Seconds from Disaster Airheaded Lynas executive chairman Aussie Nicholas Curtis and United State’s Anderson Descendants of hardcore Convicts are laughing at Malaysians
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Airheaded Lynas executive chairman Aussie Nicholas Curtis and United State’s Anderson Descendants of hardcore Convicts are laughing at Malaysians
Lynas executive chairman Nicholas Curtis an Airheaded Aussie – Descendants of hardcore Convicts
“Lynas has engaged in a large public consultation programme, communicating directly with more than 10,000 local residents, community leaders, villagers and the families since July 2011.
“We are now engaging in a conversation with the Malaysian community that will continue for the life of the plant, but we are concerned that these defamatory statements will instill misplaced fear and anxiety in the general public about our safe operations.
“Lynas’ operations will be safe and will comply with the environmental, health and safety standards stipulated by the laws of Malaysia and audited by the International Atomic Energy Agency. These laws reflect or exceed international standards,
A nation that cannot uphold its law cannot preserve its order. When Anderson was smuggled out to safety, the authority of state abandoned the responsibility of state. Excuses, evasions and lies have shifted over 26 years; this central truth has not.
It is odd that the government should have chosen law and order as its final alibi after some exhausting self-laceration in its search for a credible explanation for the escape of Union Carbide’s Warren Anderson on December 7, 1984.
Why do we say “law and order” rather than “order and law”? Simple. Law comes before order. Law defines the nature of order. Law is the difference between civilization and chaos. Law is evolutionary: the edicts of tribes, chiefs and dynasties lifted human societies from scattered peril to structured coexistence. The laws of democracy have vaulted us to the acme of social cohesion, for they eliminated arbitrary diktat and introduced collective will. The divine right of kings is dead; it has been reborn as the secular right of an elected Parliament.
A nation that cannot uphold its law cannot preserve its order. When Anderson was smuggled out to safety, the authority of state abandoned the responsibility of state. Excuses, evasions and lies have shifted over 26 years; this central truth has not.
Unsurprisingly, Anderson sneered at the establishment that knelt before him; contempt is the umbilical chord of the colonial, or neo-colonial, relationship. The crux of the Bhopal tragedy is summed up in a few sentences uttered by Anderson as he was escorted out of India on December 7, 1984: “House arrest or no house arrest, or bail or no bail, I am free to go home…There is a law of the United States… India, bye bye, thank you.”
‘House or no house arrest’: he could not care a damn about those funny-looking policemen (in lathis and khaki shorts?) who had dared to arrest a pillar of the American corporate establishment. ‘Bail or no bail’: what was a rotten piece of paper signed in an Indian court worth to a lord of Wall Street? Not even the decency of silence. Anderson was publicly, even proudly, contemptuous of those who did not have the courage to interrupt his freedom for a mere industrial disaster in which a few thousand semi-slave Indians had been gassed to death within hours and thousands more would die over years.
‘There is a law in the United States’: Anderson had twigged on to a basic truth that the law is a malleable reality for those who are “well-connected” in India. How could Anderson have respect for India’s law when those entrusted with its sanctity had defiled it? Anderson laughed at Indian law, and jeered at the Indian state. Compare this with the fact that his company was scared witless at the prospect of an American trial. Carbide fought hard, and successfully, with predictable help from a comprador Indian establishment, to shift the trial from America to India. Their subsequent collusion with Indian courts touched Supreme heights.
British Petroleum knew the perils of entanglement with American justice and shelled out within six weeks of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Big Oil (which is far bigger than Big Chemical) has been forced to put aside $20 billion for the repair of the environment after an ecological disaster that has not killed a single innocent human being. Technically, BP need not have paid more than $75 million. The first demand on Carbide, 26 years ago was for $15 billion. It has paid the equivalent of just one billion dollars (at today’s prices) for the death of nearly 20,000 people and the horrific maiming of over 100,000.
Barack Obama slipped on a bit of oil himself when the spill began. He thought playing to the gallery would subdue the clamour, while BP contained the damage. He upped the ante (it became an environmental 9/11) even while his National Guard helped BP by hiding affected bird-life from media cameras. Obama began to taunt the British in British Petroleum, perhaps because he found it easier to attack a nation than a multinational; but public opinion was not to be mollified by rhetoric.
BP paid America out of fear, not because of a demand order from its conscience. Carbide had nothing to fear, and never possessed a conscience. QED. BP will not pay a dividend this year. Carbide paid a dividend even after Bhopal.
‘India, bye bye, thank you’: those famous last Anderson words. Bye bye; this is a divorce, not a separation. There might be some alimony in it, but don’t start shopping until the cheque is in the bank.
Accusation is the easy exit route from Bhopal. Introspection will take us back to the beginning. Betrayal is impossible without trust. We did not trust Carbide to be honest. We trusted our political class, and it continues to search for new and inventive ways to betray us again.
Every anniversary of a trauma, whether Bhopal, Bhagalpur, Bluestar, Ahmedabad or the anti-Sikh riots on Delhi’s streets, turns into a struggle between anger and amnesia. It is a no-contest. Amnesia wins every time.
Eyeless in Bhopal. Heartless in communal riots. Clueless in Ayodhya. Mindless in government. And, maybe, pointless in rage. Perhaps the determining fact is that everyone, apart from the victim, has a vested interest in silence since the guilt, active or passive, extends beyond the obviously culpable. Governments might inspire and abet riots, but they are never possible without participation of the people. Every political party has an inconvenient truth in its history.
What, however, explains the callous indifference to the perpetrators of the Bhopal tragedy, Union Carbide and Dow Chemical? Twenty-five years ago, Union Carbide’s factory in Bhopal spat out 40 tons of aerial poison in the form of methyl isocyanate, killing nearly 4,000 immediately and some 15,000 since then. It was a crime of greed, since this gas was used because it was cheaper than safer alternatives. The cover-up was dubious, at the very least. Carbide attributed the accident to sabotage by a disgruntled employee who was never named. This evasion was prelude to escape. In 2001, Dow Chemical bought Carbide for $11.6 billion.
Dow priced the Indian dead at an average of $2,200 per corpse, or around Rs 1 lakh at today’s exchange rates. The blinded and maimed were dismissed with a compensation of $550 on average. That, explained a Dow spokeswoman, was “plenty good for an Indian”. When Dow Chemical sets the price for Indian lives, we natives had better accept with folded hands. How much, incidentally, do you think your infant’s eyes are worth? Raghu Rai, who gave the world the iconic image of Bhopal, of a dead child’s face, could have provided the answer, but which establishment, political or corporate, has time for a photographer’s pain?
Our governments, whether led by Congress or BJP, made the usual thundery noise in public and, in private, cooperated with Carbide/Dow Jones, starting from the day Carbide chief Warren Anderson was airlifted out of Bhopal to escape local wrath. Over time, even the noise has become a passing perfunctory statement. We have never asked for Anderson’s extradition, although there is an international arrest warrant against him. Is Anderson hiding in the Amazon forest? No. He is living in a luxurious American suburb. Why should American authorities worry about accountability if we don’t? Our unstated reason has been that action against Anderson would frighten foreign investors. Why let a few thousand corpses interfere with the balance sheet?
In 2006, Dow wrote to America’s then ambassador in India, thanking him for obtaining our government’s assurance that Dow would not be held liable for the mass murder of Bhopalis. Dow should now send a letter to our present minister of state for environment, who went to Bhopal to jeer at those who are still protesting against continuing death from left-over toxic waste. According to critics, from 15 to 30 people are still dying every month.
Dow Chemicals dare not be as casual about Americans. In 2002, it set aside over two billion dollars to cover Carbide’s asbestos contamination liabilities. An American cough is far, far more expensive than an Indian life. Why? Because America cares for Americans. The poor in America have won their right to justice, and every company knows that it cannot sweet-talk its way through sleepwalkers in power.
If there is any explanation for Delhi’s fudge-and-fuss approach, it can only lie in the Indian elite’s very real indifference to the poor. What, one wonders, would have been the reaction if Carbide had leaked its poison over Lutyens’ Delhi rather than five kilometers from the old Bhopal city? Would Anderson have spent 25 years in Tihar rather than a villa in Hampton’s? You can bet your last silver dollar that Dow would have been both poorer and more contrite.
Abdul Jabbar Khan, convenor of the Bhopal Gas Peedith Mahila Udyog Sangathan, had much to say to the media as he led a rally from the homes of the dead to the death factory on the 25th anniversary. One sentence said as much as was needed: “We got no justice, no adequate compensation and not enough compassion.” He was expecting justice from a meandering legal system, compensation from a caustic foreign company – and compassion from fellow-Indians. Of the three, the last hurts most.
Media has done what it could. The Times of India has done some moving reportage of the 25th anniversary in the last few days. It would be interesting to find out, possibly through market research, whether the readers of the nation’s most powerful newspaper have been moved at all.
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