The Union Government is set to buy silence through fresh payouts to keep the Congress’s guilty secrets under wraps
Unusually for an event that happened more than 25 years ago, the Bhopal gas tragedy has dominated mindspace for two full weeks since the trial court pronounced its verdict on the guilty men on Monday, June 7. Once the judgement came, skeletons began to tumble out of a range of cupboards, causing acute embarrassment to the Government in Delhi as well as the Congress. The Prime Minister acted with uncharacteristic political acumen by quickly constituting a Group of Ministers (GoM) under workaholic Home Minister P Chidambaram and it seems its report will indeed be submitted within the stipulated 10-day deadline.
The likely contents of the GoM report are not difficult to anticipate. In fact, the most important part has already emerged with the suggestion that the Planning Commission will release Rs 984 crore as grant for rehabilitation, compensation, cleaning up and other leftover jobs of the humungous tragedy. Two rounds of compensation have already been distributed to the victims, ranging between Rs 10 lakh for the families of the deceased to Rs 50,000 for those marginally affected.
The gas leak devastated some of the poorest parts of the city, inhabited largely by Muslims. It is a measure of their resilience, ironically moulded by fatalism that enabled them to revert to their homes and jobs as they tired of waiting for official largesse to come their way. Another dose of compensation will obviously be welcome but nearly 26 years after the event the money can hardly be expected to reach those who most needed it in the tragedy’s aftermath. In fact, over 3,000 listed victims are yet to collect their dues because they have left what they believed was an accursed city and migrated elsewhere.
Therefore, additional compensation is not the core issue as we revisit Bhopal 1984. Arguably, there are ongoing concerns over rehabilitation, reclamation of the devastated localities, relocation of toxic waste, and regeneration of groundwater contaminated by the seepage of chemicals. It is unbelievable that after more than two decades even the waste has not been shifted out of Bhopal because authorities continue to quibble over who should pay for it and where it should be dumped. While the Government contends that Union Carbide (now owned by Dow Chemicals) must bear the costs, the company cites various judgements to say that its responsibility is over. The Madhya Pradesh Government has started to remove the waste but the chosen location, on the outskirts of the industrial town of Pithampura, is being resisted.
NGOs continue to cry hoarse over groundwater contamination around the UCC plant, but the State Government says it spent Rs 14 crore laying pipelines to provide clean water to these colonies so that they don’t have to tap groundwater. Interestingly, property developers seem to have decided that the vicinity of the erstwhile factory is a perfect spot to construct high-rise apartment blocks. Accordingly land prices there have gone up significantly.
To my mind, these are nuts-and-bolts issues that should have been resolved long ago but weren’t thanks to proverbial bureaucratic sloth. Hopefully, the new package will pave the way for these matters to be sorted out without further delay. Basically, there are two facets to the reopening of the Bhopal case — administrative and political. While the administrative lapses have no doubt been Himalayan, we are probably heading towards closure on these issues. But the political aspect has got revived in a big way and till convincing answers are given to the queries raised in the last fortnight, the ghosts of Bhopal will not be excised.
Three things are clear. First, Warren Anderson came to India by arrangement with the Government, having been assured “safe passage” by the Ministry of External Affairs in consultation with the political leadership. Second, the Central Government ordered the State Government to give instant bail to Anderson when he was put under house arrest in Bhopal, and flew him back to Delhi by official aircraft where and he interacted with senior officials during the brief sojourn. Third, despite the specious arguments advanced by the ruling party, Anderson could not have flown in and out of India without the knowledge and consent of the highest political authority, namely, then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi.
It is apparent that the Government went out of its way to appease Union Carbide and its then chairman in the purported belief that bending backwards would open the flow of US investments to India. This assessment belied the sycophantic mindset of India’s foreign policy establishment as well as political leadership. The fear of annoying Uncle Sam was so all pervasive that the Congress threw caution to the winds and treated Anderson as if he were a visiting Head of State! In that sense, the Indian Establishment equated one US-based multinational company with the US Administration. Is it surprising that stories are being carefully planted about then President Ronald Reagan having a telephonic chat with Rajiv Gandhi, presumably to direct the Prime Minister to fall in line? Incidentally, this was first hinted at by Congress general-secretary Digvijay Singh who has since been asked to shut up.
On the backfoot, the Congress has tied itself up in knots. Mr Pranab Mukherjee’s semi-credible claim that Anderson had to be “rescued” from Bhopal because of a law and order threat has now been completely contradicted by the interview to CNN-IBN by Mr MK Rasgotra, former Foreign Secretary. Initially, the effort was to put the blame on then Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Arjun Singh so that Rajiv Gandhi could be portrayed as a babe in the woods who knew nothing of the shenanigans of his partymen. This incredible line of defence fell apart almost instantly and now Mr Arjun Singh is threatening to bare all! PV Narasimha Rao was dragged into the picture as the next fall guy but a robust riposte from his son seems to have smothered that diversionary tactic.
The fact is that the Congress cannot run away from the guilt of Bhopal. It seriously underestimated the extent of the tragedy and was happy when former Chief Justice AM Ahmadi converted the case into one caused by negligence, that is, an accident. It was the agreement, which the Union of India initialled in 1989 with Union Carbide that quashed all claims of justice for the victims of Bhopal. The Government is now trying to apply a soothing balm by doling out taxpayers’ money. But the guilty men sitting in America have been allowed to get away through what amounts to a conspiracy against the people of Bhopal. India did not cause the gas leak; those who did have got away paying a mere $ 478 million. And we are left to pick up the bill for the devastation only because the Government must keep the Congress’s guilty secrets under wraps.
