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Is it just me or do you notice the whiff of deception that emanates from the Group of Ministers currently discussing Bhopal?....

June 20, 2010 02:59 AM IST First published on: Jun 20, 2010 at 02:59 AM IST

Is it just me or do you notice the whiff of deception that emanates from the Group of Ministers currently discussing Bhopal? For the committee to be constituted at all worried me and when Congress ministers and spokesmen started answering every question on Bhopal with there is a Group of Ministers… I became increasingly convinced that this GOM is no more than a device to facilitate more duplicity and deceit. What can it tell us about what happened that the whole world does not already know?

We know that an American company called Union Carbide manufactured poisonous gas without adequate safety precautions. We know that it tried afterwards to blame it all on its Indian subsidiary. We know that thousands of people died,thousands more were maimed and thousands of women gave birth to babies with horrible birth defects. We know that they were paid a pittance as compensation. We know that no government in Delhi or Bhopal in the past 25 years made the slightest effort to rectify the harm done. We know that justice was not just delayed but turned into a joke. We know that the people who live around the poison factory continue to suffer diseases caused by unclean water and polluted air. We know that the public health services they are forced to rely on are appalling. So,exactly what is the purpose of this Group of Ministers?

Is its main purpose,as cynics believe,simply to ensure that the blame does not end up falling on Rajiv Gandhi? If this is true then it will be a complete waste of taxpayers money since the general perception (despite the strenuous efforts of Congress Party spokesmen) is that the buck stops with the Prime Minister. In 1984,that Prime Minister was Rajiv Gandhi. But,there were other prime ministers who came after him and they are as much to blame. Chandra Shekhar,Deve Gowda,IK Gujral,P.V. Narasimha Rao,Atal Behari Vajpayee and Dr Manmohan Singh. Why has no Prime Minister in the past 25 years been troubled by the terrible suffering of the victims of the worst industrial accident in the history of industry?

If all that needs to be done now is to apportion blame then it must be apportioned between all of them but it would be an irrelevant exercise. It no longer matters. What matters is for us to try and understand why the Indian state always ends up failing its weakest citizens. What matters is making sure that those who suffered receive enough compensation to rebuild their broken lives. This needs to happen without the usual bribery and corruption and without the usual delays even if it means giving the task to the NGOs who have done more to help Bhopals victims than any government has.

Call me an old cynic but I very much fear that the Group of Ministers has been constituted mostly to divert attention from doing what really needs to be done. Other than compensation to the victims what we need to know is what action will be taken against the officials in Delhi and Bhopal who failed to do their duty in the past 25 years? Will they be identified and punished? What we need from the current Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh are details of what measures he has taken in the past six years to help the victims. How many have been provided with decent homes? How many of their children have been put through proper schools? How many have access to clean water? How many have access to proper healthcare? What has his government done to make sure that at least these things happen?

Then there are things that only the Prime Minister can do. He must take whatever steps need to be taken to ensure that the Indian justice system never takes 25 years to decide a case of such importance. Why did it take so long to identify and punish the culprits in a case in which everyone knew who the culprits were? It is a question the judiciary must address if we want to restore faith in the Indian justice system.

What Union Carbides criminal negligence proved most effectively was that in India you can get away with killing large numbers of desperately poor people because their lives are worthless in the eyes of the Indian state. This is almost the most shameful aspect of what happened in Bhopal on that horrible December night in 1984. We do not need yet another report by yet another group of ministers to tell us that what happened must never happen again. The only way to ensure this is by identifying and publicly punishing those who failed the victims in every way at every step. Warren Andersen is far from being the only guilty man.

Follow Tavleen Singh on Twitter @ tavleen_singh

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