Bhopal: the tragedy turns to farce
Regular readers of Lalkar
will know that the 1984 industrial mass murder at Bhopal has appeared in our
paper a few times over the years. This is essentially because this has never
been settled – the company that committed this genocide just walked away from
the horror and carnage that they visited upon the Indian people and, in true
imperialist fashion, will never be held to account for the deaths of upwards of
20,000 people and the continuing suffering and disability of many thousands
more.
It took the Union Carbide Corporation (UCC) five
years before it paid any compensation and even then it was paid to the Indian
government, No direct payment from UCC has ever been paid to the families of
those who died so horribly or any of those who survived to live lives of pain
and disability. Since that night in 1984, when 45 tons of the highly toxic MIC
gas poured out of the Union Carbide plant and through the shanty town all
around it before going on through the city and into the surrounding
countryside, many thousands more, some who were not there or not even born at
the time, have been affected because of the lingering contamination both in the
soil and in the subterranean waters for miles around the city. This is the
reality of imperialism where the sole reason for production is maximum profit
for the company at any cost to anyone or anything else!
The gas-affected have organised themselves and
their supporters to fight for justice, something most of them now acknowledge
will only come with the overthrow of imperialism. It has taken 25 long years
to get a ruling in an Indian court, during which time UCC (now wholly owned by
the Dow Chemical Company) have passed the blame onto its Indian subsidiary
Union Carbide India Ltd (UCIL), thus making sure that the real culprits, who
set the production and profit targets which necessitated the plant management
wilfully ignoring safety policies, procedures and equipment, were never to face
any charges.
In the end, eight former members of UCIL senior
management faced reduced charges, and one of those died peacefully while the
marathon legal farce played out over long years. The defendants, while not the
main criminals in this case, are certainly not innocents. They had full
knowledge before the event of how dangerous a leak of MIC could be to the
people of Bhopal and yet did nothing to ensure that such a thing could not
happen. The senior management of the parent company and that company itself,
along with its new multi-billion dollar owners (Dow Chemical Company), the
Indian government, both national and local (who relaxed and/or turned a blind
eye to their own safety controls in order to attract and keep UCC production in
India), are not only not charged with any culpability in the murders but can
carry on all over again somewhere else. The Indian parliament is at present
discussing a bill to reduce payments to any potential claimants from any future
industrial disaster and Dow chemicals will continue setting up plants where
life is cheaper and safety regulation is relaxed or non-existent.
The seven former senior management members who were
found guilty by the Indian court of the lesser charge, in the face of
overwhelming evidence, of ‘causing death by negligence’ instead of the more correct
charge of ‘culpable homicide’, were sentenced to two years imprisonment and a
fine of around £2000. The company UCIL was fined around £10,000. The seven
are very unlikely to see the inside of a prison though and will start legal
appeals and challenges to the ruling which are likely to take a few more years
to settle.
Meanwhile the gas-affected are left with their
suffering and their anger and the growing conviction that the political system
they live under can never deliver justice for them against the rich and
powerful. In the words of one activist on hearing the result “the judgement
and letting the Union Carbide Corporation off without even being charged is as
big a disaster as that night 3 December 1984!”. Another activist complained
bitterly that “these sentences are what you give people for motorcar
offences not killing 20,000 people!”
If all the money that UCC paid the Indian
government in 1989 were to be shared among all those with a claim they would
get the princely sum of around £300 per claimant. Compare that with the huge
payout to survivors and families of the Lockerbie disaster when an airliner was
exploded above the Scottish village. In that instance Libya, who most
certainly had nothing to do with the bombing (see Proletarian issue 32,
October 2009, ‘Megrahi released in deal for oil’), had been forced by
means of sanctions and bribes to accept responsibility for the crime and put £1
bn into the ‘pot’ for paying out to victims families.
The price of Indian lives comes a great deal below
that of British and American lives when lost in disasters and that is another
factor that multi-nationals callously take into consideration when deciding
where to build potentially dangerous plants.
The Bhopal gas-affected have not organised and
struggled for 25 years to walk away now – there will be continuing protests and
possibly legal challenges but, more importantly, the hard lessons re the
different legal treatment of rich and poor clearly shows what bourgeois
democracy is and, with the killer widely recognised as imperialism, this is
fertile ground for communist education, agitation and hopefully activity.
These lessons are not just for the Indian
proletariat; all workers need to understand that imperialism is a monster that
will sacrifice any of them at any time to increase or protect profits. Only
the path of socialist revolution leads to a decent and fulfilling life that
will bring our descendants into the warm glow of a communist future.