Bhopal is not a normal place. It is deeply, intimately, poisoned. Twenty-five years after the catastrophic gas disaster, Union Carbide’s toxins still flow in the soil, in the water, in the wells, in people’s blood, in wombs and breast milk and in the hearts of local politicians. Go and see for
yourself. Once you’ve arrived in Bhopal, take an auto-rickshaw to any one of Annu Nagar, Blue Moon Colony, Nawab Colony, Atal-Ayub Nagar, Oriya Basti, Garib Nagar, Kainchi Chola. You’ll soon notice that an awful lot of children seem in some way damaged. It’s about one in 25, ten times the national average. You’ll see a lot of people who are obviously sick. More than you’d normally expect to find, even in slums as desperate as these.
Open your ears and listen to the stories of those who live here. ‘That night’ is still vividly alive in people’s memories, a nightmare that will not fade. Many Bhopalis are seriously, chronically ill from the injuries they sustained as they fled the gas, and unwittingly drew it deep into their lungs. Wherever you go in these areas you get views, sometimes far off, often close, of Union Carbide’s factory. The company abandoned it full of dangerous chemicals, thousands of tonnes of them, and now it is derelict, falling apart.
Winds and storms tear at it. Twenty-four monsoons have rusted and rotted it. The rains have washed the chemicals deep into the soil and groundwater. From there they pass into the wells and bore pipes, gush from taps, enter people’s bodies, flow in their veins. The poisons burn stomachs, corrode skin, damage organs and seep into wombs where they go to work on the unborn. By the time the infants are born, the poisons are waiting in their mothers’ milk.
If you are scientifically-minded, take samples of soil and water inside the factory. Union Carbide was itself the first to do this. In 1989 its samples were so lethal that fish introduced to them died instantly. The findings were kept quiet. Ten years passed before Greenpeace’s survey found mercury in places at six million times background level, and cancer — and birth-defect-causing poisons in the water supply.
Draw water in Atal-Ayub Nagar from handpump AA2 — people drink this, wash their clothes and bathe in it — have the sample analysed at the best lab you can find. You’ll discover carbon-tetrachloride at 4,880 times the EPA safety limit. Ten years ago Greenpeace tested this same well and carbon-tetrachloride was then at 682 times higher than EPA limits. In the last decade, the water has got seven times more poisonous. Thirty-five thousand people living near the factory have to use contaminated water. No wonder so many are sick, so many children born deformed and brain-damaged. What is surprising is the attitude of the politicians, both at the state and Centre.
The factory has been poisoning its surroundings for a very long time. Well, before the gas accident, a Bhopal lawyer called Babulal Gaur was involved in a dispute between Union Carbide and local farmers who claimed their cattle were being poisoned by the factory. Later Gaur became a minister in the local BJP government and to him fell the duty of caring for the city’s gas survivors. In 2004, he told the Christian Science Monitor that the groundwater was contaminated and complained that the previous Congress state government had tried to hush the matter up. In May of that year India’s Supreme Court ordered the state to supply clean water to the poisoned communities. Gaur’s government ignored this order. A year passed and a group of women and children went to government offices to ask why nothing had been done. They were savagely beaten, punched and kicked by the police. A month later Gaur, by now the Chief Minister, announced an ambitious Rs 600 crore plan to beautify the city with ornamental fountains and badminton courts.
To mark the 25th anniversary of the gas disaster, Gaur, now demoted to Gas Relief Minister, announced that he would open the derelict factory site to the public. There was no water contamination, he said. Also, displaying a curious naiveté, he told journalists that he had handled some waste and not become ill. A cynic remarked that this was like touching a cigarette and saying, ‘Look, I haven’t got lung cancer.’ Denying that contamination exists clearly serves the company’s interests. No doubt it is mere coincidence that Dow Chemical, owner of Union Carbide, has been making donations to Gaur’s party, the BJP.
This sordid little tale is itself an echo of the bigger machinations going on at the Centre, where Dow has been trying to twist the arm of the Manmohan Singh Congress government into letting it off the Bhopal hook. When people ask, why is the disaster continuing? why have Union Carbide and Dow Chemical not been brought to account? the answer is this: Union Carbide’s victims are still dying in Bhopal because India itself is dying under the corrupt and self-serving rule of
rotten leaders. Bhopal will not be healed, cured or cleaned, as long as the power-brokers and the money-brokers are allowed to get away with it. India is a democracy. This agony will end only when people like you demand that justice long overdue must finally be done.
Indra Sinha is the author of Animal’s People, the Booker-shortlisted fictionalised account of a Bhopal gas survivor. He is also an active campaigner for Bhopal gas victims
The views expressed by the author are personal