***This one is a Pretty big Chapter!!!! But have made it more precise (i.e Short :p) for you***
They will think about what happened the night of December 2 and the early morning of December 3, 1984, when an accident at the chemical plant owned by Union Carbide of Danbury, Connecticut, led to history's worst industrial disaster.
December 3, the International Medical Commission-Bhopal (IMCB) will release its final report on the current medical, social, and economic status 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.
I In the early morning hours of December 3, 1984, water entered under still disputed circumstance 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: CH3NCO + H2O CH3NH2 + 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 a rate of over 40,000 pound an hour.
Accounts of that night again when in Bhopal someone says "that night," they mean the night of December 2-3, 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, it predilections.
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.
Arun’s Story
Arun's fee for writing up the affidavit and printing up one copy of the ceding card at a printing press (such costs him 100 rupees, or $3) is 3000 rupees ($86).
The gas victim Arun loves his life.
Looking at the pictures the government had put up to alert survivors, Arun did not cry.
On the night of the gas, Arun fell I 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.
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.
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 every one from clerks to judges, Arun will extract the gas victims' compensation money from the clutches of the government.
Once, when Sathyu was remonstrating with Arun about his misdeeds, Arun responded, "Look at Warren Anderson [then Union Carbide's chairman].
Arun Hates the term "gas victim." Arun sought out the government officer responsible for the announcement and swore: "Your mother's cunt." 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.
On the night of the gas, as his family was dying, as he was falling in love, Arun lost his faith in GodWhen 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.
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. T 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 7 Magician tells his customers, monitors their
blood pressure, and 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
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.
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.
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.
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 11years? “Tear it up and throw it away,” I tell them.
“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 recover after action is filed but before the commencement of trial, and fifty percent (50%) of any gross recover after commencement of trial.
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.
He did not return phone calls.) Responding to such abuses, the Indian parliament passed a law declaring itself the sole legal representative of all the Bhopal gas victims.
“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, Rajini, who died three days later.
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.
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.
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.
Carbide executives were delighted; they speedily transferred money to the government.
“The American government gave us this,” he says.
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 In the Oriya slum, 11 years later, word spreads that a visitor form 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.
“Contract between law office of Pat Maloney, PC, of the city of San Antonio, Bexar County, Texas, and Suresh.
The Quantification of Loss
“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.” A 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.
You also write.” Although the government isn’t releasing figures about the average amount of rewards, the welfare commissioner’s office told me that the maximum compensation awarded for deaths is 150,000 rupees ($4286), except in a small handful of cases.
The payments the government has been disbursing since 1990 for interim relief (200 rupees, or $6 a month) are also deducted from the awards.
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.
Clerks in government offices demand anywhere from 100 to 2000 rupees ($57) to move papers, depending on the size of the awards.
For personal injury cases, 90 percent get 25,000 rupees, or $714 (the award bestowed on most of the survivors I spoke to directly).
Mohammed Laique, a local lawyer who has been representing claimants from the beginning, gave me the standard rates of compensation.
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.
For most deaths, the amount awarded is 100,000 rupees ($2857).
This belief is prevalent among the rich in Bhopal, government officials, and Carbide executives.
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.
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.
The schedule is gruesomely specific:
- In case of death: 200,000
minimum
- For disability of 1 leg: 120,000
- If one or two hands are cut off: 200,000
- If one or two legs are severed: 200,000
- Thumb cut off: 60,000
- If four fingers cut
off from one hand: 100,000
- 3 fingers cut off: 60,000
- 2 or 1 fingers cut
off: 40,000
- Breast cut off: 180,000
- For problem with 1 eye: 80,000
- 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.
Moral Responsibility
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.
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.
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.
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.
Anderson's 1984 Bhopal expedition marked the last time a senior Carbide executive from Danbury got his shoes soiled in the city.
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.
Carbide may have accepted “moral responsibility” for the disaster, but has never apologized to the people of Bhopal.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
“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.
Brian Mooney's Story
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.
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.
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.
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.
One day that summer, Mooney found himself in the park of the gas-affected women, at one of their Saturday rallies.
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.
Mooney slowly realized that he had no remaining faith in the legal system, that it had an inefficiency woven into its warp and woof.
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.
Mooney quit Kelley Drye in 1988.
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.
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.
The archdiocese of New York, through its legal counsel Kelley Drye & Warren, sued the protesters and obtained an injunction against them.
Mooney was put to work on legal research, principally insurance-coverage issues.
I Mooney had to rationalize to himself the reasons why he was working for Carbide’s law firm.
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.
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 defence of the corporation that had done this to them.
