The issues in Bhopal go way beyond the Congress letting Anderson go
The Congress party’s role in allowing Union Carbide chief Warren Anderson to escape after the Bhopal disaster — and Digvijay Singh inadvertently bringing in Rajiv Gandhi by saying there was probably pressure from the US — is immensely entertaining, but is really a side issue. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that Anderson hadn’t been allowed to leave the country on the orders of then Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Arjun Singh. What then? He couldn’t have been kept under arrest all this while, so like Keshab Mahindra and others he would have been sentenced to a two-year prison term only 26 years after the tragedy. And since the judgment will be challenged and will certainly travel all the way up to the Supreme Court — and take another few decades to do so! — it is not certain if Anderson will even be around by then.
The real issues are the complete and utter failure of all governments, both at the Centre and the states, and their apathy. A list of some of the most egregious ones:
> While the original charge sheet asked for trying the case under Section 304 of the Indian Penal Code (culpable homicide not amounting to murder), which has a maximum sentence of 10 years, the Supreme Court under then Chief Justice A M Ahmadi reduced this to Section 304A under which the maximum sentence is only two years since this deals with death by negligence (like running over someone with your car). While evidence was presented to show the plant was not working properly and the equipment was faulty, the judgment read: “Even assuming that it was a defective plant and it was dealing with a very toxic and hazardous substance like MIC, the mere act of storing such a material by the accused in (tank) No. 610 could not even prima facie suggest that the accused concerned thereby had knowledge that they were likely to cause death of human beings.”
What followed was worse since the Review petition was dismissed by the court. Given the evidence provided and the quote from the judgment just cited, this tells you just how much of a sham the entire Review process under Article 137 of the Constitution is. More so when you consider that, just 453 words later, Article 142 says, “The Supreme Court in the exercise of its jurisdiction may pass such decree or make such order as is necessary for doing complete justice (itals mine) in any cause or matter pending before it.” Which means that if circumstances warrant it — and given how the unsafe plant, run to the ground by Carbide, was responsible for several thousands dying, surely circumstances warranted it — the court can pass almost any order.
The court didn’t do it, nor did Parliament — surely our MPs should have realised that what had happened was a colossal tragedy and the court rejecting the Review petition was a travesty of justice. For 14 years after this, the MPs twiddled their thumbs and then, when the local court gave a two-year sentence last week, the shock of waking up so suddenly made the law minister try to bluster his way out by saying Anderson could still be extradited! (By the way, Carbide is so cocky, despite all the evidence and the court sentence, its website says it was not guilty, that the water was introduced into the MIC tank by an employee, that the government knew who the employee was, but didn’t want to pursue him since it only wanted to pursue Carbide and get compensation from it (https://bsmedia.business-standard.comwww.bhopal.com/faq.htm).
> The government never even bothered to give compensation to the victims, preferring to wait instead till Carbide paid up — a third of this money is with the government even today. Surely the government’s job was to provide immediate compensation, and then let the victims get money from Carbide separately. To give an example, when you die in a plane crash, your next of kin get compensation from the airline immediately; if negligence of the airline is proved and there is a payment from a lawsuit, this is in addition to the immediate relief provided.
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To ensure history doesn’t repeat itself when the next Bhopal happens, we need to look at setting up a tort compensatory system with contributions from industry — in the manner the entire telecom industry contributes to the Universal Service Obligation Fund for rural telephony — so that victims can be provided immediate succour. What they get from the Carbides of the world later is a different matter.
> Even if the government didn’t want to pay compensation, you’d think it would at least clean up the toxic material from the disaster site. For 25 years, nothing got done and when the Centre for Science and Environment did tests earlier this year, it found mercury and toxic materials like lindane and carbaryl were 24-110 times the safe limits — and this at a site 3 km from the Carbide plant. In other words, the toxic material, kept covered with plastic in a shed, has leached down into the groundwater. Surely the clean-up didn’t have to wait for Carbide to pay for it, it was vital for Indian citizens — Carbide paying up was a different matter. Interestingly, while a committee of experts wants to dispose of the toxic waste in an incinerator in Gujarat (the matter is stuck in a series of court cases), state government reports insist the site is non-toxic.
Given the way the Congress party is trying to shield the late Rajiv Gandhi by insisting there was no pressure to keep the CBI from extraditing Anderson, it’s not clear what the reconstituted Group of Ministers (GoM) will achieve since anything it recommends will show up previous governments run by it. By the way, since the Congress party is now blaming Arjun Singh for releasing Andersen (to protect Gandhi), you wonder how it justifies having Mr Singh head the GoM before it was recast. But that’s what happens when everything is politics.