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I suppose there are better ways to spend an evening (a fairly pleasant one at that) than to try and get into the Union Carbide factory in Bhopal, but at that particular moment I couldn’t think of one. Besides, I really did want to go in and have a look. It was a pretty morbid desire, admittedly, but I think that it would be near-impossible for a first time visitor to Bhopal to not have even a passing curiosity about the factory. I had in fact been rather hesitant about even mentioning the words Union Carbide, considering what had happened here, but the factory appeared to have become a sort of grotesque tourist attraction. This unsettled me. I mean, if I had lived through the disaster and someone turned up wanting to include it in their ‘things to see’ checklist, I’d probably want to rearrange their dentistry.
Anyhow, after driving right past the gate a couple of times, I pulled over and walked up to where a couple of hefty-looking fellows were indulging in a bit of exuberant back slapping. If it hadn’t been for the various bits of protest- graffiti (Hang Anderson! Anderson murdabad!) on the boundary walls, there was no way of telling that this was the site of the world’s deadliest industrial disaster. ‘Can I go in and look around? I’m a journalist.’ I asked the fellows at the gate. ‘Yes you can, but you need written permission from the Collector.’ ‘How long does the whole process take?’ ‘Oh, anywhere from ten days to a month.’ That took a sledgehammer to my plans, because I didn’t have that sort of time. I did the next best thing and asked them what it was like inside. ‘It’s amazing,’ they said. ‘You should see the towers and the machinery... so big and tall. Those people from the slums came and destroyed a lot of things inside, so now there’s a police party here all the time. We’re both part of it.’
‘Those people’ were the unlucky souls who survived the gas leak and happened to live in the tenements bang across the road from the factory. I say unlucky because by all accounts, and in one of life’s all-time cruel ironies, the thousands of people who died on the night of December 3, 1984 (and have continued to die since) were the fortunate ones. Those that survived and now live in all manner of agonies drew the short end of the stick - an end that’s been used to bludgeon the people of Bhopal from the day the plant was built in 1969. Most of us know that a lot of people were gassed to death in Bhopal, but not much else. It’s therefore worth repeating the sequence of events here, just so that the sheer enormity of the crimes committed by Union Carbide (UCC), the government of Madhya Pradesh and India and Dow Chemicals (who bought over Union Carbide) can be better understood.
The plant was never safe to begin with, having been built based on either untried or near-obsolete technology. A number of smaller leaks had already taken place before 1984, killing some of the factory’s own employees. An internal safety report made it clear the plant was polluting the entire area and was a disaster waiting to happen, but the bosses ignored the report outright and put cost-cutting measures through, severely endangering the already critical safety situation.
When the inevitable happened and 27 tonnes of methyl-isocyanate (MIC), hydrogen cyanide, mono methyl amine and other chemicals were released into the air, UCC officials sent in telegrams from the US claiming the cloud of gas was only like tear gas, a mere irritant and harmless - this while thousands of corpses lay all over Bhopal, and in full knowledge that MIC was in fact lethal. UCC’s chief medical officer at first recommended injections of sodium thiosulfate, a treatment that had proved effective, but UCC’s lawyers directed him to retract his advice precisely because the treatment’s success would imply that the company had been negligent. The state government forbade doctors from using the treatment and bulldozed a clinic that had been set up for the purpose.
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