Five Past Midnight in Bhopal - Dominique Lapierre [145]
In Bhopal, too, the victims organized themselves to defend their rights. Activists’ organizations rallied thousands of survivors to ransack Carbide’s offices in New Delhi and demand the immediate payment of the promised indemnities. Five years after the tragedy, its victims had still not laid hands on a single one of the $470 million they had been awarded.
Not surprisingly, so large a sum of money, even though placed in a special account administered by the supreme court, was a magnet for the greedy. Sheela Nadar, Padmini’s mother, had to pay out 1,400 rupees for a dossier establishing her husband’s death. Payment of baksheesh became obligatory in order to obtain access to the compensation desks or to the often very distant offices that handed out the first allocations of provisions and medical aid. In the final analysis, according to official figures, 548,519 survivors would eventually receive what was left of the money paid by Carbide: a little less than 60,000 rupees or approximately $1,400 for the death of a parent, and about half that in cases of serious personal injury. It was a far cry from the million rupees the New York lawyer had promised Ganga Ram and the Orya Bustee survivors.
Because the wind had been blowing in the direction of the bustees that night, it was the poorest of the poor who were most affected by the tragedy. Left to suffer, exploited by predators on all sides, the survivors soon found themselves subject to further persecution. Under the guise of a “beautification program” the new authorities used part of the moneys meant for the victims to empty the bustees of their Muslim population. Flanked by police, bulldozers razed several neighborhoods to the ground. Only the determination of about fifty Muslim women threatening to burn themselves to death succeeded in putting a temporary halt to the eviction of Muslims. But after a few days, they were all moved to Gandhinagar, outside the city. Iqbal, Ahmed Bassi and Salar, who had escaped the scourge of MIC, were driven out by the madness of men. Like most of the other Muslims living in the Kali Grounds neighborhood, they had to abandon their homes again—this time for good.
In 1991, the Bhopal court summoned Warren Anderson, Union Carbide’s chairman, to appear on a charge of “homicide in a criminal case.” But the man who was enjoying peaceful retirement in his villa in Vero Beach, Florida, did not keep the promise he had made to a journalist as he left Indian soil on December 11, 1984. Not only was he not returning to the country where his company’s factory had wrought disaster, but he actually managed to lower his profile within his own country. Anderson left Vero Beach, and his whereabouts are not publicly known. The international warrant for his arrest issued under Indian law remained unserved by Interpol. In March 2000, in response to a class-action suit by victims’ organizations in the federal court of the southern district of New York, Union Carbide’s lawyer William Krohley said the company will accept process served in the name of Anderson but will not disclose his whereabouts. These organizations remain undaunted, however, and do not intend to give up. The graffiti “HANG ANDERSON,”
which the survivors never tire of repainting on their city walls, are a reminder that justice has not yet been done.
If the Indian people believe Warren Anderson is a fugitive, the prospects of bringing Union Carbide to justice are just as unlikely, for the very good reason—albeit one of small consolation to the victims—that the multinational no longer exists. Despite all its chairman’s efforts, the tragedy on December 2, 1984, was the death of the proud company with the blue-and-white logo. The purchase of its agricultural division by the French company Rhône-Poulenc, now the proprietor