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Friday, December 03, 2004

A hand in things to come

Probably this is my last blog of the year. I am on a holiday for 2
weeks and by the time I am back to my webworld, it will be holidays
for everybody. With christmas and new year around the corner, it seems
Iraq, Darfur, politics, health etc are not key items in world's
agenda. Even David Blunket's future and what will happen in Ukraine
does not appear to remain live topics for more than a week. Smoking
ban and hunting ban also seems to have lost the status of hot topics.
Me, the blogger was upset during last few weeks because of the
disturbing topics that come to mind, one after another. I thought I
will end this year's weekly diary with sharing some data and thoughts
on the world's greatest industrial disaster, which the BBC reminded me
yesterday. Yes, we have a pattern of remembering things when decades
get completed. Previously it used to be only at 25 years, 50 years,
75 years , and then at the time of completed hundreds etc. Probably
BBC thought the world may not find it pertinent at 25 years, so let us
observe it in a big way, at completion of 20 years. I am talking of
the Bhopal gas tragedy enacted by the Union Carbide at the central
Indian city of Bhopal on 4th Dec. 1984.

The docudrama was breath taking. Even those who may not have anything
to do with India, would have been perturbed by watching it for one
full hour. It should, as it can again get repeated at any place, even
in a most technologically advanced nation. How ever perfect may be the
security checks, Murphy,s law - If anything can go wrong, it will one
day go wrong - has to work. Man's experiments with pesticides have
reaped tragedy time and again , in different parts of the world and
it continues and will continue to do so . Bhopal is only a symbol of
man's greed . Greed for money by those who manufacture pesticides to
satisfy the greed for more grains by farmers and nations.

Bhopal gas leak was the most devastating man made industrial accidents
in which an estimated 8000 people were dead and 200,000 injured,the
agony of the latter destined to continue till they die. It was the
story of an American multinational company's dream which turned out to
be an Indian night mare.The night of 4th Dec.1984, when thousands were
awakened , only to die within minutes and hours should go up in
history like a Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Even more cruel, as people of
Bhopal were not in war with anybody.Union carbide which had hundreds
of companies in more than forty countries and still operates in many
countries should have been tried by an international tribunal akin to
the Nuremberg trial. Its advertisement which used to run in media
carried a sinister forecast - "A hand in things to come". It came so
heavily over a sleeping city like the deadly methyl isocyanate gas
itself. When BBC quoted one more phrase from their adverts" To make
world a better place to live", you know how that became a favourite
phrase of American rulers to come. While MIC was hailed as a
miraculous pesticide to be a friend and saviour of farmers, the
company's own private documents described it as liquid dynamite. Even
now,while it is estimated that at least one person dies in Bhopal
every day as a direct consequence of the tragedy, Union carbide has
not accepted culpability till date, though the total number of people
dead till date is estimated to be any where around 20,000. As the
legal director of Green peace said toady at a media teleconference of
Bhopal tragedy, what is happening is an example of environmental
racism."Had this happened in the US, there is no doubt that Dow
Chemical ( who owns Union carbide today ) would now be paying for the
clean-up that would be ordered by the EPA through litigation by local
community groups," He said. ( The EPA -Environmental Protection Agency
-is the environment watchdog in USA. But Bhopal is Guantanamo for
it).

Ahead of 20th anniversary of Bhopal gas tragedy tomorrow, today the
world wide web is awash with stories and news reports of one of the
most horrible tragedies of the world . Let me just quote memoirs of
the autopsy man of the fateful day.

........... Doctor Divya Kishor Satpathy, Bhopal's "autopsy man",
still shudders when he recalls how his department performed 1,000
autopsies on Dec 3, 725 the next day and 55 on the third day."There
were small babies, many of them still cuddling their mothers. But all
dead. What was their fault? They had nothing to do with Union Carbide,
nothing to do with Sevin (the pesticide the multinational produced),"
says Satpathy, wiping a tear. He was then working at the forensic
department of Bhopal's Gandhi Medical College."I was home when I got a
call to come to the mortuary immediately. Thousands were lying around,
many dead, many others unconscious. And none of these people had
anyone to attend to, because the relatives had run away to save their
own lives.We had only 10-15 doctors. And no one had a clue what gas it
was. We called experts, including the Union Carbide people, but no one
seemed to know. Clearly, Union Carbide had never told its Indian
employees about methyl-isocyanate."Nearly 40 tonnes of
methyl-isocyanate had escaped from tank number 610 of the Union
Carbide plant that night, killing 3,000 people instantaneously and
another few thousand in following hours. The autopsies showed that
people were drowning to death in their own lung fluids ( a condition
medically called pulmonary oedema ).

............"It was not possible to do post-mortem for every body, so
we went by the sample method. I assigned 10 bodies to each medical
student who would take their details - height, features, the clothes
they were wearing and so on - and keep records. That helped people to
know the fate of their relatives," Satpathy recalls. "We were in the
mortuary for five days. No one went home. And every half an hour one
of us used to cry," Sathpathy says, tears welling up in his eyes."The
living always lie. It is the dead who tell the truth," says Bhopal's
autopsy man.

Yes, It was in deed a hand in things to come . A helping hand from the
rich world to the illiterate poor of a developing country , which
continues in invisible ways, even now.

Friday, December 03, 2004