Five Past Midnight in Bhopal (51 page)

In Bhopal, too, the victims organized themselves to defend their rights. Activists’ organizations rallied thousands of survivors
to ransack Carbide’s offices in New Delhi and demand the immediate payment of the promised indemnities. Five years after the
tragedy, its victims had still not laid hands on a single one of the $470 million they had been awarded.

Not surprisingly, so large a sum of money, even though placed in a special account administered by the supreme court, was
a magnet for the greedy. Sheela Nadar, Padmini’s mother, had to pay out 1,400 rupees for a dossier establishing her husband’s
death. Payment of baksheesh became obligatory in order to obtain access to the compensation desks or to the often very distant
offices that handed out the first allocations of provisions and medical aid. In the final analysis, according to official
figures, 548,519 survivors would eventually receive what was left of the money paid by Carbide: a little less than 60,000
rupees or approximately $1,400 for the death of a parent, and about half that in cases of serious personal injury. It was
a far cry from the million rupees the New York lawyer had promised Ganga Ram and the Orya Bustee survivors.

Because the wind had been blowing in the direction of the bustees that night, it was the poorest of the poor who were most
affected by the tragedy. Left to suffer, exploited by predators on all sides, the survivors soon found themselves subject
to further persecution. Under the guise of a “beautification program” the new authorities used part of the moneys meant for
the victims to empty the bustees of their Muslim population. Flanked by police, bulldozers razed several neighborhoods to
the ground. Only the determination of about fifty Muslim women threatening to burn themselves to death succeeded in putting
a temporary halt to the eviction of Muslims. But after a few days, they were all moved to Gandhinagar, outside the city. Iqbal,
Ahmed Bassi and Salar, who had escaped the scourge of MIC, were driven out by the madness of men. Like most of the other Muslims
living in the Kali Grounds neighborhood, they had to abandon their homes again—this time for good.

In 1991, the Bhopal court summoned Warren Anderson, Union Carbide’s chairman, to appear on a charge of “homicide in a criminal
case.” But the man who was enjoying peaceful retirement in his villa in Vero Beach, Florida, did not keep the promise he had
made to a journalist as he left Indian soil on December 11, 1984. Not only was he not returning to the country where his company’s
factory had wrought disaster, but he actually managed to lower his profile within his own country. Anderson left Vero Beach,
and his whereabouts are not publicly known. The international warrant for his arrest issued under Indian law remained unserved
by Interpol. In March 2000, in response to a class-action suit by victims’ organizations in the federal court of the southern
district of New York, Union Carbide’s lawyer William Krohley said the company will accept process served in the name of Anderson
but will not disclose his whereabouts. These organizations remain undaunted, however, and do not intend to give up. The graffiti
“
HANG ANDERSON
,”

which the survivors never tire of repainting on their city walls, are a reminder that justice has not yet been done.

If the Indian people believe Warren Anderson is a fugitive, the prospects of bringing Union Carbide to justice are just as
unlikely, for the very good reason—albeit one of small consolation to the victims—that the multinational no longer exists.
Despite all its chairman’s efforts, the tragedy on December 2, 1984, was the death of the proud company with the blue-and-white
logo. The purchase of its agricultural division by the French company Rhône-Poulenc, now the proprietor of the institute’s
Sevin factory, and the takeover in August 1999 of all of its assets, for the sum of $9.3 billion, by the Dow Chemical Group,
meant that Union Carbide disappeared forever from the world’s industrial horizon. The initiators of the various legal proceedings
launched against the Danbury multinational let it be known that they would hold Dow Chemical responsible for the charges levied
against Carbide. Their claim was given short shrift. “It is not in my power,” declared Frank Popoff, Dow’s CEO, “to take responsibility
for an event which happened fifteen years ago, with a product we never developed, at a location where we never operated.”

And what of the beautiful plant? One day in January 1985, shortly after Operation Faith, a tharagar turned up outside the
teahouse in Orya Bustee.

“I’m looking for hands to dismantle the rails from the railway line leading to the factory,” he said.

The stretch of track linking the factory to the main railway line had never been used. It was a testimony to the megalomania
of the South Charleston engineers who had arranged for the purchase of both a locomotive and freight cars to transport the
enormous quantities of Sevin the factory was supposed to produce. Timidly, Ganga Ram, who had lost most of the customers of
his painting business in the catastrophe, put up his hand.

“I’m looking for work,” he said, convinced that the tharagar would reject him when he saw his mutilated fingers.

But that day Carbide was taking on any available hands. The former leprosy sufferer would at last be able to have his revenge
by helping to dismantle the monster that had once refused him employment.

For one year, Jagannathan Mukund headed the team assigned to closing down the factory, a Herculean task that involved cleaning
every piece of equipment, every pipe, every drum and tank, first with water and then with a chemical decontaminant. These
cleaned and scrubbed parts of the factory were sold off to small local entrepreneurs. In 1986, when the job was done, the
last workmen wearing the once prestigious coverall with the blue-and-white logo left the site forever.

Today, the abandoned factory looks like the vestige of some lost civilization. Its metal structures rust in the open air.
In the rough grass lie pieces of the sarcophagi that protected the tanks. On the control room walls, the seventy dials rest
in eternal peace, including the pressure gauge for tank 610, with its needle stuck on the extreme left of the instrument,
lasting testament to the fury of the MIC. The notices with the inscription “
SAFETY FIRST
” add a touch of irony to a scene of industrial devastation.

What was to be done with this mute but powerful witness? In 1997, India’s minister for culture suggested turning the whole
of the Kali Grounds site into an amusement park. But the indignant outcry the proposal provoked caused the authorities to
withdraw it. The accursed factory must remain there always, as a place of remembrance.

Fortunately, a privileged few managed to escape the misfortune that befell most of the tragedy’s victims. Orya Bustee’s bride
and groom were among them. Miraculously resurrected after her rescue from the funeral pyre, Padmini was able to rejoin her
loved ones after a long and painful recovery in Hamidia Hospital. She returned to Orya Bustee and set up home with her husband
Dilip in her parents’ hut. Very soon, however, the nightmare of that tragic night began to haunt her to the point where she
could no longer bear the place in which she had spent her adolescence. The mere sight of the metal structures mocking her
from a few hundred yards away very nearly drove her insane. That was when an opportunity presented itself in the form of a
plot of land for sale, about forty miles from Bhopal, near the banks of the Narmada River. The idea of returning along the
trail that had once brought her family from Orissa to Bhopal filled the young Adivasi with enthusiasm. She persuaded her husband
that they could make their home in the country, have a small farm and live on what they produced. Her mother and brother were
prepared to go with them. The indemnity they had just received for the death of the head of their family made the relocation
just about feasible.

Dilip and Padmini built a hut, planted soy, lentils, vegetables and fruit trees. Little by little they dug out an irrigation
system. Like all the farmers in the area, they bought “medicines” from traveling salesmen to protect their crops from insects,
especially from the weevils that liked to attack potatoes. These door-to-door salesmen did not, of course, offer Sevin. Instead
they had pyrethrum-based pesticides, which had the advantage of being both cheap and generally effective, except when it came
to soya bean caterpillars, which were a real nightmare.

One day in the autumn of 1998, Dilip and Padmini received a visit from a pesticide salesman they had never seen before. He
was wearing a blue linen coverall with a badge on it. Padmini, who thanks to Sister Felicity had learned to read, had no difficulty
in making out the name on the badge. It was that of one of the giants of the world’s chemical industry.

“I’m a Monsanto rep,” he declared, “and I’ve come to give you a present.”

With these words, the man took out of his motorized three-wheeler a small bagful of black seeds that he proceeded to place
in Dilip’s hands. “These soya seeds have been specially modified,” he explained. “They contain proteins that enable them to
defend themselves against all kinds of insects, including caterpillars …” Seeing that his audience was wide-eyed with interest,
the man seized his opportunity: “I can also offer you sweet pepper seeds that are immunized against plant lice, alfalfa seeds
treated against diseases affecting cows, sweet potatoes that …”