Five Past Midnight in Bhopal - Dominique Lapierre [1]
Again in the United States, we would like to thank Halcott P. Foss and engineers Jean-Luc Lemaire and William K. Frampton, for having opened wide the doors to the Institute 2 factory, the Bhopal plant’s elder sister, where Sevin is still produced from deadly methyl isocyanate. Additional thanks go to Jean-Luc Lemaire and to René Crochard for the illuminating explanations that facilitated the writing of the technical parts of our book. We include in this American tribute Ward Morehouse and David Dembo who, from their small East River office in New York, conduct an unrelenting struggle to make the truth about the Bhopal disaster known and who generously gave us access to their precious archives. And we would like to express our gratitude to Kathy Kramer for having placed at our disposal documentation concerning the Boyce Thompson Institute in Yonkers where the Sevin, which was to wipe out insects ravaging the harvests of peasants throughout the world, was invented.
Among all the Indian engineers who took part in the adventure of Bhopal’s “beautiful plant,” our gratitude is due primarily to Kamal Pareek for the entire days we spent together, reconstructing in every little detail the extraordinary hope that the Bhopal factory had brought with it, the subsequent slow agony and the eventual catastrophe. Grateful thanks also go to engineers Umesh Nanda and John Luke Couvaras who patiently shared their memories and entrusted numerous unpublished documents to us. We would similarly like to express out gratitude to Jagannathan Mukund who was the factory’s last managing director and who allowed us to bombard him with questions for three days on his Conoor property in the mountains of the Nilgiris in southern India.
Naturally a very large part of our research was conducted in Bhopal itself, where the assistance of Satinath Sarangi and his team of record keepers from the Sambhavna Trust was indispensable to us, as were the generous help and hospitality of Farah Khan and her mother Niloufar Khan, Begum Rachid, Bano and Yadar Raachid Uzzafar Khan, Sonia and Nader Raachid Uzzafar Khan, as well as Mr. and Mrs. Balthazar de Bourbon, Enamia, Kamlesh Jamaini, the chronicler Nasser Kamal, Manish Mishra and Dr. Zahir ul-Islam who helped us uncover the secrets of the culture and legendary past of their beautiful city.
We wish to thank also his excellency Mr. Digvijay Singh, the chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, for his warm reception, and all those who so generously helped us in the various aspects of our research. By alphabetical order: M.M. Shyam Babu, K.D. Ballal in Bangalore, Dr. Bambhal, Sudeep Banerjee, Sajda Bano, Ahmed Bassi, Dr. Bhandari, Praful Bidwai, N.M. Buch, Father Dennis Carneiro, Amar Chand, Dr. Heeresh Chandra, T.R. Chouhan, S.P. Chowdhary, Mr. Chughtai, Deena Dayalan and the staff of The Other Media, Mr. Diwedi, Dr. Banu Dubey, R.K. Dutta, Dr. Deepak Gandhe, Brigadier Garg, Subashe Godane, V.P. Gokhale from Eveready, Ahsan Hussain, Santosh Katiyar, Rehman Khan, Colonel Gurcharan Singh Khanuja, Rajkumar Keswani, Dr. Loya, Dr. N.P. Mishra, Dr. Nagu, Shekil Qureshi, Ganga and Dalima Ram, Dr. Rajanarayan, Salar, Dr. Sarkar, Dr. Satpathy, Arvind Shrivastava, V.N. Singh, Commissioner Ranjit Singh, S.K. Trehan, Dr. Trivedi, Dr. Varadajan, Mohan Lal Varma, Rev. Timothy Wankhede.
Union Carbide’s management in India and the United States failed to respond to our requests for interviews and information.
By contrast, we are grateful to the Rhône-Poulenc division of Aventis, which took over the proprietorship of the Institute 2 factory in the United States, and to its director for agro-international public relations, Georges Santini, for having generously received us both in Institute 2 and at the research department in Lyon. We include in our appreciation Christine Giulani, in