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Students worldwide demand justice for Bhopal victims
Students demanded that Dow Chemical resolve its legal and moral responsibilities for the 'Hiroshima of the chemical industry'.
It's billed as the biggest mobilisation by Indian students on American campuses. Over 40 US universities will see this week a new campaign unfold on the 20-year-old Bhopal gas tragedy. The idea is to drum up support to force Dow Chemical to clean up the toxic site, face criminal trial in India and pay up for the medical care and rehabilitation of survivors.
With support from American and other student bodies under the auspices of the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal (ICJB), the Indian students have lined up protests, vigils and brainstorming sessions. The venues include such prestigious centres as Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Princeton, Brown and Carnegie Mellon.
The students want their universities to snap links with Dow Chemical and reject donations from the company as long as it does not assume its moral and legal responsibility in Bhopal. "Dow-Carbide should expect these protests to continue and intensify," says ICJB's student coordinator Ryan Bodanyi.
"We're not going to allow Dow-Carbide to get away with murder," says Nishant Jain of the Association of India's Development (AID), the lead organisation in mobilising Indian students for the campaign. "Enron's crimes may have cost people their retirement portfolios, but Dow-Carbide's crimes in Bhopal have cost tens of thousands of people their health and their lives."
A number of American and international organisations have joined hands to bring pressure to bear on Dow. They include the Greenpeace, Amnesty International, Environment Health Fund and the Boston Common Asset Management.
Addressing a media teleconference, Greenpeace's legal director charged Dow practising "environmental racism". If the Bhopal-type disaster had struck somewhere within the US, Dow would have paid for the clean-up in compliance with the Environmental Protection Agency's code and other laws of the land.
Rajan Sharma, the lead attorney representing the survivors, says the legal struggle to hold Union Carbide and its successor Dow accountable would continue. A federal class action lawsuit is pending in New York against Union Carbide and its former CEO Warren Anderson. "We have prevailed twice before in the US Court of Appeals," he said.
The Boston Common Asset Management, acting on behalf of some investors, has filed a shareholder resolution, asking Dow to quantify and analyse Bhopal's impact on the company's reputation, finances and expansion plans.
