Five Past Midnight in Bhopal (50 page)

Some groups now estimate that the gas from the beautiful plant killed as many as between sixteen and thirty thousand people.

More than half a million Bhopalis suffered from the effects of the toxic cloud, in other words, three in every four inhabitants
of the city.
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After the eyes and lungs, the organs most affected were the brain, muscles, joints, liver, kidneys and the reproductive,
nervous and immune systems. Many of the victims sank into such a state of exhaustion that movement became impossible. Many
suffered from cramps, unbearable itching or repeated migraines. In the bustees, women could not light their chulas to cook
food without risk of the smoke setting off pulmonary hemorrhaging. Two weeks after the accident, a jaundice epidemic struck
thousands of survivors who had lost their immune system defenses. In many instances neurological attacks caused convulsions,
paralysis and sometimes coma and death.

More difficult to assess, but just as severe, were the psychological consequences. In the months that followed the disaster,
a new symptom made its appearance. The doctors called it “compensatory neurosis.” A number of Bhopalis developed imaginary
illnesses, but some neuroses were very real. The most serious psychological effect was
ghabrahat
, a panic syndrome that plunged patients into a state of uncontrollable anxiety with an accelerated heartbeat, sweating and
shaking. Those suffering from it lived in a permanent nightmare state. People with a tendency toward vertigo suddenly saw
themselves on the edge of a precipice; those who were frightened of water thought they were drowning. With its associated
depression, impotence and anorexia, ghabrahat brought desolation to a large number of survivors, sometimes making them view
the catastrophe as a divine punishment, or as a curse inflicted on them by some member of their family. Ghabrahat drove many
to despair and suicide.

Today Bhopal has some one hundred and fifty thousand people chronically affected by the tragedy, which still kills ten to
fifteen patients a month. Breathing difficulties, persistent coughs, ulcerations of the cornea, early-onset cataracts, anorexia,
recurrent fevers, burning of the skin, weakness and depression are still manifesting themselves, not to mention constant outbreaks
of cancer and tuberculosis. Chronic gynecological disorders such as the absence of menstrual periods or, alternatively, an
increase to four or five times a month, are common. Finally, retarded growth has been noted in young people aged between fourteen
and eighteen, who look scarcely ten. Because Carbide never revealed the exact composition of the toxic cloud, to this day
medical authorities have been unable to come up with an effective course of treatment. Thus far, all treatments have produced
only temporary relief. Often overuse of steroids, antibiotics and anxiolytics serves only to exacerbate the damage done by
the gases. Today Bhopal has as many hospital beds as a large American city. Without enough qualified doctors and technicians
to use and repair the ultramodern equipment, however, the vast hospitals built since the disaster remain largely unused. An
inquiry carried out in July 2000 revealed that a quarter of the medicines dispensed by the Bhopal Memorial Hospital Trust,
recently established with Carbide funds, were either harmful or ineffective, and that 7.6 percent were both harmful
and
ineffective.

So much official negligence has produced a rush of private medical practices. According to victims’ advocacy groups, however,
two-thirds of these doctors lack the necessary skills. In light of this, several of these groups set up their own care centers
such as the Sambhavna Clinic, with which the authors of this book are now associated. This unique institution, founded by
a former engineer (see the Letter to the Reader) by the name of Satinath Sarangi, is staffed by four doctors and some twenty
medical and welfare experts. Together, they monitor more than ten thousand economically disadvantaged patients, and see that
they all receive effective treatment. The team at Sambhavna Clinic has discovered that certain yoga exercises can dramatically
improve chronic respiratory problems. Half the patients thus treated have regained the ability to breathe almost normally
and have been able to give up the drugs they had been taking for many years. The clinic also manufactures some sixty plant-based
Ayurvedic medicines, which have already enabled hundreds of patients to resume some form of activity—a spectacular achievement
that has wrested from poverty some of the fifty thousand men and women once too weak to do manual work.

So many years after the catastrophe, five thousand families in Chola, Shakti Nagar, Jai Prakash Nagar and other bustees are
still drinking water from wells polluted by the toxic waste left by the factory. Samples taken by a Greenpeace team in December
1999 from the vicinity of the former installation showed a carbon tetrachloride level 682 times higher than the acceptable
maximum, a chloroform level 260 times higher, and a trichloroethylene level 50 times higher.

No court of law ever passed judgment on Union Carbide for the crime it committed in Bhopal. Neither the Indian government,
claiming to represent the victims, nor the American lawyers who had extracted thousands of powers of attorney from poor people
like Ganga Ram, managed to induce a court on the other side of the Atlantic to declare itself competent to try a catastrophe
that had occurred outside the United States. One of the American lawyers representing the Indian government had taken young
Sunil Kumar, one of three survivors of a family of ten, to New York to try and persuade the judge before whom the case had
been brought, to agree to try Carbide. It was the ambulance chaser’s view that only an American court could require the multinational
to pay an amount commensurate to the enormity of the wrong. They sought damages of up to $15 billion. Carbide’s defense lawyers
argued that an American court was not competent to assess the value of a human life in the third world. “How can one determine
the damage inflicted on people who live in shacks?” asked one member of the legal team. One newspaper took it upon itself
to do the arithmetic. “An American life is worth approximately five hundred thousand dollars,” wrote the
Wall Street Journal.
“Taking into account the fact that India’s gross national product is 1.7 percent of that of the United States, the court
should compensate for the decease of each Indian victim proportionately, that is to say with eight thousand five hundred dollars.”
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One year after the catastrophe, no substantial help from the multinational had reached the victims, despite the fact that
Carbide had given $5 million in emergency aid. It took four long years of haggling before, in the absence of a proper trial,
a settlement was drawn up between the American company and the Indian government. In February 1989, Union Carbide offered
to pay $470 million in compensation, in full and final settlement and provided the Indian government undertook not to pursue
any further legal proceedings against the company or its chairman. This was over six times less than the compensation initially
claimed by the Indian government. The lawyers for the government nevertheless accepted the proposal without consulting the
victims.

This very favorable settlement from Union Carbide’s perspective sent the company’s stock up two dollars on Wall Street, a
rise that enabled Chairman Warren Anderson to inform his shareholders that in the final analysis, the Bhopal disaster only
meant “a loss of forty-three cents a share” to the company. One week after the fateful night, Union Carbide shares had dropped
fifteen points, reducing the multinational’s value by $600 million.

Most surprising was the psychological shockwave that the disaster triggered throughout every level of the company, from engineers
like Warren Woomer or Ranjit Dutta, to ordinary workers, office employees or elevator boys in the various subsidiaries. At
the head office in Danbury, secretaries burst into tears over telexes from Bhopal. Engineers, unable to comprehend what could
possibly have happened, shut themselves away in their offices to pray. Local psychiatrists had employees of one of the world’s
largest industrial companies come pouring in, in a pitiful state of depression and bewilderment. Many admitted to having lost
confidence in “Carbide’s strong corporate identity.” There were similar reactions in Great Britain, Ghana and Puerto Rico,
wherever, in fact, the flag with the blue-and-white logo was flying. Four days after the catastrophe, at midday on December
6, over 110,000 employees at the 700 factories and laboratories stopped work for ten minutes “to express our grief and solidarity
with the victims of the accident in Bhopal.”

Anderson was so concerned by the crisis in morale of Carbiders the world over that he recorded a series of video messages
intended to restore their confidence. These messages featured much discussion of ethics, morality, duty and compassion. The
best way of getting things back on track, however, was still to show that the company was not guilty. On March 15, 1985, the
vice president of the agricultural division of the Indian subsidiary, K.S. Kamdar, called a press conference in Bombay to
announce that the tragedy had not been due to an accident but to sabotage. Kamdar based his statement on the inquiry carried
out by the team of engineers sent to Bhopal the day after the disaster. According to this inquiry, a worker had deliberately
introduced a large quantity of water into the piping connected to the tank full of MIC. This worker, who remained nameless,
had supposedly acted out of vengeance after a disagreement with his superiors. To support this theory, the investigators had
relied on the discovery of a hose close to tank 610 and, in particular, upon the doctoring of logbook entries made by the
shift on duty that night. The report that supposedly incriminated a saboteur made no mention of the fact that none of the
factory’s safety systems were activated at the time of the accident.

The authors of this book were able to identify and meet the man Union Carbide had accused. They talked to him at length. The
man in question is Mohan Lal Varma, the young operator who, on the night of the disaster, identified the smell of MIC while
his companions attributed it to an insecticide sprayed in the canteen. It is their deep-seated conviction that this father
of three children, who was well aware of the dangers of methyl isocyanate, could not have perpetrated an act to which he himself
and a large number of Carbide’s workers were likely to fall victim. His colleague T.R. Chouhan, wrote a book called
Bhopal—The Inside Story
, in which he points out large technical holes in Carbide’s sabotage story. Mohan Lal Varma’s innocence was, moreover, immediately
recognized. No legal proceedings were ever instituted against him. Today he lives, quite openly, two hours outside Bhopal.
If the survivors of the tragedy had had the slightest suspicion about him, would they not have sought vengeance? As it was,
no one in Bhopal or elsewhere took the charge seriously.

Events would further conspire to refute it. Four months after the accident in Bhopal, on March 28, 1985, a methyl oxide leak
at the Institute site in the United States poisoned eight workers. On the following August 11, another leak, this time from
a tank holding aldicarb oxime, injured 135 victims in the Kanawha Valley. One of them was Pamela Nixon, the laboratory assistant
at Saint Francis Hospital in South Charleston, who had noticed the smell of boiled cabbage years before. “I was among those
who believed Union Carbide when they claimed that accidents like the one in Bhopal could not occur in America,” she told the
press when she came out of the hospital. The incident had changed her life. She went back to college and joined the organization
People Concerned About MIC, created by residents in her area. After which, armed with a degree in environmental sciences,
she set out to take on the executives of the various chemical factories in the Kanawha Valley and compel them to tighten their
safety measures. This was something that no one had done in Bhopal. The tragedy was bearing its first positive fruits.