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In my growing-up days in Bhopal, in the aftermath of the Gas Tragedy, the most striking memory of Warren Anderson was the numerous posters and wall writings that were scattered across the city, carrying Anderson's picture alongside that of a skull of death.
'Killer Anderson', the 'Murderer of Bhopal', the 'Man behind the holocaust' were all sobriquets that accompanied Anderson's name.
Not a single prayer meeting or protest rally passed without demands for his extradition to stand trial for the crime of Bhopal. His old bespectacled face with a mild grin was perhaps the most common picture through which one associated the all-powerful CEO of Union Carbide.
In fact, such was the seclusion in which Anderson lived his life after he retired from UCC's board that till date no one knows how the man looked like after 1984.
It was much later, when I started understanding the actual cause of the calamity, that I realised that Anderson was just one -- albeit a prime one -- of many people behind the tragedy that killed over 4000 people in just 48 hours and which haunts the residents of the city to this day.
There were many others behind the untold miseries that befell Bhopal, from the then Chief Minister Late Arjun Singh to the district administration which had allowed construction of a hazardous chemicals factory bang within a densely-populated city, to the engineers and officers of the accident-prone plant.
If Anderson was responsible for escaping punishment in connivance with others, so are these others. If he is Accused Number One in the Bhopal gas tragedy, others involved in the case should not have been far behind.
There have been calls for his hanging, but there should equally have been similar calls for the others who contributed to the tragedy by turning a blind eye to the factory despite knowing fully well that a disaster was waiting to happen. Successive officials in both central and state governments who allowed the wounds to linger should also be held accountable, as should Dow Chemicals, the multinational chemical company which eventually bought Union Carbide, or even those who left the toxic chemical from the closed plant linger, which continues to be a major cause of pollution in the city.
But it is Warren Anderson, news of whose death became public on Friday, who remains the single most visible culprit behind the tragedy and one of the most hated figures in Bhopal's history. So much so that upon learning of his death, media reports said that protestors spat on the same old picture of Anderson.
With his death, the conspiracy behind the tragedy and the trickery by which culprits were allowed to go scot free by a benign state and central government might be buried. So also, perhaps, will the names of all others who contributed to the making of the gas tragedy.
But for Bhopal residents who lived through the ordeal of that night, Anderson will always be the man who was single-handedly responsible for the death of more than 10,000 innocent people.
