Five Past Midnight in Bhopal (29 page)

“December second, between ten o’clock and midnight, will be the most propitious time for your children’s union,” he announced.

T
he document was stamped “
BUSINESS: CONFIDENTIAL
” and dated September 11, 1984. Addressed to the person in charge of Union Carbide’s engineering and safety department in
South Charleston, it was signed J.M. Poulson, the engineer who, two years previously, had headed the safety audit of the Bhopal
factory. This time Poulson and the five members of his team had just finished inspecting the storage conditions of several
hundred tons of methyl isocyanate at Institute 2, deep in the Kanawha Valley, home to more than two hundred and fifty thousand
Americans.

The document revealed that the Institute plant was suffering from a number of defects and malfunctions: vibrations likely
to rupture sensitive piping; potentially dangerous leakage from various pumps and other apparatus; corrosion of electric cable
sheathing; poor positioning of several automatic fire extinguishers in sectors of prime importance; faults in the filling
systems to the MIC tanks, etc. In short, deficiencies that proved that safety at the flagship factory left a lot to be desired.
The document also claimed that the actual health of personnel working in Institute was at risk. Poulson and his team had in
fact discovered that workers in the MIC unit were often subjected to chloroform vapors, especially during maintenance operations.
There was no monitoring system to measure the duration of their exposure, despite the fact that chloroform was a highly carcinogenic
substance. The report stipulated that an interval of fifteen minutes would constitute dangerous overexposure. All the same,
the investigators considered these risks relatively minor in comparison with the danger “of an uncontrollable exothermic reaction
in one of the MIC tanks and of the response to this situation not being rapid or effective enough to prevent a catastrophe.”
The document gave a detailed list of the circumstances that could make such a tragedy possible. The fact that the tanks were
used for prolonged storage was conducive to internal contamination, which was likely to pass unnoticed until precisely such
a sudden and devastating chemical reaction occurred. The investigators had actually found that the tank’s refrigeration system
introduced minuscule impurities, which could become the catalysts for such a reaction. They had discovered that these impurities
could also come from the flare meant to burn off the toxic gases at a height of 120 feet. In short, the most modern plant,
one that Carbide had counted among the safest in the whole of the United States’ chemical industry, appeared to be at the
mercy of a few drops of water or metal filings. “The potential hazard leads the team to conclude that a real potential for
a serious incident exists,” declared the document. In his accompanying letter, Poulson gave the names of sixteen Carbide executives
who should receive copies of his report. Strangely, this list made no mention of the man to whom it was a matter of primary
concern. Jagannathan Mukund, managing director of the Bhopal plant, with three tanks permanently holding sixty tons of MIC,
would remain ignorant of the concerns expressed by the American engineers and, in particular, of their recommendations to
counteract a possible catastrophe.

The plant on the Kali Grounds was a little like his baby. It was he who had set down the plans for the first formulation unit.
It was he who had bought the splendid palace from the nawab’s brother to turn it into an agronomical research center. Together
with Eduardo Muñoz and several other fanatical pioneers, Ranjit Dutta had laid the foundations for the beautiful plant right
in the heart of the City of the Begums. As far as this engineer with the physique of a football player was concerned, his
time spent in Bhopal had been a magical period in a richly successful career. After leaving India in 1976 to work in Carbide’s
American agricultural products division, Dutta had repeatedly returned to the site of his first love. Every year he vacationed
there with his family, boating on the waters of the Upper Lake, listening to poets during the mushairas in Spices Square,
and dreaming beside the illuminated outline of the factory whose funnels he had designed.
^*

Now, at the age of fifty-four, he was vice-president in charge of the agricultural products division at the company’s headquarters.
And that summer of 1984, at the time when the team of investigators led by Poulson was compiling its report, the Indian engineer
had just come back from a pilgrimage to Bhopal. This time, however, the man who loved the city so much returned sad and disappointed.

“I didn’t like what I saw during that visit,” he later recounted. “I saw the approaches to the factory overrun with rubbish
and weeds. I saw unoccupied workers chatting for hours over cups of tea. I saw mountains of files strewn about the management’s
offices. I saw pieces of dismantled equipment lying about the place. I saw disorientated, unmotivated people. Even if the
factory had temporarily stopped production, everyone should have been at their workstations getting on with maintenance work…
. It’s strange but I sensed an atmosphere of neglect.”

As soon as he got back to Danbury, Dutta tried to relay this impression to his superiors but, oddly, it seemed none of them
wanted to listen. “They probably thought I was harboring some sort of grievance against the local management,” he would say,
“or that I wanted to take over the running of the factory again. But I only wanted to warn them that strange things were going
on in Bhopal, and that people there were not doing their jobs as they should.”

It would not be long before Dutta had an explanation for this apparent indifference. If no one at the top of Union Carbide
seemed interested in the neglect to which the factory had fallen prey, it was for a reason: in Danbury the Bhopal plant had
already been written off. Dutta would have formal confirmation of the fact at the conference, which, every year, assembled
the heads of the company’s agricultural divisions in the Connecticut countryside. At this meeting, in August 1984, marketing
strategies for products made by Carbide throughout the world—sales prices, methods of beating the competition and acquiring
new clients—were discussed and agreed upon. The topics included the Bhopal factory. As early as 1979, the economic viability
of the plant had been subjected to extensive debate. One of the various options management considered was simply stopping
its construction but because of the late stage in the building process, this idea had been abandoned. Five years later, the
situation had further deteriorated. The plant was now losing millions of dollars. The sales prospects for Sevin in 1984 did
not exceed a thousand tons, half the amount for the preceding year and only a fifth of the plant’s total production capacity.
It was a financial disaster. At the August 1984 meeting, therefore, approval was given for a liquidation program. In fact,
the multinational was counting on getting rid of its costly Indian factory by moving its installations to other third world
countries. Brazil, for example, could accommodate the phosgene, carbon-monoxide and methyl-isocyanate units. As for the Sevin
formulation and packaging works, Indonesia seemed the ideal place for them to be relocated.

In the autumn of 1984, Carbide’s vice president for Asia sent a top-secret message to Bhopal. He wanted to know the financial
and practical feasibility of dismantling and moving the plant, “taking into account the moderate price of Indian labor.”

The task of gathering the necessary information was entrusted to the Hindu engineer Umesh Nanda. Nine years earlier, a brief
advertisement in the
Times of India
had enabled this son of a modest industrialist in the Punjab to fulfill the dream of all young Indian scientists of his generation:
that of joining a renowned multinational. Now, he was charged with shattering his own dream. “Dismantling and shipping the
Sevin production unit should not pose any problem,” he responded in a telex to his superiors on November 10. “The same would
not appear to be true of the MIC unit, however, because of extensive corrosion damage.” Nanda warned that the unit could be
reassembled only after repair work involving considerable expense was completed. The Indian’s telex provided the answers to
Carbide’s queries. It also confirmed what had been Rajkumar Keswani’s worst fears. The beautiful plant had been abandoned.

After a two-year absence, Rajkumar Keswani was back in Bhopal. He was not yet aware that Carbide had decided to write the
factory off and was preparing to transfer parts of it to other third world countries. Ever more alarming information from
his contacts inside the plant prompted him to sound a fourth alarm, entitled “
BHOPAL ON THE BRINK OF DISASTER
.” This time he really believed that his article would rouse public opinion and convince the authorities.
Jansatta
, the regional daily that ran his piece, was not a local journal but one of India’s biggest newspapers, and a part of the
prestigious
Indian Express
group. Once again, however, Keswani was a voice crying alone in the wilderness. His latest apocalyptic predictions provoked
not the slightest interest in the public, any more than they incited the municipal authorities to take any safety measures.
The journalist sought an explanation for this latest failure. “Wasn’t I convincing enough?” he asked himself. “Do we live
in a society where people mistrust those interested in the public good? Or do they just think I’m putting pressure on Carbide
to fill my own pockets?”

The wheel of destiny was turning. In a few weeks’ time, Keswani’s round face would appear on all the world’s television screens.
He would become the youngest reporter ever to receive the Press Award of India, the highest possible distinction accorded
to a journalist of the subcontinent.

N
ot for the world would she have missed her meeting with the ordinary people of India. Every morning before leaving to perform
her onerous duties as prime minister of the world’s most populous democracy, Indira Gandhi received those who came to seek
a
darshan
, a visual contact, with the woman who embodied supreme authority. The encounter took place in the rose- and bougainvillea-laden
garden of her residence on Safdarjang Road, New Delhi. For the sixty-seven-year-old patrician who for seventeen years had
ruled over a fifth of humanity, such morning gatherings were an opportunity to immerse herself in the multifaceted reality
of her country. Draped in a sari, she would move from group to group, speaking first to peasants from the extreme south, next
to a delegation of railway workers from Bengal, then to a group of young schoolgirls with long braids, and thereafter to a
squad of barefoot sweepers who had come from their distant province of Bihar. The mother of the nation had a few words to
say to each group. She read the petitions presented to her, responded with a promise and posed graciously for souvenir photographs.
As in the days of the Mogul emperors, the most humble parts of India had, for a moment’s interlude, daily access to the seat
of power.