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The haunting
On December 2-3, 1984 thousands perished in the world’s largest industrial disaster, killing and maiming thousands more in the years to come. As there is talk of setting up a Bhopal disaster memorial, Indrajit Hazra visited the Union Carbide factory site whose only purpose now is to remind us of what happened 25 years ago as well as to make us forget.
The dead do not speak. But the guards inside the single-storey building near the entrance of the otherwise derelict Union Carbide factory site in Bhopal aren’t taking any chances.
Scrawled on almost all the windows inside the guard house, each room lit by a dim bulb and plastered with pictures of deities that include Kareena Kapoor, are lines from Tulsidas’ Ramayana. The guards are wary of talking about the past. They are warier of talking about the present which involves them keeping prying ‘intruders’ at bay.
One of the guards mumbles an explanation about a line invoking Hanuman, “It’s to keep spirits out.”
In the early evening darkness that descends on Bhopal, made darker by the adjoining dense ‘forestland’ that was once an up and running pesticide plant, no one needs to ask what spirits the man starting his night shift is talking about.
The Bhopal wall
The Union Carbide factory site on Berasia Road is a sprawling, crumbling ground with wild overgrowth behind a perimeter wall that’s smeared with all kinds of graffiti. One of them depicts a handcuffed man wearing a top hat with the words ‘Arrest Andersen’ behind him, as another man in a lungi of sorts and part of an angry crowd speech-bubbles, "Apradhi ko saja do (Punish the guilty)".
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| Inside the guard rooms at the Union Carbide factory site, the windows are scrawled with lines from Tulsidas’ Ramayana for ‘protection’ Courtesy: Satish Bate/ HT Photo |
It’s another matter that the ‘aparadhi’, Warren Anderson, Chairman of Union Carbide when death came to Bhopal on a December night in 1984, is, at 88, spending his autumn years far from any fumes — or fuming victims — in Bridgehampton, Long Island, New York.
But there are signs on the wall that things have moved on even as many others things have remained the same. Next to the message, ‘Bhopal Group for Information and Action 09826167369’, and a stone’s throw away from a ‘3 December 2009 Kala Divas (Black Day)’ wall calendar — the number being updated each year with whitewash before every ‘Bhopal gas’ anniversary, and ‘24’ still visible under the freshly painted ‘25’ in ‘Bhopal gas kand ki 25-wey barsi pradesh sarkar key nikkameypan aur kendra sarkar ki laaparwahi key 25 saal' (On the 25th anniversary of the Bhopal gas disaster, 25 years of the state government's incompetence and the central government's carelessness.). On the same wall there’s another message: ‘Gulshan Coaching Commerce Classes/ Mathematics’.
Lost in the forest
The Madhya Pradesh government recently announced that it will throw open the defunct Union Carbide site to the public on the 25th anniversary of the gas tragedy. But as we walk through a large breach in the wall, we suddenly find ourselves in the expansive grounds of a rolling field where apart from people tending to their cattle, there are kids happily flying kites and behaving like, well, kids.
The factory site, an untouched museum of decay, looks more like a zamindar’s vast property gone to seed because of a decades-long family dispute rather than Ground Zero of a disaster zone. As one proceeds through the ‘Carbide forest’, carefully avoiding from stepping on human turd or a snake, there’s a growing feeling that behind those heavy bushes and trees, an Angkor Wat-like structure will suddenly appear. Instead, what does are broken cement water tanks with their inverted watermarks — ‘45 m, 50 m, 55 m...’ — still visible and scattered like heads of giants.
It was from one such tank that on the night of December 2-3 that a large amount of water entered another vessel, the infamous ‘Tank 610’ that contained far too much methyl isocyanate (MIC) than safety norms would have allowed. As Bhopal slept, a chemical reaction with disastrous consequences was brewing. Accelerated by contaminants as well as the heat generated by the reaction inside the vessel (over 200°C), Tank 610 released large volumes of the deadly gas.
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| A view from the top of a defunct tower at the Union Carbide factory site. In the background the city of Bhopal can be seen. Courtesy: Satish Bate/ HT Photo |
Treading further inside the forest, we see rusting towers with bent-over tanks that have corroded over the last quarter century. What purpose do these decrepit structures serve except the paradoxical one of reminding people that the Union Carbide factory still exists — although in a form that hardly does justice to its reputation.
Inside an empty building that seems blasted from inside during a war, you sense the same feeling you do when you meet a murderer who has become old since the last time he killed: you almost feel pity for this blasted heath of rusted equipment and green space that serves no real purpose at all.
Living to tell
“They should tear the place down and build something here that will give us jobs,” says Manoj Kumar Panthi, resident of the J.P. Colony just outside the Carbide wall. “Something other than ‘chemical’,” he adds. Manish was 7 on that terrible night when the air gagged and killed 3,787 people over 72 hours (if you go by the Madhya Pradesh government figures; or 8,000-plus people if you go by the report of Dr Ingrid Eckerman, member of the International Medical Commission on Bhopal, 1994). He survived by being pressed into a bundle by his mother. His father and brother weren’t so lucky. They succumbed to the gas in 1986, a few months separating their deaths.
Shakti Goliya, a 27-year-old mechanic, also thinks it’s time the site is razed and something else built over it. “At the government hospitals, they don’t talk properly to us. Many are also sent away after all these years,” he says. “It’s better to go to private clinics even though it’s not free. Who’s going to fight all the time to go to a doctor?”
Inside the wall, Babu Lal Yadav, 38, is tending to his buffaloes that are munching on the green grass. He has breathing problems he compounds by smoking. “There are stories about this place,” he says looking into the distance. “Strange stories about sightings. But I don’t believe them. I don’t even believe what the government says about taking care of gas victims.”
Yes, the factory site, with the government planning to turn it into a Rs 116 crore Hiroshima-like memorial, is definitely haunted. By the people of Bhopal.
