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Business News/ Opinion / The many unlearnt lessons from the Bhopal tragedy
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The many unlearnt lessons from the Bhopal tragedy

Nobody it seems, is immune in the merry-go-round of the blame game arising from Bhopal. Three decades on, the severe deficit in institutional credibility remains unbridged

Bhopal gas tragedy protests at Jantar Mantar, New Delhi on 10 November. Photo: Arun Sharma/ Hindustan TimesPremium
Bhopal gas tragedy protests at Jantar Mantar, New Delhi on 10 November. Photo: Arun Sharma/ Hindustan Times

Warren Anderson died on 29 September at a ripe old age, comfortably distanced from the city of Bhopal. Just a few weeks remained for the 30th anniversary of the holocaust the company he had long served—before briefly getting it to serve him—had unleashed in a city that continues to suffer its consequences.

Some saw the three decades of comfort Anderson had enjoyed after Bhopal as vengeance thwarted. Others, of more subtle disposition, saw it as testament to a monumental collapse of accountability and the enduring inequity of any bargain involving a developing country and a powerful global corporation.

Soon after the former head of Union Carbide Corp. (UCC) went his unlamented way, a coalition representing Bhopal’s victims and survivors began a demonstration at a prominent spot in India’s national capital. Their demand was simply for compensation in accordance with data gathered by official agencies tasked with mapping the human suffering caused by the toxic gas leak of December 1984. In three days, the protesters were compelled by the indifferent official response to raise the stakes from a hunger strike to the denial of even water.

Following an assurance from relevant quarters in the government that their demands would be sympathetically considered and judged on merits, the victim-survivors of Bhopal called off their protest. Circumstances, though, are likely to make this no more than a provisional truce. India’s democratic institutions went a long way in seeking to assure justice for Bhopal, but finally failed. And there is an inescapable logic which suggests that the failure of justice in Bhopal implicates all India’s democratic institutions.

Democratic common sense has it that a citizen who suffers a serious invasion of rights should have the means available for due recompense. Article 32, which B.R. Ambedkar referred to as the “very soul" of the Constitution, guarantees such a right and names the Supreme Court as its ultimate guardian. In Bhopal, this principle was abridged since the citizens who had suffered an invasion of their rights were deemed incapable of seeking appropriate remedies.

By a law enacted within four months of the disaster, the central government assumed sole litigative authority for all victim-survivors of Bhopal. The relevant clause—section 3 of the Bhopal Gas Leak Disaster (Processing of Claims) Act—was justified on the basis of the parens patriae (father of the country) principle. It did not take long for this assumption of litigative authority by the government on grounds of citizen immaturity or incapacity to assume the dimension of an usurpation of rights.

At the moment of its passage, the Bhopal gas leaks Act showed an uneasy awareness of its potential to invade and undermine citizen rights. A safeguard was inscribed in the law, which allowed any person with a claim to “urge" it upon the central government. And if such a person should so desire, he or she would be allowed to engage a “legal practitioner of his (sic) choice to be associated in the conduct of any suit or any other proceeding relating to his (sic) claim".

The plain fact that emerges from the most recent fast by the victims and survivors of Bhopal is that the government had no idea of their numbers or identities. Neither was it inclined to ascertain the numbers or identities of citizens it had assumed exclusive litigative authority on behalf of, until threatened by the public relations disaster of the self-immolation of some among them.

A fair measure of the extent of governmental default is available in the inconclusive character of the calculus of Bhopal’s dead and maimed. In 1989, the Supreme Court, in a tragically misconceived ruling, ordered a full and final settlement of the litigation arising from the tragedy. Later that year, in seeking to beat back the tide of public outrage over what plainly seemed a collusive settlement, the court laid out the rationale of its order.

The total number of fatal cases, it estimated, “was about 3,000" and of “grievous and serious personal injuries… in the neighbourhood of 30,000". In 1991, in pronouncing its decision on a review petition seeking the annulment of the contrived and collusive settlement, the Supreme Court held that “4,000 people lost their lives" in the chemical holocaust while injuries of various degrees of seriousness were suffered by an unspecified “tens of thousands".

By August 2004, while ordering a payout from funds held in reserve—pending final settlement with Union Carbide—the Supreme Court was dealing with over 15,000 death claims. And personal injury claims settled exceeded 550,000. Soon afterwards, the department created in the Madhya Pradesh government ceased updating figures on deaths and injuries attributable to the gas leak. Its website now provides boilerplate figures on the money spent and facilities created. It celebrates the wondrous themes of “life over death" and “hope over disaster and despair", which it sees as the final outcome of the disaster.

Vengeance is a primitive instinct. Yet when the principals involved in egregious mass crimes get away with punishment of no greater severity than a reckless driver who causes death through negligence, there is a worry that persists over the possible recurrence of similar disasters. This dilemma could have easily been avoided if the Indian government had been alive to the moral compulsions attendant on its assumption of sole litigative authority for Bhopal. In the event, it took a Supreme Court battling a severe crisis of credibility to remind the government.

In deciding on the constitutional validity of the Bhopal Gas Leak Disaster Act, chief justice Sabyasachi Mukherjee held that the law proceeded “on the hypothesis that until the claims of the victims are realised or obtained from the delinquents (Union Carbide and its Indian subsidiary)…the central government must pay interim compensation or maintenance for the victims".

But then, it was the Supreme Court that had in 1989, stepped into a terrain that it was not required to enter, in ordering a full and final settlement of civil suits arising from Bhopal and decreeing the abatement of all criminal charges, when the issue before it was simply one of interim compensation. In the event, the settlement it ordered was only moderately in excess of the interim compensation decreed by a Bhopal district court. Every subsequent ruling by the highest judicial bench in the country has been an effort to wash away this original sin.

While partially reversing its “full and final settlement" in 1991, the Supreme Court had entered a hapless plea of injured innocence. Justice for the victims of Bhopal was important, it held, but so too “the dignity of the Court". The “credibility of the judiciary" it held, “is as important as the alleviation of the suffering of the victims".

In June 2010, when a judgment was rendered in the criminal cases arising in Bhopal by a local magistrate, then-home minister P. Chidambaram stood up in Parliament to admit to a “deep sense of guilt" at how the process of justice had run aground. The executive branch of government and the legislature, he lamented, had failed to exercise the “vigil and the supervision that the situation warranted".

The “elected political class" of India, “had let down the victims of Bhopal" and this abdication had been enabled, indeed facilitated by the intrusive attentions of the judiciary. For years together, said Chidambaram, the executive and the legislature sat back as the judiciary took on virtually the entire onus of righting the wrongs of Bhopal. This was a grievous error, in fact a thorough miscarriage of the process of governance.

Nobody it seems, is immune in the merry-go-round of the blame game arising from Bhopal. Three decades on, the lessons remain unlearnt and the severe deficit in institutional credibility unbridged.

Sukumar Muralidharan is a senior journalist who was part of a fact-finding mission on Bhopal (2004).

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Published: 28 Nov 2014, 01:57 AM IST
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