carried out in July 2000 revealed that a quarter of the medicines dispensed by the Bhopal Memorial Hospital Trust, recently established with Carbide funds, were either harmful or ineffective, and that 7.6 percent were both harmful and ineffective.

  So much official negligence has produced a rush of private medical practices. According to victims’ advocacy groups, however, two-thirds of these doctors lack the necessary skills. In light of this, several of these groups set up their own care centers such as the Sambhavna Clinic, with which the authors of this book are now associated. This unique institution, founded by a former engineer (see the Letter to the Reader) by the name of Satinath Sarangi, is staffed by four doctors and some twenty medical and welfare experts. Together, they monitor more than ten thousand economically disadvantaged patients, and see that they all receive effective treatment. The team at Sambhavna Clinic has discovered that certain yoga exercises can dramatically improve chronic respiratory problems. Half the patients thus treated have regained the ability to breathe almost normally and have been able to give up the drugs they had been taking for many years. The clinic also manufactures some sixty plant-based Ayurvedic medicines, which have already enabled hundreds of patients to resume some form of activity—a spectacular achievement that has wrested from poverty some of the fifty thousand men and women once too weak to do manual work.

  So many years after the catastrophe, five thousand families in Chola, Shakti Nagar, Jai Prakash Nagar and other bustees are still drinking water from wells polluted by the toxic waste left by the factory. Samples taken by a Greenpeace team in December 1999 from the vicinity of the former installation showed a carbon tetrachloride level 682 times higher than the acceptable maximum, a chloroform level 260 times higher, and a trichloroethylene level 50 times higher.

  No court of law ever passed judgment on Union Carbide for the crime it committed in Bhopal. Neither the Indian government, claiming to represent the victims, nor the American lawyers who had extracted thousands of powers of attorney from poor people like Ganga Ram, managed to induce a court on the other side of the Atlantic to declare itself competent to try a catastrophe that had occurred outside the United States. One of the American lawyers representing the Indian government had taken young Sunil Kumar, one of three survivors of a family of ten, to New York to try and persuade the judge before whom the case had been brought, to agree to try Carbide. It was the ambulance chaser’s view that only an American court could require the multinational to pay an amount commensurate to the enormity of the wrong. They sought damages of up to $15 billion. Carbide’s defense lawyers argued that an American court was not competent to assess the value of a human life in the third world. “How can one determine the damage inflicted on people who live in shacks?” asked one member of the legal team. One newspaper took it upon itself to do the arithmetic. “An American life is worth approximately five hundred thousand dollars,” wrote the Wall Street Journal. “Taking into account the fact that India’s gross national product is 1.7 percent of that of the United States, the court should compensate for the decease of each Indian victim proportionately, that is to say with eight thousand five hundred dollars.” * One year after the catastrophe, no substantial help from the multinational had reached the victims, despite the fact that Carbide had given $5 million in emergency aid. It took four long years of haggling before, in the absence of a proper trial, a settlement was drawn up between the American company and the Indian government. In February 1989, Union Carbide offered to pay $470 million in compensation, in full and final settlement and provided the Indian government undertook not to pursue any further legal proceedings against the company or its chairman. This was over six times less than the compensation initially claimed by the Indian government. The lawyers for the government nevertheless accepted the proposal without consulting the victims.

  This very favorable settlement from Union Carbide’s perspective sent the company’s stock up two dollars on Wall Street, a rise that enabled Chairman Warren Anderson to inform his shareholders that in the final analysis, the Bhopal disaster only meant “a loss of forty-three cents a share” to the company. One week after the fateful night, Union Carbide shares had dropped fifteen points, reducing the multinational’s value by $600 million.

  Most surprising was the psychological shockwave that the disaster triggered throughout every level of the company, from engineers like Warren Woomer or Ranjit Dutta, to ordinary workers, office employees or elevator boys in the various subsidiaries. At the head office in Danbury, secretaries burst into tears over telexes from Bhopal. Engineers, unable to comprehend what could possibly have happened, shut themselves away in their offices to pray. Local psychiatrists had employees of one of the world’s largest industrial companies come pouring in, in a pitiful state of depression and bewilderment. Many admitted to having lost confidence in “Carbide’s strong corporate identity.” There were similar reactions in Great Britain, Ghana and Puerto Rico, wherever, in fact, the flag with the blue-and-white logo was flying. Four days after the catastrophe, at midday on December 6, over 110,000 employees at the 700 factories and laboratories stopped work for ten minutes “to express our grief and solidarity with the victims of the accident in Bhopal.”

  Anderson was so concerned by the crisis in morale of Carbiders the world over that he recorded a series of video messages intended to restore their confidence. These messages featured much discussion of ethics, morality, duty and compassion. The best way of getting things back on track, however, was still to show that the company was not guilty. On March 15, 1985, the vice president of the agricultural division of the Indian subsidiary, K.S. Kamdar, called a press conference in Bombay to announce that the tragedy had not been due to an accident but to sabotage. Kamdar based his statement on the inquiry carried out by the team of engineers sent to Bhopal the day after the disaster. According to this inquiry, a worker had deliberately introduced a large quantity of water into the piping connected to the tank full of MIC. This worker, who remained nameless, had supposedly acted out of vengeance after a disagreement with his superiors. To support this theory, the investigators had relied on the discovery of a hose close to tank 610 and, in particular, upon the doctoring of logbook entries made by the shift on duty that night. The report that supposedly incriminated a saboteur made no mention of the fact that none of the factory’s safety systems were activated at the time of the accident.

  The authors of this book were able to identify and meet the man Union Carbide had accused. They talked to him at length. The man in question is Mohan Lal Varma, the young operator who, on the night of the disaster, identified the smell of MIC while his companions attributed it to an insecticide sprayed in the canteen. It is their deep-seated conviction that this father of three children, who was well aware of the dangers of methyl isocyanate, could not have perpetrated an act to which he himself and a large number of
Carbide’s workers were likely to fall victim. His colleague T.R. Chouhan, wrote a book called Bhopal—The Inside Story, in which he points out large technical holes in Carbide’s sabotage story. Mohan Lal Varma’s innocence was, moreover, immediately recognized. No legal proceedings were ever instituted against him. Today he lives, quite openly, two hours outside Bhopal. If the survivors of the tragedy had had the slightest suspicion about him, would they not have sought vengeance? As it was, no one in Bhopal or elsewhere took the charge seriously.

  Events would further conspire to refute it. Four months after the accident in Bhopal, on March 28, 1985, a methyl oxide leak at the Institute site in the United States poisoned eight workers. On the following August 11, another leak, this time from a tank holding aldicarb oxime, injured 135 victims in the Kanawha Valley. One of them was Pamela Nixon, the laboratory assistant at Saint Francis Hospital in South Charleston, who had noticed the smell of boiled cabbage years before. “I was among those who believed Union Carbide when they claimed that accidents like the one in Bhopal could not occur in America,” she told the press when she came out of the hospital. The incident had changed her life. She went back to college and joined the organization People Concerned About MIC, created by residents in her area. After which, armed with a degree in environmental sciences, she set out to take on the executives of the various chemical factories in the Kanawha Valley and compel them to tighten their safety measures. This was something that no one had done in Bhopal. The tragedy was bearing its first positive fruits.

  In Bhopal, too, the victims organized themselves to defend their rights. Activists’ organizations rallied thousands of survivors to ransack Carbide’s offices in New Delhi and demand the immediate payment of the promised indemnities. Five years after the tragedy, its victims had still not laid hands on a single one of the $470 million they had been awarded.

  Not surprisingly, so large a sum of money, even though placed in a special account administered by the supreme court, was a magnet for the greedy. Sheela Nadar, Padmini’s mother, had to pay out 1,400 rupees for a dossier establishing her husband’s death. Payment of baksheesh became obligatory in order to obtain access to the compensation desks or to the often very distant offices that handed out the first allocations of provisions and medical aid. In the final analysis, according to official figures, 548,519 survivors would eventually receive what was left of the money paid by Carbide: a little less than 60,000 rupees or approximately $1,400 for the death of a parent, and about half that in cases of serious personal injury. It was a far cry from the million rupees the New York lawyer had promised Ganga Ram and the Orya Bustee survivors.

  Because the wind had been blowing in the direction of the bustees that night, it was the poorest of the poor who were most affected by the tragedy. Left to suffer, exploited by predators on all sides, the survivors soon found themselves subject to further persecution. Under the guise of a “beautification program” the new authorities used part of the moneys meant for the victims to empty the bustees of their Muslim population. Flanked by police, bulldozers razed several neighborhoods to the ground. Only the determination of about fifty Muslim women threatening to burn themselves to death succeeded in putting a temporary halt to the eviction of Muslims. But after a few days, they were all moved to Gandhinagar, outside the city. Iqbal, Ahmed Bassi and Salar, who had escaped the scourge of MIC, were driven out by the madness of men. Like most of the other Muslims living in the Kali Grounds neighborhood, they had to abandon their homes again—this time for good.

  In 1991, the Bhopal court summoned Warren Anderson, Union Carbide’s chairman, to appear on a charge of “homicide in a criminal case.” But the man who was enjoying peaceful retirement in his villa in Vero Beach, Florida, did not keep the promise he had made to a journalist as he left Indian soil on December 11, 1984. Not only was he not returning to the country where his company’s factory had wrought disaster, but he actually managed to lower his profile within his own country. Anderson left Vero Beach, and his whereabouts are not publicly known. The international warrant for his arrest issued under Indian law remained unserved by Interpol. In March 2000, in response to a class-action suit by victims’ organizations in the federal court of the southern district of New York, Union Carbide’s lawyer William Krohley said the company will accept process served in the name of Anderson but will not disclose his whereabouts. These organizations remain undaunted, however, and do not intend to give up. The graffiti “HANG ANDERSON,”

  which the survivors never tire of repainting on their city walls, are a reminder that justice has not yet been done.

  If the Indian people believe Warren Anderson is a fugitive, the prospects of bringing Union Carbide to justice are just as unlikely, for the very good reason—albeit one of small consolation to the victims—that the multinational no longer exists. Despite all its chairman’s efforts, the tragedy on December 2, 1984, was the death of the proud company with the blue-and-white logo. The purchase of its agricultural division by the French company Rhône-Poulenc, now the proprietor of the institute’s Sevin factory, and the takeover in August 1999 of all of its assets, for the sum of $9.3 billion, by the Dow Chemical Group, meant that Union Carbide disappeared forever from the world’s industrial horizon. The initiators of the various legal proceedings launched against the Danbury multinational let it be known that they would hold Dow Chemical responsible for the charges levied against Carbide. Their claim was given short shrift. “It is not in my power,” declared Frank Popoff, Dow’s CEO, “to take responsibility for an event which happened fifteen years ago, with a product we never developed, at a location where we never operated.”

  And what of the beautiful plant? One day in January 1985, shortly after Operation Faith, a tharagar turned up outside the teahouse in Orya Bustee.

  “I’m looking for hands to dismantle the rails from the railway line leading to the factory,” he said.

  The stretch of track linking the factory to the main railway line had never been used. It was a testimony to the megalomania of the South Charleston engineers who had arranged for the purchase of both a locomotive and freight cars to transport the enormous quantities of Sevin the factory was supposed to produce. Timidly, Ganga Ram, who had lost most of the customers of his painting business in the catastrophe, put up his hand.

  “I’m looking for work,” he said, convinced that the tharagar would reject him when he saw his mutilated fingers.

  But that day Carbide was taking on any available hands. The former leprosy sufferer would at last be able to have his revenge by helping to dismantle the monster that had once refused him employment.

  For one year, Jagannathan Mukund headed the team assigned to closing down the factory, a Herculean task that involved cleaning every piece of equipment, every pipe, every drum and tank, first with water and then with a chemical decontaminant. These cleaned and scrubbed parts of the factory were sold off to small local entrepreneurs. In 1986, when the job was done, the last workmen wearing the once prestigious coverall with the blue-and-white logo left the site forever.

  Today, the abandoned factory looks like the vestige of some lost civilization. Its metal structures rust in the open air. In the rough grass lie pieces of the sarcophagi that protected the tanks. On the control room walls, the seventy dials rest in eternal peace, including the pressure gauge for tank 610, with its needle stuck on the extreme left of the instrument, lasting testament to the fury of the MIC. The notices with the inscription “SAFETY FIRST” add a touch of irony to a scene of industrial devastation.

  What was to be done with this mute but powerful witness? In 1997, India’s minister for culture suggested turning the whole of the Kali Grounds site into an amusement park. But the indignant outcry the proposal provoked caused the authorities to withdraw it. The accursed factory must remain there always, as a place of remembrance.

  Fortunately, a privileged few managed to escape the misfortune that befell most of the tragedy’s victims. Orya Bustee’s bride and groom were among t
hem. Miraculously resurrected after her rescue from the funeral pyre, Padmini was able to rejoin her loved ones after a long and painful recovery in Hamidia Hospital. She returned to Orya Bustee and set up home with her husband Dilip in her parents’ hut. Very soon, however, the nightmare of that tragic night began to haunt her to the point where she could no longer bear the place in which she had spent her adolescence. The mere sight of the metal structures mocking her from a few hundred yards away very nearly drove her insane. That was when an opportunity presented itself in the form of a plot of land for sale, about forty miles from Bhopal, near the banks of the Narmada River. The idea of returning along the trail that had once brought her family from Orissa to Bhopal filled the young Adivasi with enthusiasm. She persuaded her husband that they could make their home in the country, have a small farm and live on what they produced. Her mother and brother were prepared to go with them. The indemnity they had just received for the death of the head of their family made the relocation just about feasible.

  Dilip and Padmini built a hut, planted soy, lentils, vegetables and fruit trees. Little by little they dug out an irrigation system. Like all the farmers in the area, they bought “medicines” from traveling salesmen to protect their crops from insects, especially from the weevils that liked to attack potatoes. These door-to-door salesmen did not, of course, offer Sevin. Instead they had pyrethrum-based pesticides, which had the advantage of being both cheap and generally effective, except when it came to soya bean caterpillars, which were a real nightmare.