Bhopal's Great Tragedy

On Monday morning, people who had waited 26 long years for justice gathered in the streets to await the verdict pronounced over the Union Carbide gas plant leak, the world’s worst industrial disaster.

When it was announced, it was too little and too late!

The fact that all the Indian defendants had been found guilty produced short-lived joy, but news of the sentences left the rest of the country in shock, disbelief, disgusted and angry.

The court made zero mention of Warren Anderson, the American then-chairman of Union Carbide, who had a warrant issued against him since 2003 but was later declared an ‘absconder’ by the court (despite the fact that he was publicly proclaimed to be living in his New York apartment as of late 2009).

As with most Indian cases with weak verdicts, blindingly obvious questions still hung in the air.
Like why didn’t the Indian government force Dow to clean up Bhopal?
Or why did the prosecution turn their attention on the Indian managers instead of trying UCC for culpable homicide?

In 2008 itself the Indian law ministry had advised Manmohan Singh that Dow was liable for UCC’s misdeeds in Bhopal. Little did everyone know that the Prime Minister and his minions were in contortions to appease Dow, which had then offered to invest $1billion in India if freed from its Bhopal liabilities.

Indra Sinha, who has written a scathing book on the Bhopal Gas Tragedy called ‘Animal’s People’, tells the story of ‘that night’ here and speaks of the verdict here.