“Almost everyone is gone now. Maybe at last it will be my turn next.”
December 10, 2019 5:54 PM   Subscribe

35 years later, the Bhopal disaster continues to destroy lives: “It would be better if there was another gas leak which could kill us all and put us all out of this misery,” said Omwati Yadav, 67, who can see the Union Carbide factory from the roof of her tiny one-room stone house, painted peppermint green with orange doors. Her body shaking with sobs, she cries out: “Thirty five years we have suffered through this, please just let it end. This is not life, this is not death, we are in the terrible place in between.” [Photos]

Previously on Metafilter: 20 years on, "Dow" accepts responsibility, 25 years on

On the historical context:
This week marks the 35th anniversary of the disaster yet the injustice suffered by the people of Bhopal remains stark and unrelenting. The official death toll is still disputed but an estimated 574,000 were poisoned that night and upwards of 20,000 people have died since from related conditions. No one from Union Carbide was ever tried for the gross negligence that led to the gas explosion, despite multiple criminal charges being brought against them in India. No cleanup operation of the chemical waste – which was already being dumped into the local community before the explosion – has ever been conducted.

Surveys done by the Bhopal campaign groups have shown this toxic waste, which according to their tests contains six of the persistent organic pollutants banned by the UN for their highly poisonous impacts on the environment and human health, has now reached 42 areas in Bhopal and continues to spread. The pond where Union Carbide used to dump the chemicals sits festering and untouched, with children and wild pigs running on about on its banks.
On the intersectional nature of the Bhopal disaster:
The data also suggests that the explosion has had a particularly adverse effect on women exposed to the gas, even as babies just days old, causing high rates of infertility, stillbirths, abortions, early menopause and wreaking havoc on menstrual cycles. As a result, many women in Bhopal continue to be abandoned by their husbands, believed not to be capable of fulfilling the familial duties expected of them.
On the multigenerational injustice:
Yet it is the lasting impact on the second and third generation, and on those yet unborn that haunts those in Bhopal the most. The Chingari children’s centre, established for those born with disabilities as a consequence of the disaster, has registered over 1,000 children, with most affected by cerebral palsy, muscular dystrophy, autism, intellectual disabilities and severe learning difficulties. “This is the terrible legacy of Bhopal: all of these children were born to parents, or even grandparents, who were in contact with the gas that night,” said Rashida Bee, the centre’s founder. “The situation is getting worse, not better. We are seeing more and more second and third generation children being born with such disabilities and coming here. Bhopal’s tragedy has not stopped.”
On those who have shielded perpetrators in India:
Justice has indeed remained elusive for the victims of Bhopal. A 1989 compensation deal, now widely panned as shamefully inadequate, saw most victims given just 25,000 rupees (£275), while some received nothing at all. None of the nine Indian officials who were convicted in 2010 for their role in the disaster served any time behind bars, while Union Carbide has never appeared in court.

[...]

The Indian government has also been accused of working against the victims by kowtowing to corporate interests. In 2015, while on a visit to the US, Indian prime minister Narendra Modi met with officials from Dow Chemicals. Contacted by the Guardian for this story, Dharmendra Kumar Madan, joint secretary at the ministry of chemicals, which is responsible for Bhopal, refused to comment, stating simply: “I am not concerned with this issue.”
...And in America, across over three decades of administrations:
Classified emails released as part of WikiLeaks show that in 2010, when the Indian government pushed to reopen the compensation settlement for Bhopal victims, Robert Hormats, who served as President Obama’s under secretary of state for economic growth, energy, and the environment, met with then Indian cabinet minister Montek Ahluwalia to communicate that it would “look really bad to reopen a settlement”. Hormats is now vice president of Kissinger Associates, the geopolitical consulting firm set up by former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger, who took on Union Carbide as a client following the disaster and lobbied on their behalf for years after.

State department documents also reveal that in his 2010 visit to India, President Barack Obama specifically did not meet with NGOs dealing with Bhopal out of fear of stoking the issue and that a key objective of the visit was instead to stress his “support for Dow’s business in India.”

US government intervention continues to this day. On six separate occasions between 2014 and 2019, the US Department of Justice has simply not passed on the summons for Dow Chemical to appear in the Bhopal Court on criminal charges of sheltering a fugitive, their subsidiary company Union Carbide. This is seen by campaigners as a direct violation of the treaty of mutual legal assistance between the US and India, and has ensured Dow Chemical has never appeared in the courts to answer the criminal charges.
And finally, on the dwindling numbers of survivors left to fight for justice:
Each anniversary brings a smaller onslaught of attention to Bhopal but the tragedy remains the same. In JP Nagar, eight people have died in the past two months of diseases related to gas exposure, including two of the key activists who have led the fight for justice for Bhopal.

Sitting in her small home, furnished only with a wardrobe and a single plastic chair, Leela Bai Ahivwar, 70, still remembers the night of the explosion with anguish and said the past 35 years since has been “only pain”. She lost both her son and daughter to diseases connected to their gas exposure. “I no longer have any hope for justice. We walked to Delhi twice in protest, and for what,” says Ahivwar. “Almost everyone is gone now. Maybe at last it will be my turn next.” Another Bhopal life then, defined only by death.
posted by Ouverture (15 comments total) 42 users marked this as a favorite
 
I don't believe in Hell, but sometimes, I wish I knew it existed and that it was actually just so that the kind of evil fuckers who put profits above lives and the kind of evil fuckers who helped shield the former could be informed of the huge error of their ways.

I can't even understand how mere riches can let those people live with themselves.
posted by Ickster at 7:43 PM on December 10, 2019 [22 favorites]


Kissinger Associates, the geopolitical consulting firm set up by former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger, who took on Union Carbide as a client following the disaster and lobbied on their behalf for years after.

I can't think of anything bad enough to say about that man.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 8:14 PM on December 10, 2019 [20 favorites]


Yeah, so horrifying. It makes me think of those who profited of art and jewels and businesses and real estate during/after the Holocaust. I remember when Bhopal went down and thought for sure the union carbide guys would do time. Nope, $203.25 (1984 dollars) for *some* victims. I had no idea about the continuing USG cover-up. Fuckers. I don't believe in hell, but kharma. When those murderers get theirs, it's gonna be significant.

I'd like to see DOW tried at the hague for crimes against humanity. I don't even know if that's how it works, but the words seem to fit.
posted by j_curiouser at 8:17 PM on December 10, 2019 [10 favorites]


Now I'm gonna rtfa and try to keep it together.
posted by j_curiouser at 8:24 PM on December 10, 2019 [1 favorite]


>I don't believe in Hell, but sometimes, I wish I knew it existed

As my mom would have said of these rat bastards, "Hell is not hot enough."

Also, what the fuck, Obama?
posted by Sing Or Swim at 8:29 PM on December 10, 2019 [8 favorites]


I clicked the link preparing myself to read horrible stories about this tragedy and was immediately greeted by beautiful faces. I just... words fail me here.
.
posted by BigHeartedGuy at 8:30 PM on December 10, 2019 [5 favorites]


I did a report on this when I was in high school, not longer after it happened. I have family in Bhopal. No catastrophic deaths, but many, many ongoing health problems. So many have gradually gone blind. Uncles, aunts, cousins. And these aren't people who were particularly close to the factory.

I'm not going to read the article. Too close to home.
posted by bardophile at 9:56 PM on December 10, 2019 [18 favorites]


I'd say that at this point, if at any point the Indian nation wants to nationalize a US business, detain Americans, or just give shelter to our enemies, all they'd have to say is 'Bhopal', and I'd be like 'alright, fair enough'.

I mean the USA has demonstrated with this, and with Chevron in Ecuador, and also that diplomat's wife who killed that youth in the UK that America is not going to adhere or reciprocate to any treaties of extradition, so why should foreign courts recognize the warrants, judgments, or awards made by our courts? It's time for our country to be recognized by the international community as the corrupt kleptocratic anti-democratic oligarchy that it is, and to be given the same amount of shrift that is given to Turkmenistan and Belarus.
posted by LeRoienJaune at 10:27 PM on December 10, 2019 [29 favorites]


That^^^
posted by j_curiouser at 10:41 PM on December 10, 2019 [3 favorites]


Contacted by the Guardian for this story, Dharmendra Kumar Madan, joint secretary at the ministry of chemicals, which is responsible for Bhopal, refused to comment, stating simply: “I am not concerned with this issue.”

Remember that UCIL was owned (49.1%) by the Government of India, the state government of MP and government controlled banks and controlled by a board based in India which was required by Indian law at the time.

If you ever read about Bhopal and wonder, "why would the Indian government not push harder? Why was the case settled so quickly?", remember that those decisions were in some cases being made by people who had appointed people to the UCIL board so of course they wanted it over and done with.

This is also why the Indian government never pushed for any of the American UCC employees to be extradited. First, because their own lawyers told them that they would probably be acquitted of most charges that could be brought under Indian law1 which would cause political mayhem and second because that would lead to public trials where their defence lawyers would lay out in forensic detail exactly who made which decision and how those decisions led to thousands of people dying.

(1) As mentioned in the post, the plant supervisor and UCIL management were tried decades later for causing death by negligence and received trivial sentences that they never served. If that's the best they can do for the people who made the decisions to switch off and not maintain the required safety systems they'd really struggle to get a conviction of someone who was the CEO of the non-operating majority shareholder.
posted by atrazine at 3:25 AM on December 11, 2019 [12 favorites]


.

We weren't taught about Bhopal in school. I remember in college I somehow learned about the accident and spent the rest of the day reading about it in a daze. I simply could not believe something that horrible had happened and not only was I never taught about it, but no one was ever held responsible and no cleanup ever occurred. It still paralyzes me with horror.
posted by fiercecupcake at 9:46 AM on December 11, 2019 [5 favorites]


The yes men prank referenced in that previous post was amazing and the followup shown in the full length movie "the yes men fix the world(2009)" is worth noting. after the bbc prank, they actually travel to bhopal and talk to people and activists and doctors there. the prank clearly made the locals happy even though the situation is still really bad over there...
posted by danjo at 9:49 AM on December 11, 2019 [2 favorites]


My respect for Obama just fell into the toilet.
posted by BlueHorse at 5:37 PM on December 11, 2019 [3 favorites]


There was a picture of a child, and I have never forgotten that photo. I won't link it, but Bhopal gas tragedy child photo will retrieve it. Each tragedy is personal and devastating. It's too large a tragedy, and too large an injustice for words; I have none.
posted by theora55 at 8:33 PM on December 11, 2019 [2 favorites]


Bhopal is why white people need to learn racial humility.

Indian Residential Schools are why white people need to learn racial humility.

Slavery of Africans and Lynchings is why white people need to learn racial humility.

Indian Indenture System (i.e. Slavery of Indians) is why white people need to learn racial humility.

I say this as a mixed-race-with-Indian-heritage Canadian whose PM did blackface/brownface(?)/made himself look like a racist dork.

It's not enough that 174 First Nations reserves in Canada are currently under drinking water advisories, but ethnoculturally speaking, the same WASPs had to go over to India and devastate drinking water there too. When is it enough?

When do *enough* white people deal with the transgenerational trauma they're still carrying from the Dark Ages? --in which plague meant that drinking water was historically polluted by the rotting corpses of their loved ones. Then maybe they [most white people] wouldn't be compelled to make this ancestral ghost-memory the absolute reality* for those [non-white-skinned peoples] they consider responsible for Europe's experience of the human condition.

*By focusing on environmental impacts, it is not acknowledged that members of the First Nations communities in the areas BC Hydro intended to flood were quite traumatically displaced. It's only by talking to people from those communities whose families survived the flooding that you will learn they were not given notice, that many responded to flooding in their homes in the middle of the night, and that their graveyards and the bodies of their ancestors floated up into the streets as they were fleeing -- when BC Hydro blocked the rivers. The fact that they are forced to drink water in which their ancestors bodies decomposed in does not elude the descendents living there today.
posted by human ecologist at 11:06 AM on December 17, 2019


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