"No More Bhopals" Part 1

Bhopal, with its crowded streets and choking pollution, may never feel like home, but I'm finally comfortable and settled here at Sambhavna Clinic. I now have a meaningful (although sometimes monotonous) project and I have become acquainted with the local microbiological fauna (my digestive system flushed itself clean thanks to some unknown bacteria in the water). So I’ve been enjoying the wireless internet, delicious Indian meals, and being a part of one of India's most innovative and progressive organizations.

It isn't hard to be comfortable here since they treat volunteers so well - I hardly have a reason to leave the property except to remind myself how lucky I am to be staying in this oasis of calm in a sea of chaos. Sambhavna is located in an impoverished, chaotic area for a reason – it is only meters away from the site of the Union Carbide pesticide factory which caused the world's worst industrial disaster 25 years ago. Union Carbide chose the slums of Bhopal because there was plenty of cheap labor, the property was inexpensive, and the disenfranchised neighborhood was unlikely to protest when the plant emitted foul gases or toxic materials.

My project is to digitize Sambhavna's comprehensive collection of news clippings concerning the gas tragedy. Every article ever written that is related to the gas leak and its aftermath is housed in the clinic's library. In order to make this information more durable and accessible to people doing research I am reading, scanning, and categorizing each article in chronological order. At times the project is really engaging – I get an in-depth look at the history of the tragedy and the legal battle that follows – but it can also be monotonous – scan, save, scan, save, scan, save. I'm just happy to be contributing in a measurable way. Once the project is complete, researchers and lawyers will be able to make use of the database of articles without having to come to Bhopal, they can just download pop in a disc.

Reading the daily reports describing the suffering of thousands of people and Union Carbide's shameless evasion of all responsibility has forced me to think about three questions:

1. How was it that a corporation killed thousands of people due to gross negligence and faced almost no consequences?

2. What should have been done after the disaster to give justice to the victims?

3. What needs to change in order to be sure that something of this nature never happens again?

How was it that a corporation killed thousands of people due to gross negligence and faced almost no consequences?

First it is absolutely necessary to recognize a fundamental fact about corporations – they have no souls, no conscience, and no ethical responsibility towards anyone or anything. Corporations have only one motive – profit. This isn't some left-wing, anti-capitalist view, it is economic fact. CEOs and corporate boards are bound by law (a Supreme Court decision, no less), to act in the interest of the corporation's bottom line. If a CEO makes a decision based on ethics that negatively affects the bottom line, he can legally be sued by the shareholders. There is no room for good-deeds, except those trifles which are necessary for good PR. This isn’t a conspiracy theory, it is the result of the current legal and economic framework within which corporations operate.

Following the disaster the CEO of Union Carbide, Warren Anderson, did his duty - evade responsibility and minimize costs. Luckily for UC and Mr. Anderson, the global economic/political system is stacked in favor of trans-national corporations. Union Carbide simply left India. There is no global political structure which has the ability to control trans-national corporations, despite the fact that they exert an enormous amount of influence everywhere in the world. It is like the old Wild West where a bandit could simply cross state lines to evade justice.

Despite UC's best efforts, they were eventually pressured to pay a settlement to the victims. How much for a permanently injured victim? $500. How much for the family of someone who was killed? $1000. How is it possible that Union Carbide could get away with paying such a laughably small amount? Simple, all the victims are poor and brown. Indian lives are worth less than American or European lives. The settlement would have been hundreds of thousands, if not millions, per person in the US, but as a UC official put it, “500 dollars is plenty much for an Indian”. The fact that he said this during my lifetime gives me chills. After the settlement was announced, the price of UC stock instantly rose. Investors knew they got off cheap. In an audacious speech meant to reassure stock holders, Warren Anderson stated that the entire “Bhopal incident” cost the company 43 cents per share. $0.43 PER SHARE! What does message does that send to other companies with dangerous operations in the developing world? Get in, make some money, and buy your way out of any messy situation for mere pennies.

So, to get back to the original question, UC was able to avoid any substantial consequence because it did its best to avoid responsibility and there was no legal body which could force it do to otherwise. When it did dispense money, it calculated the health and life of an Indian the way tourists haggle for souvenirs – things are cheap here, including the people’s health and lives. Sickening.

What should have been done after the disaster to give justice to the victims?

It is not only the amount of compensation from UC that is so insulting to the victims in Bhopal, it is the fact that a billion dollar corporation can destroy a community and environment, make a paltry one-time payment, and then be off the hook. Handing victims a large check does help to make their life easy for the short term, but that should not be the end of it. Union Carbide should be responsible for cleaning up its mess and setting up a healthcare and economic stimulus infrastructure to lessen the suffering caused by its negligence. It should also be forced to undergo a thorough review of all of its facilities to ensure that the kinds of safety lapses that caused the Bhopal catastrophe won’t happen again. These steps would begin to give justice to a people who were first exploited for cheap labor and then poisoned and killed by a multi-billion dollar corporation.

The Indian government has been attempting to extradite Warren Anderson for the past 24 years. There is a warrant for his arrest, and if it is actually served, he will be tried for culpable homicide in an Indian court. I really don’t know how to feel about extraditing an octogenarian to India to be tried for murder. Realistically, as CEO of such a large corporation, he did not know that the Bhopal plant violated nearly every safety measure and regulation in the chemical industry, but maybe he should have. Maybe if he is tried and convicted and imprisoned future CEOs will ensure that such disasters don’t happen, since they could be held responsible. Someone has to be held responsible. Anderson surely was given credit for UC’s financial success while he was CEO, so why should he not be held responsible for its mistakes? Thousands of innocent people are currently being poisoned by contaminated water. Thousands more are chronically ill due to the disaster. Thousands more lost family and friends in one horrific night. These people deserve justice, so who am I to tell them that it would be unfair to interrupt a wealthy old man’s retirement?

What needs to change in order to be sure that something of this nature never happens again?

Everything. The entire, supposedly inviolable, idea that a corporation has all the rights of a person without the accompanying ethical and moral responsibilities must change. Trans-national corporations must be reigned in by an effective international body that is able to enforce safety standards, environmental regulations, and human rights laws. The age of outsourcing our dirty work, which damages the environment and health of employees, to poor countries must come to an end. If a job is unsafe for an American, it is unsafe for an Indian, a Malaysian, or a Mexican.

We can not continue to exploit the poor in order to have “Everyday Low Prices”. Our entire economic system, which is pathologically driven by wealth production, must begin to factor in the costs to human beings around the world. It may mean that Americans will have to pay a little more for the endless array of unnecessary consumer goods at their local Wal-Mart (actually in my perfect world Wal-Mart would be broken up since it has a veritable monopoly in many locales). Globalization works great for the top 1% of the world’s population, and for the rest it means long working hours, miserable manufacturing jobs, and being exposed to products and lifestyles which they will never be able to afford. It is time to include the rest of the world into our decision making. If we don’t, we should no longer be considered the “Home of the Brave”.

Good News! People awareness is growing and you can help!

The Bhopal Gas Tragedy is an acute symptom of a larger global malady. It is a case study in globalization’s discontents. Never before have the winners and losers in the trans-national-capital-game been so clearly demarcated. Thankfully there are brave and persistent people in Bhopal who are not looking at the tragedy as an event which occurred in the past, but rather as a part of an ongoing battle against injustice on a global scale. Check out the video below if you want to get really riled up (I got goose-bumps).

It is an example of how the tragedy has resulted in a city full of motivated and talented activists who are keenly aware of their place in the global socio-economic scheme. It is unfortunate that it took the world’s worst industrial disaster to wake up a community to the shenanigans of global corporations, but now they are unstoppable.

Part 2 will be about ways that Americans can help the fight for justice in Bhopal and to ensure that there will be “No More Bhopals”.