Recently, the UK’s Guardian newspaper published a shot of what looked like a golf bag containing a pair of clubs. These were in fact the shrivelled, twisted legs of 14-year-old Adil, one of hundreds of children born malformed or brain-damaged to families living near the Union Carbide factory in Bhopal.

The same factory in December 1984 leaked poison gas, killing thousands in the most hideous and disgusting ways. Adil’s mother was caught in the gas but survived. I am lucky, she’d say, but a new terror was already on the way.

People didn’t know that their drinking wells were being poisoned by chemicals leaking from the factory. The water began to smell and taste foul. Held up to the light it appeared full of oily globules which sank to form a tawny layer. The goo was a cocktail of lethal poisons, but at the time no one knew this. Except Union Carbide.

A 1989 secret Carbide memo records proof that it knew soil and water in its factory were badly poisoned by chemicals whose effects included skin and eye damage, cataracts, diarrhoea, vomiting, abdominal pain, liver and kidney damage, convulsions, brain damage, anaemia, birth defects and cancers.

Despite the obvious danger to nearby communities, Carbide’s bosses issued no warning. Many families were already ill from its poison gas leak. Carbide watched in silence, and allowed them to be poisoned a second time. In the debate about who is responsible for clean-up we should never forget this inhuman and criminal act of negligence.

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