For Our Masters, With Love
By B. F Firos
13 June, 2010
Countercurrents.org
History will never forgive the Indian establishment for treating its people as flies
Manmohan Singh and his team can rejoice at a Bhopal local court’s verdict on world’s worst industrial massacre. He and his team (and his predecessors, too) can take heart from the fact that nothing has ever been done to antagonize their white masters lest India’s image as an investor-friendly country where trans-national corporations can come and set up factories, pollute or even annihilate an entire people gets blunted.
Warren Anderson, the then chief of Union Carbide Corporation (UCC), who’s enjoying his quite retired life in the US, must be laughing over India’s self-serving politicians and ludicrous and flawed Indian judicial system that let a corporate criminal like him escape.
Who are the culprits here? A CBI which failed to convince the courts, including the Supreme Court, about the gravity of criminal charges against the UCC and its officers? Or a Supreme Court which diluted the charges against the company executives from murder to accident by negligence. Or the Indian system that let a Warren Anderson to escape, despite he being arrested on a non-bailable warrant?
In fact, at various levels, every institution, from courts to police to politicians, has been responsible for their commission and omission, making a mockery of thousands of dead and those who continue to bear the agonies of this massacre.
It’s really appalling to see the media and the collective society go on calling it a tragedy or disaster, when facts are very clear for us to see that the UCC allowed the deadly gas to leak.
Consider these facts:
As early as in 1973, Anderson himself had noted that the technology to be used in Bhopal factory was "unproven". That makes him Accused Number One.
Documents reveal UCC went ahead with the unproven and dangerous technology for storing the methyl-isocyanate (MIC), which is 500 times deadlier than hydrogen cyanide, and can be lethal unless refrigerated to zero degree. Refrigeration was never used in its plant in Bhopal where temperature often went upto 40 degree C. The company saved $37.68 a day by way of this.
Muñoz, the first MD of Union Carbide India Ltd, said he had opposed the company plan to install three giant MIC tanks in Bhopal, for, only token storage was necessary, in small containers, based on economic and safety considerations. But he was overruled.
UCC’s own engineers warned against storing MIC except under dire necessity, that too in the tiniest quantities. In Bhopal it was kept in a huge tank, the size of a steam locomotive.
After a factory worker, Ashraf Khan, died due to a phosgene spill on 24 December 1981, a UCC team from the US found 61 hazards, 30 of them major and 11 in the dangerous phosgene/MIC unit.
But instead of upgrading the safety standards, which were religiously followed in its Virginia plant, the company resorted to lunatic and criminal cost-cutting measures like reducing the staff and training days. To cite just one example, in the MIC control room a single operator had to monitor seventy-odd panels, indicators and controllers, all old and faulty, which often failed. The company thereby saved $40/day.
The operators had to manage the huge, dangerous plant using manuals written in a language they never understood: English.
What else these convey other than the plain truth that the company didn't care a damn to the lives of the shantytown of Bhopal?
It appears everything has been an ‘adjustment’. Two hours after the June 6 judgment was pronounced, the accused got bail! Victims are disappointed that the accused didn’t spend even one night in jail.
Now, dirty skeletons have started tumbling out showing how shamelessly the then ruling Congress party, both in New Delhi and in Madhya Pradesh, helped Warren Anderson escape prosecution in India soon after his company killed thousands. Kafkaesque Congress party and India's self-serving bureaucracy ensured that their sugar daddy is not prosecuted in India for his crime of mass murder.
The then investigating officer of CBI (India's answer to America's FBI) is telling how he was instructed by the external affairs ministry not to proceed against Anderson. A state aircraft was arranged at the behest of the then state chief minister Arjun Singh for the safe escape of Anderson. Reports also say the then district collector and superintend of police ensured the safety of their master (again in a state car with all the state security fit for a VIP) to the airport and even gave a salute to their white master before he got into the airplane! In New Delhi he met with the then President Gyani Z Singh before flying to his home country.
Declassified CIA records show Anderson was released on the orders of Rajiv Gandhi, fearing the whole incident would mar the party's prospects in the forthcoming elections and the apprehension that it would scare away .foreign investors.
Like in many other man-made killings such as the anti-Sikh riots of 1984 or the anti-Muslim pogrom in 2002, justice will remain elusive to 22,000 people killed (as per a 2004 Amnesty International report) from the poisoning, and those hundreds who are still born with grotesque birth defects such as missing palates and fingers growing out of shoulders. For, the Indian ruling class is suffering from an acute and incurable disease inherited from India’s colonial legacy. It’s called slavery. Slavery to the white masters.
