We
have safely negotiated the silver jubilee of the Bhopal gas disaster.
Did the ritual remembering. Wondered what Warren Anderson was doing at
home in Long Island, safe from the limp arm of the US law. Wondered how
the Dow management gets any sleep. While declining to pay to clean up
the 2,000 tonnes of hazardous waste dumped in Bhopal by its subsidiary
Union Carbide, it has spent a packet to propose a new element for the
periodic table — ‘Hu’, the human element. The Dow Hu ad blitz supports
corporate goals which include ‘Local Protection of Human Health and the
Environment’, ‘Product Safety Leadership’ and ‘Sustainable Chemistry’.
Seriously, how do Dow’s managers sleep at night?
They can because they’ve got away with it again, like they got away
with selling napalm and Agent Orange. Our government muffed up,
settling for Union Carbide’s paltry insurance money instead of the $3.3
billion claimed. That was 18 years ago and today, one sees that the
disaster labelled the Industrial Hiroshima has left a
disproportionately small footprint on the world’s consciousness. Bhopal
enjoys a fraction of the recall of another disaster that happened a
year and a half later: Chernobyl. They’re like a diptych, a study in
contrasts.
Chernobyl forced a reappraisal of nuclear safety. After a
referendum, Italy decommissioned all its reactors. Global concern
forced Moscow to let down the veil of secrecy, contributing to the
process of opening up that led to the collapse of the USSR. Today, an
international Chernobyl Forum oversees the cleanup. And in popular
culture, the depopulated Zone of Alienation and the ghost town of
Pripyat have featured in four video games and the Oscar-winning
Chernobyl Heart.
The Chernobyl meltdown directly killed 56 people and contributed to
perhaps 4,000 cancer deaths. Union Carbide immediately killed about
8,000 and the cumulative toll could be 25,000. Factor in morbidity and
genetic disorders and Bhopal is probably worth ten Chernobyls. And yet
the world generally goes, “Bhopal… what?” Only the activist community
remembers. In 2003, Greenpeace even tracked down Warren Anderson when
he was sought by Interpol and the US government claimed to have lost
him.
But five years ago the Yes Men, culture jammers from New York, put
the 20th anniversary of Bhopal in the face of 300 million. On BBC, Andy
Bichlbaum impersonated a Dow spokesman and announced that Union Carbide
would be liquidated and the $12 billion proceeds paid to Bhopal’s
victims. Dow’s scrip lost $2 billion in 23 minutes. The Yes Men also
infiltrated a financial conference in London to present a fake Dow
Acceptable Risk Calculator, which computed industrial project gains
against doomed lives. Its slogan: “Because the skeleton in your closet
could be a golden skeleton”, like Bhopal. Its mascot: Gilda, a gilded
human skeleton. Global risk managers still line up to know more.
Footage from these gonzo ‘actions’ features in The Yes Men Fix the
World, which premiered in US theatres in October. A Hindi print is
planned for India release. Not sure when that will happen, so I’m
publishing the script later this month. One does what one can. What
happened in Bhopal in 1984 was impunity on an industrial scale. It is
important to remember it, and not only on its anniversary.
Pratik Kanjilal is publisher of The Little Magazine
The views expressed by the author are personal