June 14, 2008
No Life Or Liberty
NITYANAND JAYARAMAN, Tehelka Magazine, Vol 5, Issue 24, June 21, 2008
A clause that could save lives doesn’t seem to apply to Bhopalis
SACHIN JATAV would like to play cricket like his namesake. But forget running between the wickets, this 13-year-old can barely walk properly. When he is not staggering on his feet, he just thrashes about, somehow coping with the excruciating pain in his legs. Sachin lives near Union Carbide’s football field-sized solar evaporation ponds in Bhopal. These were filled to the brim with the pesticide factory’s toxic effluents and were just left there to dry. Along with the rain, the poisons in the pond leached into the groundwater. Sachin and his parents are among more than 25,000 Bhopalis who use this poison-laced water for drinking, bathing, everything.
Like Sachin, numerous children living in Bhopal suffer from congenital and water contamination-related diseases. 14-year-old Sarita Malviya lives with her family in a community where the handpumps spit out poisoned water. Her hands and arms are perpetually sweat-soaked, covered with a light rash. Her palms look scaly, crisscrossed by abnormally deep lines. “This is because of the water,” Sarita says. Her youngest brother, nine-year-old Vijay — generally a helpful, energetic kid — is a terror when he gets agitated. He is uncontrollable, inconsolable.
The first signs of water contamination arose in 1982, when Madhya Pradesh’s former Gas Relief Minister, Babu Lal Gaur, was still a lawyer. He had helped some farmers get compensation from Union Carbide when their cattle died after drinking the contaminated water. Now, 26 years have passed and at least 10 governmental and non-governmental studies have confirmed the groundwater contamination. The poisons found in the water can cause cancers, birth defects, joint pains, behavioural disorders, chaotic menstrual cycles, and early onset of puberty and menopause.
On April 1 this year, Hazira Bi, a grandmother of five who lives near the Carbide factory, sent an RTI request to the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) seeking inspection of files relating to the disaster. The desperation in her application was palpable: “I am a survivor of the 1984 Union Carbide gas tragedy. I am currently in New Delhi, after having walked 800 kilometres, seeking a meeting with the Prime Minister. The demands are integral to our well-being, health and the well-being of my children and grandchildren as they include actions on vital issues such as livelihood support, social support and drinking water. Therefore, I am constrained to make this request under the ‘Life and Liberty’ clause that requires you to furnish the information within two working days.”
The PMO responded on May 7, over a month later. “We treated it as a normal application because we felt that the information sought does not invoke life and liberty,” a PMO official said.
The response of the Central Information Commission (CIC), to whom the matter was referred to on May 12, was no better. In an email response to a complaint — about the lack of action — the Chief Information Commissioner, Wajahat Habibullah, wrote: “I’m sorry you haven’t received redress, but we could not see grounds for invoking the provision of life and liberty in this case. You may be assured of a decision in the immediate conclusion of the 10 days provided to the PMO.”
Till date, well beyond the stipulated 10-day notice period, no decision has been communicated.
What prompted the PMO and CIC to deny the application of the “life and liberty” clause to Hazira Bi’s application? The Bhopalis have been denied life, liberty and justice for more than two decades now. But that does not justify any further delay. The authorities cannot say: “You’ve been drinking poisoned water since 1981. What’s a wait of a few more months?”
Every day of delay in providing clean water to these communities means an added exposure to poisons for more than 25,000 Bhopalis. It means more stolen childhoods, and more hapless parents. Little wonder then that Bhopalis have not just walked from Bhopal to Delhi, but also spent more than 60 days sitting on the sidewalk in our hostile capital, pushing home their demands to the Prime Minister. On two occasions, they broke into the high-security zone to reach the PM’s residence, including the recent incident when nearly 40 of them chained themselves to the PM’s fence. Timely inspection of the files in the PM’s office could have given the Bhopalis a peep into the minds that are destroying their lives, and help them strategise their struggles accordingly.
What do you do when you know that a factory is spewing out life-threatening poisons into your primary school? You want to find what the Pollution Control Board is doing about it; instead you find that you are not entitled to receive the information without delay to enable corrective action. Is not condemning someone to drink poisoned water or breathe poisoned air, for even one day longer than can be helped, a perversion of ‘life and liberty’?
Posted by tim at 12:25 PM | Comments (0)
June 12, 2008
Why I'm going on hunger strike for Bhopal
Indra Sinha, guardian.co.uk, June 12 2008
Victims of the Union Carbide gas leak continue to suffer, their injuries and deaths uncompensated. We must support them
On July 26 2006, my friend Sathyu Sarangi called me in tears from Bhopal to tell me that our mutual friend, Sunil Kumar, had taken his life. Sathyu said that when they lifted Sunil down from the ceiling fan from which he had hanged himself, he was wearing a T-shirt that said, "No More Bhopals".
Sunil was an orphan of the Union Carbide mass-gassing of Bhopal, losing his parents and three siblings on that night of terror. Aged 12, he began doing two jobs a day to bring up his surviving sister and baby brother Sanjay. He became a leader of the survivors' struggle for justice and was one of the people I loved most in Bhopal.
The BBC reported, wrongly, that Sunil was the inspiration for Animal in my novel Animal's People, but Animal certainly benefited from Sunil's courage, sense of humour and ability to live on 4 rupees (£0.05) a day. Like Animal, Sunil heard voices in his head, and suffered nightmarish visions. You can read his story here.
On the day that Sunil died, Dow Chemical's CEO Andrew Liveris visited the UN to deliver a much-publicised speech. Fireboats hired by Dow's public relations agency jetted huge sprays aloft over the Hudson River as Liveris told the assembled diplomats "Lack of clean water is the single largest cause of disease in the world and more than 4,500 children die each day because of it … We are determined to win a victory over the problem of access to clean water for every person on earth … we need to bring to the fight the kinds of things companies like Dow do best."
Stirring words. But when asked if he would clean up Bhopal, where the drinking wells of 20,000 people have been poisoned by chemicals abandoned by Dow's subsidiary Union Carbide, causing an epidemic of cancers and hundreds of children to be born malformed and with brain damage, Liveris replied, "We don't feel this is our responsibility".
Liveris couldn't be more wrong. Under the "polluter pays" principle enshrined in both Indian and US law, Union Carbide is responsible for cleaning up the contamination and compensating the thousands whose lives have been ruined. In buying Union Carbide's assets, Dow also acquired its liabilities. Dow set aside $2.3bn to settle Union Carbide's US asbestos liabilities. How then can it refuse to accept Union Carbide's Indian liabilities?
The hard answer is that Indians are not quite as human as Americans. Dow paid $10m to settle out-of-court with an American child damaged by Dursban, a pesticide so dangerous that it has been banned for domestic use in the US. But Dow employees were found to have bribed Indian Ministry of Agriculture officials to license Dursban as safe for home use in India. If an Indian child dies I doubt if there'll be $10m or even $10,000. As a Dow public affairs chief famously remarked of the paltry compensation paid to Union Carbide's victims, "$500 is plenty good for an Indian".
Why doesn't the Indian government force Dow to clean up Bhopal? The Indian law ministry has advised Prime Minister Manmohan Singh that Dow is indeed liable for Union Carbide's misdeeds in Bhopal. It's exactly what he doesn't wish to hear. He and his ministers are in contortions to appease Dow, which has offered to invest $1bn in India if freed from its Bhopal liabilities. When news broke of this sordid backroom hustling, 280 legal professionals, among them retired judges and eminent lawyers, said the attempts to exculpate Dow were unconstitutional and illegal.
Earlier this year, 50 Bhopali survivors, many old and sick, walked 500 miles to Delhi to ask the prime minister for safe drinking water and to make Dow clean the factory. For two months Manmohan Singh left them camped on a sweltering pavement without a reply. When Bhopali women brought their damaged children to his house and chained themselves to his railings, he had them arrested. The policewomen who led them away wept.
When India's prime minister finally gave a reply, it was all prevarication, no substance. The Bhopalis then declared that they would launch an indefinite hunger strike until their demand for justice was met.
On the eve of the fast, police beat up women and children as young as six years old who had gone to protest outside the prime minister's office. The police said they'd been told to get tough. Many of us around the world rang to protest and I asked a Mr Muthukumaran of the prime minister's office if Manmohan Singh had ordered the beatings. "Are you joking?" he replied. On the contrary, I had rarely been more serious.
As I write this the Bhopalis are still in jail, and we hear that Dow Chemical is sponsoring an exhibition called The Gallery of Good at the Cannes advertising festival. Next Monday, Dow will present The Chemistry of Socially Responsible Marketing, which is presumably the advertising campaign on which it has lavished upwards of $100m. But telling lies beautifully does not make them true. Wouldn't it have more socially responsible to use the money for cleaning up Bhopal?
I have spent much of the last five years writing a novel in which victims of a chemical disaster caused by a rogue corporation are sold out by their own politicians, triggering a desperate hunger strike. Animal's People is set in the fictional city of Khaufpur, but whatever success it has had, it owes to the inspiring courage and spirit of the Bhopalis, and the descriptions of the hunger strike were drawn directly from the experiences of my friends.
Sunil is dead, but on their small stretch of pavement in Delhi, now battered by monsoon rain, nine others have sat down to begin an indefinite fast for justice. Among them are my old friend Sathyu and, grown up into a fine young man, Sunil's baby brother, Sanjay.
How can I not join them? How can we all not support them?
• To join the fast for a period, or to register your support, please visit www.bhopal.net. Donations for medical care in Bhopal may be made at www.bhopal.org/donations/
Continue reading "Why I'm going on hunger strike for Bhopal"
Posted by tim at 12:28 PM | Comments (0)
May 31, 2008
From a Government without a heart
Bhopal dharna diary, May 29, 2008
This morning, we got half of what we came here for.
Prithviraj Chavan, representing the Prime Minister's Office, came to the dharna sthal and read a statement conveying the Government's in-principle agreement to our demand for the Empowered Commission. This is a huge first step. The Commission would ensure the execution of rehabilitation schemes for gas survivors and victims of water contamination. But the devil is in the details, and the PM's statement was starkly devoid of detail. Chavan did specifically mention that medical research into long-term effects of Carbide's poisons will resume forthwith, and that water would be delivered by November. (They can drink poisoned water till then.)
Coming from a Government without a heart, even this announcement gave cause for celebration to Bhopalis. The meeting of all these demands is important, it allows the survivors to continue to... well... survive.
It has been a long road, a tough stay. A lot of people have died waiting for some of these demands to be fulfilled; a lot of people have seen their health, and that of their children, irreversibly damaged; and a lot of people have suffered severe symptoms of the exposure for 24+ years. 600,000 people in all. Going by figures estimated by the Centre for Rehabilitation Studies, Government of Madhya Pradesh, just in the last three months that the Bhopalis have been on padayatra and dharna about 90 gas-affected persons are likely to have succumbed to the long-term effects of the poisons.
These sobering realities notwithstanding, for the living and the fighting, we're glad to receive some acknowledgement that the Prime Minister is listening to us. As Rashida Bi said, "Unki aakh to khuli, kaan tak aawaaz toh aayi (he has finally opened his eyes, our voices have reached his ears)." Our friend Piyush -- who was arrested for juxtaposing the PM's face on to the bodies of the three see-no-evil, hear-no-evil monkeys -- would be glad to know that his appeal has had some effect. The Prime Minister is now able to see and hear. His feelings for fellow-humans -- particularly, those that are poor -- are still lacking. How else would you explain an offer by the PM that does not even guarantee that the mothers can give clean drinking water to their babies when they return to Bhopal? The Prime Minister has said the Bhopalis would have to wait until November 2008 to get clean water.
Reflecting on the PM's statement later in the day, the euphoria wore off and some of the old cynicism crept back in. What exactly have we won? An assurance from a PM (who has once broken his word) that we have the right to live? Elation followed by an empty sense of betrayal is now a familiar pattern for Bhopal. That is not to say we haven't learned from this cycle – each time we win an agreement with more teeth, more guarantees. Cynicism, for people like the Bhopalis who refuse to give up, only means better preparation, better follow-up and a realisation that every assurance squeezed out of a spineless politician only signals the beginning of another long struggle to help the politician live up to his word. And this time too, follow up is critical – going by our experiences, every little detail has to be examined, every deadline has to be enforced. In a way, the padyatra and dharna, were simply prologue to the struggle ahead.
And as for the other thing - the giant elephant weighing us all down – namely, legal action against Dow and Union Carbide. Our Hon'ble Prime Minister -- God bless his lost spine -- and the entire cabinet have been unable to muster the courage to take action against Dow Chemical. They are afraid of the Americans. Will Georgie bomb us for daring to pursue legal action against an American company? Not a word has been said about deregistering the three pesticides that Dow registered illegally by bribing officials. Nothing on revoking the approval given to Reliance to purchase Union Carbide's Unipol technology. And nothing said on whether the Government will -- even half-heartedly -- pursue the extradition of Warren Anderson and Union Carbide's representative. Strangely, all three things are not merely being required by the Bhopalis. They are also required by law.
Since 1992, when the Chief Judicial Magistrate proclaimed Carbide and Anderson absconders, the Government of India has specific instructions from the Court to produce Carbide's representative and ol' man Anderson in court to face trial. But successive Governments have decided that it is safer to ignore the Court than it is to piss off the United States of America. In the case of the bribery scandal involving the illegal registration of three pesticides, Dow has gotten away with murder, literally. Barring a little negative publicity, nothing concrete has materialised. Every time the Bhopalis shout for deregistering the pesticides, the Government will issue a well-heeled statement that investigations are on, or that the next painful, deliberate step is being conceived, and then will be considered, and then, perhaps, acted upon. Meanwhile, thanks to Dr. Singh’s spinal difficulties, Dow Chemical continues to profit from the sales of these three pesticides, including one (Dursban) that robs the childhood of our children.
The Bhopalis are unwavering in their commitment to see all their demands met. Our health, our bodies need to be looked after, but the outrage that has been the callousness of Union Carbide, and now Dow, has to be righted. Mr. Prime Minister, we have 600,000 Bhopalis and countless supporters, here and worldwide, demanding that one company, just one company, be pulled up for its wrongdoings. We don't understand the hesitation at punishing Dow for poisoning our communities, we cannot begin to comprehend why they are being allowed to introduce even more poisons into the country, and we shudder at the only possible reason for it: that you value its dollars more than our lives, more than righting the wrongs that were done to us. And it’s not just about us: it’s about No More Bhopals, its about sending a strong message to the world, to polluting industries everywhere, that India is open for business, but no business that compromises the environment or human rights will be tolerated.
Posted by tim at 11:29 PM | Comments (0)