SAJA: Dissecting American Media Now

Reporting Tips on South Asia > 20th Anniversary of the Bhopal Disaster

BHOPAL: What Is a Journalist's Dharma?
A 1996 speech to the South Asian Journalists Association

By Suketu Mehta
Mehta is author of Maximum City: Bombay Lost & Found and a writer in New York.

There is a pornography of images of disaster in the third world
famine, floods, war, earthquakes. Quick television interviews
with the victims reinforce those images. And, as with all
pornography, the net effect is this: the victims lose their
individuality, their humanity, and it becomes easier to distance
ourselves from people whose lives we have no idea about. As it
is, they all look so foreign: all these brown or black people,
poor things. So it becomes easier to forget them, as Bhopal is
now being forgotten.

I said pornography, and I am serious about the analogy. What
defines pornography? There are certain stock situations: the
menage a trois, or, in the case of Bhopal, the horrific accident.
Second, the lack of irritating human characteristics which
prevent our vicarious identification with the actors, or our
enjoyment of the act. The women in pornography never get a period
or a headache; the victims of disaster are never ignoble, don't
fight back, and never have names you can remember.

Third, the reaction that the pornographers seek to elicit on the
part of the viewer: an erection, or, in the reporting of
disaster, tears, pity, and possibly the reaching for one's
checkbook to send money. There is also the satisfied aftermath,
the post onanist bliss after you've had your fill of images of
maimed or diseased people, you look around your comfortably
furnished living room, your well stocked refrigerator, and you
say to your spouse, "honey, we may have our little problems, but
thank god we're not *those* people."

WHAT HAPPENED

Bhopal has been the most emotionally wrenching story I've ever
done as a journalist. It's made me powerfully focus on a central
question: what is my dharma as a journalist?

Anyone who goes to Bhopal now soon realizes that he will be
manipulated, one way or the other. The government is seeking to
tell its side of the story, the doctors another, the activist
organizations attempt to draw you in for their own ends. Last but
not least, the victims, when they hear you're a journalist from
America, will often bring out a whole catalog of illnesses and
sorrows real and imagined, suffered over the past eleven years.
Whom do you believe? Whom do you trust?

Bhopal was the worst industrial accident in history, killing
anywhere from eight to sixteen thousand people so far, injuring
around two hundred thousand. On the night of December 2, 1984, a
tank of methyl isocyanate blew up in a Union Carbide pesticide
factory, and released a poisonous cloud of gas over the sleeping
city.

Carbide alleges that the accident happened as the result of an
act of sabotage by a disgruntled employee who deliberately
introduced water into the MIC tank. Further, according to this
theory, all those on duty that night at the plant engaged in a
massive coverup through all these years to protect that one
saboteur. Carbide has never named this phantom saboteur, and
never submitted its theory to independent peer review. According
to the US trade journal Chemical and Engineering News, ""Much of
the world's safety engineering community doubts the veracity of
Carbide's sabotage evidence."

Most of the injuries relate to severe and permanent lung damage,
respiratory illnesses, and damage to the nervous system. The
children of survivors may sustain serious genetic damage for the
next three generations. What has never been comprehensively
assessed is mental trauma, what we would call post traumatic
stress syndrome if we were dealing with people of the first
world. In the relative scale of human worth, the fact that a
rickshaw puller in Bhopal still gets nightmares about having to
choose which one of his children to save as he ran on the night
of the disaster, simply doesn't figure when it comes to
prescribing treatment or awarding damages.

One little detail: on the morning after the factory blew up,
sorting through the bodies, something that people noticed was
that many of the women who were dead had flowers in their hair.
The previous night was a Sunday, and people had dressed up, to go
out to a movie or to someone's house for dinner. The women had
strung small fragrant flowers of jasmine or mogra in their hair.

The Indian government, giving itself sole legal power to
represent the victims, sued Carbide in Federal Court in New York.
The two sides fought it out over venue, whether the case belonged
in Indian or US courts. Spectators were treated to the uniquely
edifying spectacle of hearing the Indian government's lawyers
argue the inadequacy of its own legal system, countering
Carbide's lavish testaments to the excellence of the very same
system. The US court decided in favor of Carbide and transferred
the case to India.

In 1989, the Indian Supreme Court unilaterally and, without
giving the victims a chance to make their case in court, imposed
a settlement of $470 million on both parties. The government had
asked for $3 billion. Carbide executives were delighted. The
first victim did not see the first rupee in compensation until
Christmas of 1992, eight years after the night of the gas. A
total of 597,000 claims for compensation have been filed. As of
last October, almost eleven years after the accident, more than
half of all cases for compensation had still to be decided.

How much are they getting? For most deaths, the amount awarded is
100,000 rupees. For personal injury cases, 95% of successful
claimants get 25,000 rupees. Of these amounts, claimants lose
between 15% to 20% at the outset in bribes. To get money out
early, they pay another 10% Then there are sundry small bribes.
The clerks in the government offices have to be given, depending
on the amount of the award, between 100 to 2000 rupees to move
papers. The 200 rupees a month payments for interim relief that
the government has been disbursing since 1990 are also deducted
from the awards. This means that from a payment of 25,000 rupees,
the maimed survivor can expect to eventually collect a little
over 10,000 rupees. Less than three hundred dollars.

These amounts are pathetic even by Indian standards. According to
the Indian railways schedule of compensation for train injuries,
the minimum award for bodily injury is 40,000 rupees. During the
rioting that followed the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992,
the government awarded a minimum of 200,000 rupees to the
families of each person killed. So it's clear that, if a Bhopali
had any choice in the instrument of his death, it would have been
financially much more advantageous to be killed in a train wreck
or at the hands of a religious fundamentalist than through an
American multinational's gas cloud.

VILLAINS AND HEROES

I am by training and inclination a novelist. I believe that we
have to write about real people as if they had all the complexity
and nuances of characters in a novel. That means, among other
things, allowing disaster victims the freedom to be
unsympathetic, to be real bastards.

A number of the Bhopal survivors are highly unsympathetic human
beings. There is, for example, a street thug I will call Arun.
Arun first learnt of the deaths of seven out of ten members of
his family when he saw their photos stuck up on the wall by the
side of the road. He was fourteen years old then, and became the
head of his family, responsible for his little brother and
sister. Naturally the activist organizations and press clustered
around him, some using him for their own ends, and he became a
kind of travelling professional victim. He started going on tours
to talk about the tragedy that had devastated his family, all
over India and, twice, to the US. He was a natural. He told me
with pride, "At age of 15 I learned to give such good answers
that the journalists loved me." On one of his trips to the US
Arun and a couple of the other survivors, while attempting to
distribute literature in the Houston hotel where the annual
meeting of Carbide's shareholders was being held, were arrested
by the police and spent the night in jail. Arun was impressed by
the fact that the American jail was air conditioned.

Arun hates the term "gas victim." Once, in 1987, when he and a
bunch of the survivors were on their way south through India by
train, the train stopped at a station for a while and the
loudspeakers on the platform boomed out: "Now all the gas victim
children from Bhopal, go and play in this special waiting room."
Arun went up to the government officer responsible for the
announcement and swore at him, "Ma ki chut" "your mother's
cunt."

"Is it stamped on my forehead, `gas victim'?" he asks me. "Should
I beg for pity, Hai Allah, help me, give me some food, I'm a gas
victim?" Arun instructs his kid brother: "If a man thinks himself
to be weak he *will* be weak." There is a reason, Arun believes,
that he himself has remained strong. "Gas? I shit gas out of my
ass. You drink enough, you smoke enough, and there won't be any
gas." The experience has also made him lose his faith. Arun got
drunk with me one night in the gas victims' beer bar, where some
of the survivors go to drink with their compensation money. On
the night of the gas, he said, screaming, "Mother's prick, six,
seven people died, where the fuck was Ganesh? If I met him, I'd
beat him with shoes and chase him off."

Arun is not a nice man. He lives off the other survivors and
their compensation money. He beats up people, he goes drinking
and whoring, and he sells dangerous out of date medicines on the
black market. He uses his status as the poster child of the
activist movement to financial advantage. How do I treat such a
person in my article? On the one hand, his life has clearly been
devastated and there are very specific and readily identifiable
reasons for his delinquency. On the other hand, there are lots of
other survivors who have dealt with loss and not turned out to be
criminals. But Arun, for me, illustrates something fundamental:
writing the truth, in all its complexity, always serves the
victims more than a sanitized morality play full of saintly
heroes and stock villains.

I found good people, moral people, among the people who worked
for Carbide, as well.

There is a lawyer named Brian Mooney who worked for Kelly, Drye,
and Warren, Carbide's law firm in New York. As he was working on
getting the corporation to pay the least possible amount for the
disaster, he would read the newspapers to find daily more
horrific accounts of the sufferings of the victims. Finally he
couldn't hold back his conscience. He quit the law firm, and
enrolled as a graduate student in anthropology at the University
of Michigan. He got a teaching assistantship at one tenth of his
former salary. Last summer he was in Bhopal, gathering stories of
the survivors for his dissertation. He had, in effect, jumped the
fence, and was now on the side of the very human beings his
former employer had directed him to do battle against.

Why did he want their stories, the survivors asked him. Because,
he answered, he was going to teach law in America. His students
would be working for corporations like Carbide and he wanted his
students to know that the decisions they made as corporate
officials sitting in an office in the American countryside had
consequences, huge consequences on the lives of people halfway
across the world. Brian Mooney is not a hero; he's just
reclaiming in himself what is human. But to have the courage to
be human within the structure of the modern corporation is,
perhaps, in itself a heroic act.

MULTINATIONALS

When you pitch a story on India to a foreign editor, the first
question is: "How many bodies?" If there's enough dead bodies, a
nice round number, they'll fly you out there. If there are really
a *lot* of bodies, they'll fly you business class.

But there is one Indian good news story that is equally easy to
sell: the benefits of liberalization, opening up our markets to
multinationals. Bangalore: India's new silicon valley, you say,
and even the editor in Duluth, Minnesota says, yeah, I've heard
about that, boy what a paradox eh, decades of socialism, and
finally you guys are seein' the light.

Anyone who visits Bhopal will come away realizing that we need to
ask ourselves some cold hard questions about the role of
multinationals in our country.

Most of the stories being written about Bhopal today focus on the
shameful role of the Indian government, the second crime that is
being perpetrated today on the survivors. And it is true that the
state and central governments, much of the judiciary and the
Bhopal medical establishment function like a criminal mafia
living off the survivors and their compensation money. But to
highlight the Indian authorities' abuse is to miss the point.
This tragedy is American in origin; it was constructed in the
Union Carbide headquarters in Danbury, CT, not in India. The
plant was built and initially managed by Americans; it was
American owned; Americans made the profits; and an American
safety team gave the factory a clean bill of health shortly
before it blew up.

The very setup of a multinational, its trans national nature,
protects it from responsibility for the consequences of its
actions. Because Carbide could not be tried under US law for
Bhopal, it could pull out of India, run back to America, and be
safe.

If Warren Anderson, the president of Carbide at the time of the
disaster, had gone to Bhopal, stabbed one person and killed him,
and fled back to America, he would be in an Indian jail right
now. But because it was a corporation he headed that killed ten
thousand people, he lives in comfortable retirement in Florida
right now. Extradition laws can deal with individuals as
murderers but not with corporations as murderers.

Companies can export hazardous technologies or products to
countries whose legal systems are unprepared to deal with them.
Cigarette companies, for example, are flocking to the developing
countries, as Western regulations against smoking become more
restrictive. The developing countries are only now beginning to
enact comprehensive environmental or antitrust legislation. But
the companies that come to them from abroad are far ahead of
them, because of their experience fighting such legislation in
the West.

So there needs to be an international body set up, like the World
Court, to investigate and prosecute crimes committed by
multinational companies. International corporate culpability is
difficult to prove and impossible to prosecute. The UN calls to
account government misdeeds in the international arena, but there
is no such organization to deal with the problems caused by
multinationals, which are increasingly replacing governments as
the most powerful forces internationally. If the Japanese
government were to destroy a rainforest in Central America, it
can be hounded in the Security Council and prosecuted in the
World Court. But if Mitsubishi does the same, where do we fight
Mitsubishi?

So when we write our next glowing story about Coca cola or Dupont
or IBM or General Motors coming back to India, let's keep Bhopal
in mind. And remember that when Dupont set up a plant in India
after Bhopal happened, it insisted on and won from the government
this concession: that if an accident happened at the Dupont
chemical factory, the American parent company would not be held
liable. Bhopal actually weakened Indian environmental law; while
in the US, the tragedy was the principal impetus behind passage
of the Superfund legislation.

JOURNALISTS

Covering the tragedy on two continents points out the differences
in the process of journalism in India and in the US. In the US,
you need an appointment weeks in advance; they'll demand to see
copies of your publication and letters from your editor, they'll
check out your references and then when you step into the office
you'll be frisked by security, sign in, and wear a badge like a
kid in kindergarten or a convict. In Bhopal, you walk into
someone's house unannounced and they'll give you tea and ask you
to stay for dinner.

Have the gas victims of Bhopal been well served by journalists?

Not, in general, by the western media, who have tended to be
swayed by the powerful reach of Carbide's PR machine. '60
Minutes' did a shameful piece on Bhopal a few years ago, in which
Carbide was depicted as a blameless multinational trying to do
its bit for the victims and being thwarted by a demonic third
world government. Barbara Crossette of The New York Times, in an
article on the ten year anniversary of the disaster, essentially
bought whole Carbide's theory of sabotage and presented it as
established fact.

The Indian media has generally been better. Local Hindi
journalists had been warning the city for years that the factory
was a disaster in the making. There's been some excellent
reporting on Bhopal in the national English language media as
well, such as Arun Subramaniam in Business India.

Union Carbide has a powerful public relations apparatus at work.
The gas victims of Bhopal have none. In such cases, journalism
can be the equalizer.

But the people of Bhopal are sick of journalists. Many a reporter
has stepped off the plane from Delhi during these eleven long
years, feasted on the tragedy, made his name, and gone on to the
next disaster. I remember sitting in the living room of Sajida
Bano, a woman who had lost her husband in an accident inside the
factory in 1981, three years before the gas leak. She was left
with her two infant sons. She went away from Bhopal for a while
after that. Then, on December 3, 1984, she came back to Bhopal
from Kanpur with her sons. That was the night the second accident
happened, at the very same factory that had taken her husband
away. There was a cloud of gas in the station when they got off

the train, and Sajida passed out unconscious. When she came to
she found herself in her in laws house. "Where are my children?"
was the first question she asked. Her in laws were silent. "Where
are my sons?" she demanded. Finally they said, "Tumhe doodh maf
karna hoga you have to forgive the milk." In her community,
when a son dies before the mother that has given him her breast
milk, his mother has to forgive the debt he has incurred by the
drinking of that milk, to care for her in her old age. Standing
over the body of her dead four and a half year old son, Sajida
Bano said these words: Maine doodh maf kar diya. I forgive the
milk.

Sajida Bano was telling me all this, and what she and her
surviving son had been going through in the decade afterwards.
Her other son is crippled for life, always in and out of the
hospital. I kept pressing; I wanted to know more. How exactly did
she suffer? Did her son ask about his father? What was her son
wearing on the night he died?

"Now, please, enough," said Sajida. "Don't ask any more." There
have been other journalists, asking her these same questions. And
after each session, she is sick for a day or two. There was a
Belgian television crew that took over her living room and made
her relive her most painful losses. They never even sent her the
film. And I realized that I, too, had joined the list of
professional profiteers of this tragedy lawyers, businessmen,
bureaucrats, doctors, activists, and, not least, journalists. As
she was telling me her incredibly painful story, I was weeping,
but a part of me was also thinking: yes, this is great stuff,
this is what I'm looking for, this evidence of personal tragedy,
these details that I can use in my story.

A little hesitantly, Sajida asked me a question. "This thing that
you're writing, what use will it be to me?"

I've heard this question before. I heard it from the head priest
of the Kashi Vishwanath temple in Banaras when I was doing a
story on Hindu Muslim rioting there in 1991. "What am I going to
get from your story?" The priest wanted money. But in this case,
Sajida Bano wasn't asking, "What's my percentage?" What she

really was saying was, "Why should I tell you what I really went
through so that you can get your story? Why should I let you, a
complete stranger, into my house, and then relive the single most
painful night of my life, when I lost my son?"

A journalist is a professional confidence man. We ingratiate
ourselves with our sources, we win their trust, take their
stories and make use of them for our own ends. If, in the process
of writing about Sajida Bano's ordeal, I get her a measure of
money or justice, it is purely incidental. I'm not supposed to be
an advocate of her cause. I'm just there to get the story.

As I was leaving, Sajida asked if I would carry a letter she
wanted to write to the Carbide people, whoever they are: It's a
long letter, and I'll read out just two sentences she wrote.
Sajida says to the people who killed her husband and son: "You
put your hand on your heart and think, if you are a human being:
if this happened to you, how would your wife and children feel?"
Then she adds, "Only this one sentence must have caused you
pain."

Sajida Bano is asking for a human response from the human beings
within a corporation. That is what the survivors want. Over and
over they told me about Warren Anderson, "I wanted him to
apologize. I wanted him to apologize, be humble." This didn't
happen. Carbide may have accepted what it calls "moral
responsibility" for the disaster, but has never apologized to the
people of Bhopal.

Maybe if the victims saw their enemy in person, could put a human
face on him, saw his genuine anguish and his tears, there could
be some hope of forgiveness, or even of reconciliation. But as it
is, the dehumanized structure of the corporation works both ways;
it makes it easier for individual officers of the corporation to
avoid personal liability, and it makes it easier for outsiders to
hate an abstract entity, a faceless monolith. Images of Anderson
are drawn all over walls in Bhopal; they depict a stick figure
with a top hat below the slogans "Hang Anderson" or "Killer
Carbide."

I went up to Danbury and interviewed Carbide executives about
Bhopal. I was curious: what did they feel as human beings? After
all, on the day after the accident, propelled by a visceral,
human impulse, Warren Anderson flew to Bhopal to see the
situation for himself and offer aid. He did this against the
advice of his lawyers and public relations people, and was
promptly put under house arrest for his pains.

I was speaking to Carbide's chief of public relations, Bob
Berzok. He has been to India about fifteen times, not to offer
aid to the victims but to help Carbide's Indian subsidiary with
its PR image. I asked him if he could recall anybody in
particular among the victims, anybody that personally affected
him. He replied, "I don't remember any names of people." Then he
thought for a while. "There were some people that were having
difficulties breathing."

As an employee of Carbide, do you feel any personal
responsibility, I asked the executive.

"No," he answered.

The first and the last time Warren Anderson visited Bhopal was
the time after the disaster. Without a personal involvement in
the community in which the individual units of the corporation
are located, the officers of the corporation will never have
brought home to them the ill effects of their operations. If
Anderson's primary residence had been in Bhopal itself, the
factory might have been safer, and the compensation process
faster and more efficient. The absence of the factories from the
territory in which most of its investors live ensures that there
is no concern felt at a personal level about the hazards of the
factory. As it is, the primary concern to the owners of the
corporation after a disaster becomes financial, not moral. It
becomes something for accountants to pore over the death of ten
thousand people becomes, in the inimitable vocabulary of the
stock market, a charge against earnings.

Bhopal has demonstrated the utter incompetence of the legal
system to deal with a crime of this magnitude. The officers and
stockholders of Union Carbide made out like bandits. In the
financial maneuverings that took place during the takeover battle
as a result of Bhopal, Carbide gave its shareholders a $33 bonus
dividend plus $30 a share from the sale of its battery business,
and gave its top executives a total of $28 million in "golden
parachutes" to foil future takeover attempts.

Of the $470 million settlement, $220 million came out of
Carbide's insurance. After news of the settlement, Carbide's
stock actually *increased* $2 a share. A single share of Carbide
stock worth $35 in December 1984, would, if the person owning the
share were to reinvest all dividends and distribution rights, be
worth more than $700 a decade later. Not one single executive of
the company has been brought to trial. Anderson is wanted on
homicide charges in Bhopal. The Indian government has no desire
to press for his extradition; they don't want to scare away
foreign investors. Carbide's executives got away, literally, with
murder.

I don't want to give the impression that the fight is over for
the people of Bhopal. Not by a long shot. There is, for example,
the Bhopal Gas Peedit Mahila Udyog Sangathan (the Bhopal Gas
Affected Women Workers' Organization). This is the most
remarkable, and after all these years, the most sustained
movement to have sprung up in response to the disaster. The
organization grew out of a group of sewing centers formed after
the event to give poor women affected by the gas a means of
livelihood. As they came together into the organization, the
women participated in hundreds of demonstrations, hired attorneys
to fight the case against Carbide as well as against the Indian
government, and linked up with activist movements all over India
and the world.

On any Saturday in Bhopal, you can go to the park opposite Lady
Hospital and sit among an audience of several hundred women and
watch all your stereotypes about traditional Indian women get
shattered. I listened as a grandmother in her 60's got up and
hurled abuse at the government with a vigor that Newt Gingrich
would envy. She was followed by a woman in a plain sari who spoke
for an hour about the role of multinationals in the third world,
the wasteful expenditure of the government on sports stadiums,
and the rampant corruption to be found everywhere in the country.
These are not passive victims.

In the end, my dharma as a journalist and my dharma as a novelist
are one and the same. It is the dharma that the great Russian
poet Anna Akhmatova best described at the beginning of her
greatest poem, Requiem. She writes:

"In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror, I spent seventeen
months in the prison lines of Leningrad. One day, someone
recognized me. Then a woman with lips blue from the cold standing
behind me, who had never heard me called by name before, came out
of the stupor so common to us all and whispered in my ear
(everyone spoke in whispers there): 'Can you describe this?'
And I answered, 'Yes, I can.' Then something that looked like
a smile passed over what had once been her face."

That's my answer to Sajida Bano in response to her question: what
can you do for me? My answer is: I can describe this. I may not
be able to get you justice, but I can describe this.

"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory
against forgetting," writes Milan Kundera in 'The book of
laughter and forgetting." The children and the young men and the
old women and the trees and the animals of Bhopal are poor and
are sick. Our dharma as journalists is to describe this. To
forget them is to kill them.

Reporting Tips on South Asia > 20th Anniversary of the Bhopal Disaster