BP Gulf oil spill and Bhopal: a contrast

Astounding criminality

Sunanda K Datta-Ray

While the United States turns the screws on British Petroleum, Indians must contend with the mockery of the June 7 verdict sentencing seven Union Carbide employees to two years imprisonment and fines of Rs 1 lakh each. The contrast again highlights the need for some semblance of balance in India's relations with the US.

It is not for laymen to comment on the technicalities of the disaster that engulfed Bhopal in 1984 or the tortuous legal processes that followed. But the outraged British response to US President Barack Obama's pressure on BP and the fears expressed for the future of the 'special relationship' confirm that such episodes cannot be plucked out of the diplomaric context. The old identification of General Motors with the US remains valid. Whatever the cause of the Bhopal tragedy, its subsequent handling exposed the danger of dependency.

That is why I called my book on India-US relations Waiting for America. It emphatically asserted that India needs the US. But it also stressed that the connection must be consonant with India's self-respect. Indians are waiting for the US to realise that their country cannot be the new Pakistan, to cite Mr Sitaram Yechury, and that relations cannot resemble those between the US and the Shah's Iran or erstwhile South Vietnam. My case was that India's size, population, resources, strategic potential and civilisational heritage demand a more equal partnership.

I was living in Singapore when the book appeared and received thunderingly good reviews in some of our most respected journals. Then I learnt to my surprise that the publisher had asked the American Ambassador to release it and that His Excellency had asked for a copy to read and turned down the request. The last was no surprise: Anyone who was aware of the book's contents and knew anything of how American politicos think would have expected nothing else. This Ambassador, moreover, was a close friend of the President whose “if you are not with us you are against us” declaration justifying Operation Enduring Freedom articulated a basic premise of American statecraft.

There was no launch and no publicity after the ambassadorial frown. The book disappeared from shop shelves. It was not visible at the Calcutta Book Fair. Shops told me they presumed it was out of print since requests for fresh stock were ignored. Direct approaches to the publisher were rebuffed. Eventually, the publisher e-mailed me to say the book had “not sold well” and would be pulped. A minor incident but revealing, perhaps, of attitudes.

Immediately after the Bhopal tragedy, when the paper I edited published a hard-hitting editorial demanding firm action by the Government, a senior New Delhi bureaucrat tried to persuade me to change our line. His case was that American law would not allow Union Carbide to concede what my paper demanded. I recalled his advocacy later when other Indians argued that companies like Enron could not have bribed anyone in this country because bribery is a federal offence in the US.

This readiness to adopt the American position might partly be explained by Mr Natwar Singh's claim that eight out of 10 diplomats hanker for a Green Card for their children. Similarly, I describe in Waiting for America that Joseph Korbel, Ms Madeleine Albright's father, was waiting for his American naturalisation papers while he was the United Nations adjudicator on Jammu & Kashmir. But the subservience of Indians in high position goes beyond calculations of self-interest. The excitement when Mr Obama attended a reception for Mr SM Krishna or an ethnic Indian won the Spelling Bee competition has no logic beyond the inferiority complex of a colonised people.

The flurry of excitement in a Dhaka hotel — flower pots brought in, carpets unrolled — once prompted me to ask the cause. “Ambassador!” a Bangladeshi breathed. Which Ambassador? But “Ambassador” needed no elaboration. Eventually I discovered it was the Saudi Ambassador. America's Ambassador may not occasion quite the same furore in New Delhi but the senior diplomat I had just sat down to interview in his South Block office (after two abortive appointments) when I was researching Waiting for America jumped up with alacrity when a burly White man pushed the door open and strode in.

He was the acting US Ambassador. “Hope I'm not disturbing anything” he said breezily. “I'd come to see so-and-so and thought I'd drop in.” Honoured by the intrusion, my IFS host drove me away, my questions unasked. He is now one of India's senior Ambassadors. Given his grovelling, why blame a Lok Sabha member from Bihar for vowing not to wash for three months the hand that Mr Bill Clinton had shaken?

We now learn that corners were cut to get Union Carbide's licence to manufacture pesticide, early warnings about the factory were ignored, and India's official team of scientists not allowed into the company's plant in Virginia. In his paper, “Unsettling Truths, Untold Tales: The Bhopal Gas Disaster Victim's 'Twenty Years' of Courtroom Struggles for Justice”, Delhi High Court's Justice S Muralidhar called the settlement the Supreme Court approved in February 1989 “severely flawed”. We also learn that Mr Arun Jaitley and Mr Abhishek Singhvi both advised Dow Chemicals, which took over Union Carbide in 2001, that it had no liability for the tragedy.

Commonsense suggests that liabilities go with assets. Commonsense also suggests that the top man — Warren Anderson — must be accountable for everything that happens in his company. I was only following established practice when as editor I appeared before the West Bengal Assembly's privileges committee and took the rap for a junior colleague's indiscretion. Mr Anderson's evasiveness indicates a conscience as dead as that of the Exxon chief who retired recently with a $400 million handshake from a company that paid a similar sum (after fighting tooth and nail against the initial $ 5 billion award) for 40,000 victims of the 1989 Valdez oil spill.

The criminality of those who allowed Anderson to escape is even more astounding. They soft-pedalled charges against Union Carbide, ensured that the case was not heard in the US where damages would have been much higher and did nothing to scotch American whispers blaming the tragedy on a disgruntled workman's sabotage.

The nation expects the Group of Ministers to impress upon the US that there can be no strategic alliance based on injustice. India is still waiting for America.


Some questions on Bhopal

Priyadarsi Dutta

Upon the wrecked Pompeii of UCIL's compound in Bhopal, cobwebs of confusion dart in the air. All the former Prime Minister's men and all the ex-Chief Minister's men are trying hard to put together again the Humpty Dumpty shattered by the June 7 court judgement. Is there any credible evidence, apart from Mr Arjun Singh's trumped horse-sense that law and order deteriorated in Bhopal on December 7-8, 1984? What else did Mr Singh do to control it apart from aiding Mr Warren Anderson to flee? How was bail granted to him by the investigating officer without his ever being produced in court? How did Mr Anderson pole-vault out of a two-tier security, provincial and national, to escape unscathed to the US?

Why was Mr Anderson never quizzed — extradition was half a world away — by intelligence agencies as was David Headley? There seem to be a pile of questions never satisfactorily asked. A tragedy caused by “the synergy of the very worst of American and Indian cultures” was how the Chief Judicial Magistrate described the Bhopal disaster in his 95-page judgment.

The confusion was compounded as no judicial inquiry or commission was set up to go into the antecedents and aftermath of the gas tragedy. The reason for this is not known. The Bhopal Gas Leak Disaster (Processing of Claims) Act, 1985 was enforced with effect from February 20, 1985. The Act conferred upon the Central Government the power to secure claims connected with the Bhopal gas leakage. But sadly, no inquiry commission, headed by a sitting or retired judge of the Supreme Court, was ordered though there were reportedly 17 ministerial committees and now another GoM (Group of Ministers) to look into the issue.

In the meantime, international organisations like Amnesty International, Greenpeace Research Laboratories, University of Massachusetts and the Pesticide Action Network have conducted case studies and research on Bhopal nailing Union Carbide India Limited. Sanjoy Hazarika came to limelight with Bhopal: The Lessons of a Tragedy (1987) and Dominique Lapierre with Five Minutes Past Midnight in Bhopal (2002). But it is a riddle why there's no official report on the Bhopal catastrophe.