I am amazed by the strange logic of Dorab R Sopariwala (“Why jail for bosses?”, June 22) who has offered a completely inappropriate analogy to argue that the then Union Carbide India (UCIL) Chairman Keshub Mahindra is not culpable in the Bhopal gas tragedy and should, therefore, not be jailed. This is typical Indian middle class attitude. As long as People Like Us (PLUs) are not affected, then PLUs who are responsible for such disasters should not be blamed. All this changed with the Uphaar cinema fire in Delhi which killed too many children of PLUs. Then, of course, they went all out to get the Ansals, the owners, charged and convicted. According to Sopariwala’s argument, the Ansals are in no way to blame because it is their managers and electricians who should go to jail for poor fire safety precautions. That Mahindra and the Ansals were happily getting paid and earning huge profits for not discharging their responsibilities appear to have escaped the writer.
To come back to the analogy he draws with a hypothetical fire in a Business Standard office, Sopariwala gives the game away by saying the Ahmedabad managers opted for “a patchwork job” on fire safety in order to save money. In other words, he is tacitly admitting that UCIL did so, too. That is something that is public knowledge anyway. The safety standards prescribed by the US parent company were not enforced and as new reports show, executives from the US had in a visit to the Bhopal facility expressed concern over this. So what was Mahindra doing? If a case against Business Standard officials proves that they deliberately ignored safety norms and that Thomas and Ninan refused to implement the suggested precautions, then I think the courts would take a serious view of their culpability.
Uma Raman, Hyderabad