SAJA: Dissecting American Media Now

The Village Voice
Week ending December 3, 1996

Bhopal Lives
By Suketu Mehta (available for interviews: suketu

Next Tuesday, December 3, the International Medical Commission Bhopal (IMCB)
will release its final report on the current medical, social, and economic
status of the survivors of the Union Carbide disaster, a leak of toxic gas that
claimed around 10,000 lives in Bhopal, India, 12 years ago.

The report, the culmination of a three year study by a group of doctors
affiliated with prestigious institutions in the U.S., Europe, and Asia, is the
first comprehensive, peer reviewed study of the chronic effects of the disaster
that has been released publicly.

The commission found that up to 50,000 survivors are suffering from partial
or total permanent disability as a consequence of the gas disaster. In addition
to the widely recognized lung and eye injuries, its report details medical
conditions that have never been identified before, such as neurotoxicological
effects (damage to the brain and central nervous system). They affect short term
memory, balance, and motor skills they affect the survivors' ability to hold
jobs, their children's ability to read and write.

The study documents, for the first time, post traumatic stress syndrome in
the survivors. ''People were buried alive,'' says Dr. Rosalie Bertell, one of
the commissioners. ''Some of them actually were in a pile of bodies to be
burned, and came to you can imagine the nightmares and panic attacks after
that.''

According to earlier studies done by the Indian Council of Medical Research,
descendants up to the third generation of survivors may sustain genetic damage
leading to cancer and abnormalities in offspring. The new findings were not
available to the Supreme Court of India when it imposed a settlement for damages
in 1989, which the commission found to be ''decidedly inadequate.'' The report,
therefore, should provide new grounds to reopen the case.

Bhopal has joined the roster of internationally recognized
symbol places along with Hiroshima, Auschwitz, Chernobyl whose very names have
become synonymous with the tragedies that have taken place within their
precincts. Mention the word Bhopal to a person outside India, and they won't

think of a graceful city on the hills above two lakes with some of the most
glorious Muslim architecture in India. They will think about what happened on
the night of December 2 and the early morning of December 3, 1984, when an
accident at a chemical plant owned by Union Carbide of Danbury, Connecticut, led
to history's worst industrial disaster.

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 affected
people lose their individuality, their humanity, and we, the viewers, who have
no idea about their lives, begin to distance ourselves from them. As it is, they
all look so foreign to us: all these brown or black people, poor things. A lot
has been written about the bare facts of the Bhopal disaster: how it might have
happened, how many died, how many were injured. This article, the first of two
parts, examines what has rarely been portrayed: the complexity of people's
individual responses to an enduring disaster.

The Night of the Gas

In May 1982, a Union Carbide inspection team from the Danbury headquarters
visited the Bhopal plant and found 61 safety and maintenance problems, 30 of
them major. A series of gas leaks had already resulted in the death of one
factory worker and injuries to several others. Five months before the night of
the accident, vital refrigeration and cooling systems had been shut down. Around
the same time, the maintenance crew was reduced from six to two workers as part
of a cost cutting drive. Local lawyers and journalists had been warning Union
Carbide for months that the plant could be dangerous to its neighbors. The
company responded that such fears were ''absolutely baseless.''

In the early morning hours of December 3, 1984, water entered under
still disputed circumstances an underground storage tank containing 90,000
pounds of methyl isocyanate, a highly toxic chemical used to make pesticides.
This set off the following reaction:

CH3 NCO + H2O CH3 NH2 + CO2

Forty one tons of methyl isocyanate along with a stew of other highly toxic
gases possibly including hydrogen cyanide boiled over and burst through the tank

at a temperature of over 200 degrees Celsius and at a rate of over 40,000 pounds
an hour. This was the birth of what the scientists later named ''Bhopal Toxic
Gas.'' The gas rose from the plant, then sedately, unhurriedly, floated out over
the sleeping city.

Bhopalis have very personal relationships with ''the gas.'' Accounts of that
night again, when in Bhopal someone says ''that night,'' they mean the night of
December 23, 1984 describe how the gas was going toward Jahangirabad or Hamidia
Road; how it hovered a few feet above the ground at some places or how it hugged
the wet farm earth in others; how it killed buffalo and pigs but spared chickens
and mosquitoes; how it made all the leaves of a peepul tree turn black and how
it had a particular hunger for the tulsi plant; how it would travel down one
side of a road but not the other, like rain falling a few feet from you while
you're standing in the sunshine. People know the gas like a member of their
family they know its smell, its color, its favorite foods, its predilections.
One thing everybody remembers is the smell of chilies burning. Chilies are
normally burned to ward off the evil eye, when, for example, a child is sick.
People woke up and thought: it must be a powerful evil eye that's being driven
away, the stink is so strong.

As people ran with their families, they saw their children falling beside
them, and often had to choose which ones they would carry on their shoulders and
save. This image comes up again and again in the dreams of the survivors: in the
stampede, the sight of a hundred people walking over the body of their child.

Iftekhar Begum went out on the morning after the gas to help bury the Muslim
dead. There were so many that she could not see the ground she had to stand on
the corpses to wash them. As she stood on the bodies, she noticed that many of
the dead women had flowers in their hair. The gas had come on a Sunday, a night
when people had dressed up to go out to a film or to someone's house for dinner.
The women had, as is common all over India, braided their hair with jasmine or
mogra small, fragrant flowers.

When Iftekhar Begum came back from the graveyard, all her fingertips were
bleeding, she had sewn so many shrouds.

Arun's Story

What would you do if you woke up one night when you were 13 years old and by
the morning, seven of the 10 members of your immediate family were dead? How
would your life change?

When I first meet the young man I will call Arun, to whom this happened, he
is busy writing a wedding invitation card. Not his own. Not anybody's, in fact;
there will only be one copy of this invitation, and it will be shown to the
judge in the gas victims' claims court. There is a Muslim woman with him. She
was allotted 50,000 rupees ($1429) in compensation for her injuries, which the
government has kept in a fixed deposit bank account to prevent her from spending
it all at once. To withdraw funds from her account, she has to demonstrate to
the judge that she has some compelling need, like the wedding of a daughter.
Arun is wise to the inscrutable ways of the authorities; for a consideration, he
will help her get her money out. So he sits next to me making up this invitation
to a wedding that will never be.

Arun's fee for writing up the affidavit and printing up one copy of the
wedding card at a printing press (which costs him 100 rupees, or $3) is 3000
rupees ($86). This, he points out, is less than what a lawyer would charge,
which is 10 per cent, or 5000 rupees ($143). ''The lawyers hate me,'' he
crows.

The gas victim Arun loves his life. He wakes up at noon, massages himself
with mustard oil, and spends the afternoon sitting on the newly constructed
balcony of his house, chatting with friends. In the evenings, he drinks, or goes
to the Hotel International and asks to see the ''special menu,'' which consists
of several pages of pictures of the women they have for sale upstairs. On an
occasional Sunday, he'll get partridges, which he kills with his own hands,
cooks, and shares with his friends, who seem to be in awe of him. Three or four
times a month, he goes to the claims courts on behalf of someone, and that's
enough money for him, mostly.

Arun first learned of the deaths of his parents and five siblings when he saw
their photos stuck up on the wall by the side of the road. Till then people
would tell him but he didn't believe them. Looking at the pictures the
government had put up to alert survivors, Arun did not cry. Arun claims he has
never once cried. ''There were so many corpses. Who will you cry over? After a
while, the heart becomes quiet.''

On the night of the gas, Arun fell in love. As Arun and his family ran, as
one by one his parents, brothers, sisters dropped to the ground or got separated
from him, Arun felt someone holding his hand and leading him. On they ran,

through the chaotic streets. That was the beginning of Arun's first love. The
girl holding his hand lived in his neighborhood, and later on, she fed him and
took care of him.

That girl was the first of his neighbors to adopt Arun and take care of him,
but she was by no means the last. There were other families in the slum, his
extended family in Lucknow, a rickshaw driver and his wife, and finally, the
activist Satinath Sarangi, known with much love as ''Sathyu'' among the
survivors. Arun moved into Sathyu's house and became a poster child of the
activist movement; his story was widely used, and he was recruited by all manner
of groups, including the youth wing of the Communist Party of India, the state's
major political parties, and almost all of the activist groups working on
Bhopal. Arun became a kind of traveling victim, going on tours to talk about the
tragedy that had devastated his family, not only all over India but also, twice,
to the United States. He was a natural. ''At the age of 15 I learned to give
such good answers that the journalists loved me,'' he recalls gleefully. On one
of his trips to the U.S., 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 10 hours in jail. Arun was impressed by the fact that the American
jail was air conditioned.

But gradually, Arun went from being a victim to something of a predator.
Sundry scam inevitably pop up in any community where a large amount of money
enters the scene all at once, and Arun has learned how to profit from them. So,
for a commission, using an efficient system of bribes paid to everyone from
clerks to judges, Arun will extract the gas victims' compensation money from the
clutches of the government. He is also a loan shark; he advances money at
exorbitant rates of interest to illiterate migrants from the countryside,
actively assists them in spending it in the Bhopal bars, and beats them soundly
if they cannot pay him back. He has a gang, which will assault people's enemies
for a price. He points to my knee 300 rupees ($9) for breaking that and then
to my arm 360 rupees ($10) for that.

Once, when Sathyu was remonstrating with Arun about his misdeeds, Arun
responded, ''Look at Warren Anderson then Union Carbide's chairman . He got away
with killing so many people. If he can get away, so can I.'' Besides, Arun
sometimes puts his potential for violence to good use. Though he is Hindu, he
put his life on the line during the bloody Hindu Muslim riots of 1992, when he

stood guard outside Muslim homes with a sword.

Every year, on the anniversary of the gas leak, the chief minister holds a
big commemorative public meeting and invites a number of victims. Arun will go
this year and ask him for a favor a coveted license to sell kerosene, which

he'll divert to the black market. The chief minister, he tells me with a laugh,
will never refuse such a famous orphan anything when there are so many
journalists present.

Arun hates the term ''gas victim.'' Once, in 1987, when he and other
survivors were traveling to a demonstration, the train stopped at a station and
the loudspeakers boomed out: ''Now, all the gas victim children from Bhopal, go
and play in the special waiting room.'' Arun sought out the government officer
responsible for the announcement and swore: ''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.'' Accordingly, he insists the 12 year old boy get up at six every morning
to do calisthenics. 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.'' To prove that he is stronger than anybody,
gas affected or not, Arun steps in front of a passing minibus and looks at me.
''Shall I beat up the driver?'' he asks.

But Arun also tells me, matter of factly, that he's been having gabrahat.
This is a condition that is commonly reported by survivors, and there's no

exact English translation. All of a sudden, Arun's heart will beat wildly, he'll
start sweating, and his mind will flood with anxiety. This lasts for about 10
minutes. Since most of the people affected by the gas lived in the poorer part
of Bhopal, they were, by and large, not deemed worthy of psychiatric treatment
or counseling. It's certainly not anything the government will give Arun, or
anyone, compensation for.

One night, three of us Arun, his sidekick Ramdayal, and I sit in the gas
victims' beer bar, a shed off the housing colony. Around us are gas victims, all
of them men, drinking with the compensation money they should be spending to get
treatment for their wives, education for their kids. As the evening progresses,

Arun and Ramdayal are getting a lot more drunk than I am because they are
drinking whisky and beer cocktails. Presently, they get into a theological
argument: Was God present on the night of the gas?

On the night of the gas, as his family was dying, as he was falling in love,
Arun lost his faith in God. ''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,
mother's prick, sister's prick. The gas came, Ganesh fucked my mother, then ran
away. If my mother were here I wouldn't have a history.'' I've never seen him so
angry; he's almost shouting, and finally he becomes completely incoherent and
the gaps between the obscenities vanish and it's all just obscenities:

mother's prick, sister's prick. When he calms down, he says, ''Only work is
karma, work is the fruit.'' Later I realize what he's just said, in a single
sentence: Krishna's teaching to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita.

The Lifting of the Veils

In the years after the poison cloud came down from the factory, the veils
covering the faces of the Muslim women of Bhopal started coming off.

The Bhopal Gas Peedit Mahila Udyog Sangathan (the Bhopal Gas Affected Women
Workers' Organization), or BGPMUS, is the most remarkable and, after all these
years, the most sustained movement to have sprung up in response to the
disaster. The BGPMUS 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 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 sixties 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.

As the women of Bhopal got politicized after the gas, they became aware of
other inequities in their lives too. Slowly, the Muslim women of the BGPMUS
started coming out of the veil. They explained this to others and themselves by
saying: look, we have to travel so much, give speeches, and this burkha, this
long black curtain, is hot and makes our health worse.

But this was not a sudden process; great care was paid to social
sensitivities. When Amida Bi wanted to give up her burkha, she asked her
husband. ''My husband took permission from his older brother and my parents.''
Assent having been given all around, Amida Bi now goes all over the country
without her veil, secure in the full support of her extended family.

Her daughters, however, are another matter. Having been married out to other
families, they still wear the burkha. But Amida Bi refuses to allow her own two
daughters in law, over whom she has authority, to wear the veil at all. ''I
don't think the burkha is bad,'' she says. ''But you can also do shameful

things while wearing a burkha.''

Half of the Muslim women still attending the rallies have folded up their
burkhas for ever.

Sajida Bano's Story

Sajida Bano never had to use a veil until her husband died. He was the first
victim of the Carbide plant: In 1981, three years before the night of the gas,
Ashraf was working in the factory when a valve malfunctioned and he was splashed
with liquid phosgene. He was dead within 72 hours. After that, Sajida was forced
to move with her two infant sons to a bad neighborhood, where if she went out
without the burkha she was harrassed. When she put it on, she felt shapeless,
faceless, anonymous: she could be anyone's mother, anyone's sister.

In 1984, Sajida took a trip to her mother's house in Kanpur, and happened to
come back to Bhopal on the night of the gas. Her four year old son died in the
waiting room of the train station, while his little brother held on to him.
Sajida had passed out while looking for a taxi outside. The factory had killed
the second of the three people Sajida loved most. She is left with her surviving
son, now 14, who is sick in body and mind. For a long time, whenever he heard a
train whistle, he would run outside, thinking that his brother was on that

train.

Sajida Bano asked if I would carry a letter for her to ''those Carbide
people,'' whoever they are. She wrote it all in one night, without revision. She
wants to eliminate distance, the food chain of activists, journalists, lawyers,
and governments between her and the people in Danbury. Here, with her
permission, are excerpts that I translated:

Sir,

Big people like you have snatched the peace and happiness of us poor people.
You are living it up in big palaces and mansions. Moving around in cars. Have
you ever thought that you have wiped away the marriage marks from our foreheads,
emptied our laps of children, bathed us in poison, and we are sobbing, but death
doesn't come. Like a living, walking corpse you have left us. At least tell us
what our crime was, for which such a big punishment has been given. If with the
strength of your money you had shot us all at once with bullets, then we
wouldn't have to die such miserable sobbing deaths.

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? Only this one sentence
must have caused you pain.
If this vampire Union Carbide factory would be quiet after eating my husband,
if heartless people like you would have your eyes opened, then probably I would
not have lost my child after the death of my husband. After my husband's death
my son would have been my support. But before he could grow you uprooted him. I
don't know myself why you have this enmity against me.

Why have you played with my life so much? What was I, a poor helpless woman,
spoiling of yours that even after taking my husband you weren't content. You ate
my child too. If you are a human being and have a human heart then tell me
yourself what should be done with you people and with me. I am asking you only,
tell me, what should I do?

Negative Positive

The gas changed people's lives in ways big and small. Harishankar Magician
used to be in the negative positive business. It was a good business. He would
sit on the pavement, hold up a small glass vial, and shout, ''Negative to

positive!'' Then, hollering all the while, he would demonstrate. ''It's very
easy to put negative on paper. Take this chemical, take any negative, put it on
any paper, rub it with this chemical, then put it in the sun for only 10
minutes. This is a process to make a positive from a negative.'' By this time a
crowd would have gathered to watch the miraculous transformation of a plain
film negative into an image on a postcard. In an hour and a half, Harishankar
Magician could easily earn 50, 60 rupees ($2) in this business. Then the gas
came.

It killed his son and destroyed his lungs and his left leg. In the
negative positive business, he had to sit for hours. He couldn't do that now
with his game leg, and he couldn't shout with his withered lungs. So Harishankar
Magician looked for another business that didn't require standing and shouting.
Now he wanders the city, pushing a bicycle that bears a box with a hand painted
sign: ''ASTROLOGY BY ELECTRONICE MINI COMPUTER MACHIN.''

Passersby, seeing the mysterious box, gather spontaneously to ask what it is.
He invites them to put on the Stethoscope, which is a pair of big padded
headphones attached to the Machin. Then the front panel of the Machin comes
alive with flashing Disco Lights, rows of red and yellow and green colored
bulbs. The Machin, Harishankar Magician tells his customers, monitors their
blood pressure, then tells their fortune through the Stethoscope. The fee is two
rupees (six cents). Harishankar doesn't like this business; with this, unlike
his previous trade, he thinks he is peddling a fraud. Besides, he can only do it
for an hour and a half a day, and clears only about 15 rupees (43 cents).

Harishankar Magician is sad. He yearns for the negative positive business.
Once the activist Sathyu took a picture of Harishankar's son, who was born six
days before the gas came. He died three years later. Harishankar and his wife
have no photographs of their dead boy in their possession, and they ask Sathyu
if he can find the negative of the photo he took. Then they will use the small
vial of chemical to make a positive of their boy's negative, with only 10
minutes of sunlight.

The Plague of the Lawyers

Almost immediately after the disaster, the American lawyers started coming,
by the dozens. Out they stepped from the plane, blinking and squinting in the
strong Bhopal light, covering their noses with handkerchiefs as they stepped
gingerly through the dung strewn lanes of the slums, glad handing the bereaved,

pointing to their papers and telling their translators to tell the victims,
''MILLIONS of rupees, you understand? MILLIONS!'' And so the people signed,
putting their names down in Hindi, or just with their thumbprints.

In the Oriya slum, 11 years later, word spreads that a visitor from America
has come, and a cluster of people come to meet me. A young man, Bhimraj, and his
mother, Rukmini, approach me hesitantly, holding out a carefully preserved piece
of paper. ''The American government gave us this,'' he says. ''Can you tell me

what it says?''

I look at the document. It is a legal contract.

''Contract between law office of Pat Maloney, PC, of the city of San Antonio,
Bexar County, Texas, and Suresh.

''Client agrees to pay attorney as attorney's fee for such representation one
third (33%) of any gross recovery before action is filed, forty percent (40%) of
any gross recovery after the action is filed but before the commencement of
trial, and fifty percent (50%) of any gross recovery after commencement of
trial.

''This contract is performable in Bexar County, Texas.''

On the night of the gas, Rukmini abandoned her three year old son, Raju, who
was dead, and ran with her five year old daughter, Rajni, who died three days
later. When the lawyers came, they got Rukmini's husband, Suresh, to put his
name down in Hindi on this document. They took the family's pictures. ''They
didn't even send us a copy,'' says Rukmini. That was the last the family heard
from the man they believed came on behalf of ''the American government.'' So now
they ask me, what should they do with this paper that they've been holding on

to for 11 years?

''Tear it up and throw it away,'' I tell them. ''It's junk.'' They look at
me, their faces blank, not understanding.

(When I returned to America, I tried to contact attorney Pat Maloney. He did
not return phone calls.)

Responding to such abuses, the Indian parliament passed a law declaring
itself the sole legal representative of all of the Bhopal gas victims. It sued
Carbide in federal court in New York. The court held that the proper venue for
the case should be in India; 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 reason was simple: everybody knew that any potential
damage award given out by an Indian court would be considerably smaller than one
awarded by a U.S. court. Had the victims succeeded in suing the company in its
home country and winning, they would probably have bankrupted the giant
corporation, much as the asbestos liability cases bankrupted the Manville
Corporation and breast implant litigation bankrupted Dow Corning.
As it transpired, after prolonged legal wrangling, the Indian Supreme Court
unilaterally, without giving the victims a chance to make their case, imposed a
settlement to the amount of $470 million, with the government to make up any
shortfall. The government had asked for $3 billion from Carbide. Carbide
executives were delighted; they speedily transferred the money to the
government. That was in 1989. The first victim did not see the first rupee of
Carbide's money 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 May 1996, the
government has passed rulings on only about half of them 302,422 and awarded
compensation for injuries to 288,000 Bhopalis. Out of the total settlement
amount of $470 million plus interest since 1989, the government had, by May of
1996, only disbursed some $241 million.

The Quantification of Loss

A government psychiatrist who has done a close study of the minds of the gas
victims has come to this conclusion: they don't want to work. ''You can't get
domestic help in Bhopal nowadays,'' the doctor complained to me. ''If a family
has five affected people who get 200 rupees $6 each in interim relief , that's a
thousand rupees a month, so they don't want to work.''
There is a widespread belief that the people destroyed by the gas who tended
to come from the poorer sections of Bhopal aren't receiving deserved
compensation for grievous injuries that they are legally and morally entitled
to, but some sort of unearned windfall that's made them indolent. This belief is
prevalent among the rich in new Bhopal, government officials, and Carbide
executives.

J.L. Ajmani is the secretary of the gas relief department of Madhya Pradesh

state, and he won't give me an interview. Ajmani is a man of the 21st century.
In his luxurious office, he has a computer, a bank of three phones, a sofa, a
huge desk, and an executive chair in which he reposes under a big picture of
Mahatma Gandhi. While brushing me off, he keeps tapping into his digital diary.
I ask him about allegations of corruption in his department. He laughs
fearlessly. ''It's been 11 years. Volumes have been written. You also write.''

Although the government isn't releasing figures about the average amount of
awards, the welfare commissioner's office told me that the maximum compensation
awarded for deaths is 150,000 rupees ($4286), except in a handful of cases.
Mohammed Laique, a local lawyer who has been representing claimants from the
beginning, gave me the standard rates of compensation. For most deaths, the
amount awarded is 100,000 rupees ($2857). For personal injury cases, 90 per cent
get 25,000 rupees, or $714 (the award bestowed on most of the survivors I
spoke to directly).

Of these amounts, says Laique, ''claimants lose between 15 per cent and 20
per cent at the outset in bribes. To get money out early, you pay another 10 per
cent.'' Then there are sundry small bribes. Clerks in government offices demand
anywhere from 100 to 2000 rupees ($57) to move papers, depending on the size of
the awards. The payments the government has been disbursing since 1990 for
interim relief (200 rupees, or $6 a month) are also deducted from the awards.
This means that from an award of 25,000 rupees, the maimed survivor in September
1995 could expect to receive as little as 7600 rupees. Two hundred and seventeen
dollars.

Union Carbide claims that the compensation is ''more than generous by any
Indian standard.'' Is it really? For comparison, Laique pulls out the schedule
of standard compensation set by Indian Railways for railway accidents. The
schedule is gruesomely specific:

In case of death: 200,000 minimum ($5714)

For disability of 1 leg: 120,000 ($3429)
If one or two hands are cut off: 200,000

If one or two legs are severed: 200,000

Thumb cut off: 60,000 ($1714)

If four fingers cut off from one hand: 100,000 ($2857)

3 fingers cut off: 60,000

2 or 1 fingers cut off: 40,000 ($1143)

Breast cut off: 180,000 ($5143)

For problem with 1 eye: 80,000 ($2286)

Hip joint fracture: 40,000

Minimum for bodily injury: 40,000

''And the railways give very fast decisions, plus interest after three
months,'' adds Laique. During the bloody communal rioting that followed the

destruction of the Babri Masjid mosque in Ayodhya in 1992, the government gave a
minimum of 200,000 rupees ($5714) to the families of each person killed; these
were people of the same socioeconomic status as Carbide's victims. It's clear
that, if a Bhopali had any choice in the instrument of his death, it would be
financially much more advantageous to be killed or maimed in a train wreck or at
the hands of a religious fanatic than through an American multinational's gas
cloud.

On the day after a Union Carbide plant leaked a toxic gas that would kill
10,000 people in Bhopal, India, Warren Anderson, Carbide s chairman at the time,
flew to Bhopal to see the situation for himself and offer aid. The chairman was
propelled by a visceral, human impulse, and acted against the advice of his
lawyers and public relations people; he was promptly arrested, detained for
several hours, and put on a plane to New Delhi. He was granted bail and flew
home a few days later.

When he returned to Connecticut, Anderson met his real enemies reporters,
lawyers, shareholders, and consultants, hounding him with questions, offering
advice. He fled with his wife and his mother in law and holed up for a week in a
Stamford hotel, having all their meals sent up, a grown man hiding in a hotel
room, as he later put it. After the accident, he had trouble sleeping. And well
he might. Anderson is now wanted on charges of culpable homicide in India, and
is rumored to be living quietly in Vero Beach, Florida.

Anderson's 1984 Bhopal expedition marked the last time a senior Carbide
executive from Danbury got his shoes soiled in the city.

In the years after the tragedy, Carbide has admitted moral responsibility for
the disaster. The company proposed a variety of small projects to aid the
victims, including setting up a vocational center and contributing $2 million
toward relief efforts. After the assets of its Indian subsidiary were seized by
Indian courts, Carbide made a virtue out of necessity and, at the Supreme Court
s direction, announced that it would use the frozen assets to set up a trust to
build a new hospital for the survivors. The company refuses to use any of its
unencumbered assets toward this laudable endeavor.

Throughout, it has stoutly maintained that the disaster was a result of
deliberate sabotage. The Carbide hypothesis goes like this: a disgruntled
employee, upset about being demoted, deliberately introduced water into the
methyl isocyanate tank, setting off the deadly chemical reaction. Subsequently,
all the employees and supervisors on duty at the plant at that time decided, for
reasons best known to them,

to engage in a massive cover up of the real causes of the accident, and have
successfully maintained their conspiracy through the 11 years since.
Much of the world s safety engineering community doubts the veracity of
Carbide s sabotage evidence, writes Wil Lepkowski, the American reporter who has
most closely followed Bhopal, in Chemical and Engineering News. That evidence,
Lepkowski points out, has never been subjected to scientific peer review or
presented in court. Carbide will not name the saboteur, even though it promised
to do so in court at the appropriate time. That was in 1986; a decade later, an
appropriate time has still not been found.

At the moment, there is no Carbide employee in Bhopal. There is no executive,
no secretary, no engineer personally supervising the setting up of their
hospital; nobody walking through the slums to make sure that the people they
visited their holocaust upon are being adequately taken care of.

Carbide is doing nothing to monitor the settlement amounts, to ensure that
the victims financial needs are being taken care of; its labs are doing no
research, nor is the company funding any, on the long term effects of methyl
isocyanate; and there is no monument in Danbury or at any other company site to
the gas victims of Bhopal. As Carbide s chief of public relations Bob Berzok put
it to me when refusing my request to talk to anyone but himself at the company,
anyone at all from the president down to a cafeteria worker, This does go back
10 years and I m not interested in disrupting the business going on here. I
inquired of several people and the feeling in general for those who were here
10 years ago was that there really was no interest in discussing their personal
feelings about Bhopal .

Berzok himself has been to India some 15 times in connection with the Bhopal
disaster, not to help the victims but to help the Indian subsidiary better
manage its public relations. Staying at the posh guest house that Carbide used
to own in Shamla Hills, Berzok has never once visited the slum colonies where
the victims live and die; and he doesn t recall a single name or a single
distinguishing feature of any of the victims. He saw some of them in the medical
stations set up in the old city. There were some people that were having
difficulties breathing, is what he remembers.

For Union Carbide, Bhopal was a hit and run accident.

I wanted him to apologize, says Syed Mohammed Irfan about Warren Anderson.
Irfan lost his sister and his health because of the Carbide factory. Since the
accident, his wife is terrified of living in Bhopal and has left him to live
elsewhere in the state. I wanted him to apologize, be humble. Say we made a
mistake; get treatment, we ll pay for it. We wouldn t have hung him. This didn
t happen. Carbide may have accepted moral responsibility for the disaster, but
has never apologized to the people of Bhopal.

So Irfan s views have changed. Now if I meet Anderson in the street I ll
kill him.

I have also met people who don t think Carbide is to blame. A high school
teacher who lost her niece, and has seen her own health suffer, told me, I feel
no anger toward Carbide. It s the fault of the technology. All of Bhopal is not
a vengeful mob thirsting for revenge. Berzok emphasizes that whenever he was in
Bhopal, traveling openly as a Carbide employee from the U.S., I was treated very
graciously, very hospitably, and that was true of all my visits over the years.
Maybe if the victims saw their enemy in person, could put a human face on
him, witnessed 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 multinational 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.

An activist, Satinath Sarangi, once gave the children of the survivors in the
slum where he lives pens and paper, and asked them to draw pictures of Anderson.
I saw the children s drawings; most of them are depictions of the devil. But
many of the horned figures are smiling and almost endearing, as if the young
artists have not quite grasped the nature of evil.

Brian Mooney's Story

In December 1984, Brian Mooney, one of six children of a Hackensack, New
Jersey, shoe salesman, was working at the plush Park Avenue offices of Kelley
Drye & Warren, with people who belonged to country clubs and played squash.
Kelley Drye, one of the oldest and most prestigious law firms in New York, was
also Union Carbide s outside counsel. Mooney at the time was a few months out of
law school, so when the Bhopal case broke, he was not one of the senior
attorneys there. But the entire firm went into frenzied activity, with people
working around the clock on the case. Mooney was put to work on legal research,
principally insurance coverage issues. Every morning that December he would open
The New York Times and read gruesome accounts of the dead and dying and then
take the subway to Park Avenue to put in a full day s work preparing the defense
of the corporation that had done this to them.

Mooney had to rationalize to himself the reasons why he was working for
Carbide s law firm. It was, he says, a naive belief that people, especially
people with suits on, are not capable of malice and wrongdoing, especially on
such a large scale. Also, in this case, the opposing side, in the courts at
least, was the Indian government, not a pristine entity either.

But gradually Bhopal, and other cases he was working on that were even more
untenable personally, dominated his thoughts. Mooney, who is gay and a former
Catholic, used to celebrate mass on Saturday evenings at a Greenwich Village
church with a gay Catholic group. New York s Cardinal O Connor forbade use of
the church for the services. So some of the spurned worshipers started going to
St. Patrick s Cathedral on Sunday mornings, where, during the Cardinal s
sermons, they would stand up en masse and silently turn their backs on him.

The archdiocese of New York, through its legal counsel Kelley Drye & Warren,
sued the protesters and obtained an injunction against them. A woman at the firm
asked Mooney to serve the summons; he still isn t sure if she knew that he was
gay, but he laughed and said absolutely not. She never spoke to him again.

Mooney slowly realized that he had no remaining faith in the legal system,
that it had an inefficiency woven into its warp and woof. Mooney quit Kelley
Drye in 1988. At the time, I didn t have any idea of what I was going to do; I
was very good at not thinking about myself because of my being gay. He was 28,
and started to ask himself questions that a 14 year old would ask, about the
purpose, meaning, and direction of his life. He knew that he wanted to help
people, but he didn t believe law was the way to do that.

After a few years of drifting, Mooney applied to graduate school at the
University of Michigan at Ann Arbor for the doctoral program in anthropology. He
was accepted and given a teaching assignment with a salary equivalent to
one tenth what he used to make at Kelley Drye. In the summer of 1995, Mooney
decided to go to Bhopal and study the effects of the legal system on the very
people his former employer had commanded him to battle against.

One day that summer, Mooney found himself in the park of the gas affected
women, at one of their Saturday rallies. He was there in his role of
anthropologist/observer, ready to note down what the women were doing, why they
were here, the structures that they lived within. Suddenly he felt a man tugging
at his arm and heard an announcement to the effect that an American visitor
would now be making a speech. Mooney was caught off guard, and extremely
uncomfortable. I shouldn t be speaking to them, he thought. They should be
speaking to me. But he found himself, willy nilly, thrust onto the speaking
platform, with a mike in front of him.

Mooney began in his halting Hindi, then switched to English. He told the
women that he was studying to be a teacher, and the students that he was
teaching at the moment didn t know anything about the rest of the world and they
didn t know anything about corporate ethics. These were students who would later
go to work for companies like Union Carbide. He was here to gather their
stories, he told the women, so he could relate them to his students, so that
maybe those students, uniquely powerful because American, would think twice
about how the decisions they might make as corporate executives would affect the
lives of people half way around the world. That s why he was here, in Bhopal: to
gather their stories.

Mooney stopped and looked at the crowd. They applauded politely, smiled, but
they didn t really understand. His translator s English was inadequate, and
Mooney was left feeling extremely awkward. But, he realized at the same time, he
had done something very important for himself: he had just defined his mission,
the precise way in which he could help other people. He had been forced to
think, and had found an answer to the most universal and least asked of
questions: What am I doing here?

A Charge Against Earnings

If there s a happy ending to this story, it s for the Carbide executives and
shareholders. Bhopal made the company prey for a takeover attempt a year after
the disaster, which forced Carbide to divest itself of its consumer operations
and concentrate on its highly profitable core chemical business. In the
financial maneuverings that took place during the takeover battle, 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. If
a person owning a single share of Carbide stock worth $35 in December 1984 had
reinvested all dividends and distribution rights, that share would have been
worth more than $700 a decade later. Clearly, by any objective measure, says
Arthur Sharplin, a management professor who studied these dealings, Union
Carbide Corporation and its managers benefited from the Bhopal incident. It is
ironic that a disaster such as Bhopal would leave its victims devastated and
other corporate stakeholders better off.

Before Bhopal, the worst industrial accident in world history, Union Carbide
was involved in the worst industrial tragedy in American history, the death in
the 1930s of up to 2000 of its workers due to silicosis during the building of
the Hawks Nest Tunnel in West Virginia. Carbide makes no mention of that episode
in its corporate histories.

When I went up to the Carbide headquarters in Danbury, Berzok proudly handed
me an effusive Paine Webber report on the company, dated September 1995. It
says, We reinstate Carbide as our number one major chemical stock idea. Not
once does the name Bhopal come up in the report.

How To Help

The Bhopal Medical Appeal has set up an independent, community based clinic
in Bhopal to provide day to day care, drugs, counseling, and physiotherapy. It
also monitors the long term effects of the gas on survivors. Contributions or
offers of volunteer medical services can be sent to the BMA, c/o Pesticide
Action Network/ Bhopal, 116 New Montgomery Street, #810, San Francisco, CA
94105.