The CIA puzzle

Sometimes it is difficult to tell who is better informed on certain “hot” topics: the journalist, the politician or the bureaucrat. One question that has been cropping up everywhere is why and how the Bhopal issue turned into such a mushroom cloud of leaks, allegations and wild speculation. One of the questions that reporters are finding rather difficult to answer is why all of a sudden the media is going overboard on a 26-year-old tragedy. A senior bureaucrat buttonholed a group of journalists the other day to ask if it had something to do with the internal politics of the ruling party. The big mystery though is about the CIA papers that appear to give an insight into what happened in 1984 when Rajiv Gandhi was prime minister. A BJP hotshot was nonplussed when asked why the party had not made much of the issue years ago since the American intelligence agency had declassified the relevant documents in 2002. No one, it seems, has a clue why the issue is being whipped up now.