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Abdul Jabbar should have been planning for a quiet retirement but life for the short, balding victim of the Bhopal gas tragedy is an unending struggle for justice. As convenor of the Bhopal Gas Peedit Mahila Udyog Sangathan, Jabbar, 58, is one of the most recognisable faces of the plight of tens of thousands of survivors.
Jabbar says the industrial accident and the cover-up that ensued is a constant reminder of how the powerful can manipulate the system. “In the past 30 years, I have been offered everything from money to political positions. For me, this cause is bigger,” he says.
Jabbar lost his brother, mother and father in the gas leak and its aftermath. He has a chest infection and needs special glasses to read. “I lost everything in the tragedy,” he says. His modest office in the Gas Peedit Mahila Udyog Sangathan near Hamidia Hospital houses a training centre for victims and their families.
On the night of December 2, 1984, Jabbar and a friend were asleep in their one-room house in Rajendra Nagar, a few metres away from the Union Carbide plant. The sound of screaming woke them up. Like others, Jabbar ran.
The next morning, when he went to the hospital to look for his family, he saw how the deaths were being concealed. “Since then, I have been fighting for the victims. They are my own people, people I have grown up with,” Jabbar says.
A few months after the tragedy, when the government shut the rehabilitation centre and stopped relief, Jabbar started the Bhopal Gas Peedit Mahila Udyog Sangathan with the call, “khairaat nahin rozgar chahiye (We want work, not alms).”
The organisation has been instrumental in winning crucial battles for the victims, including the settlement between Union Carbide and the central government, that paved the way for some sort of compensation, challenging the Supreme Court settlement in 1991, and reopening criminal cases against the accused. Now, it is working with other non-governmental organisations to clean the contaminated plant site.
The son of a textile mill worker, Jabbar grew up in poverty. “I used to wash my school uniform in Bhopal’s Upper Lake and dry it to wear the next day. I had only one set,” he recalls. As a youth, he did odd-jobs like pulling carts and digging borewells. “My idol is Shankar Guha Niyogi (a trade union leader and founder of the Chhattisgarh Mukti Morcha) after I saw his work from up close,” he adds.
Jabbar is hurt by allegations of his making money in the name of Bhopal gas victims.
“It saddens me. But when people thank me for the help they received, I forget all these insinuations,” Jabbar says.
