Five Past Midnight in Bhopal - Dominique Lapierre [67]
26
“You Will Be Reduced to Dust”
So the frail little man with the dark skin had actually dared to do it. For a week he had lain stretched out on a piece of khadi, a coarse cotton cloth, outside the entrance to the factory. With the nape of his neck resting on a stone, a pitcher of water beside him, he was the embodiment of the Carbide workers’ revolt against the working conditions that they believed were responsible for the death of one of their comrades. Every morning at dawn, five workers took their place beside Malviya to fast with him for twenty-four hours. Before going to their workstations, the other employees would gather around the strikers to show their solidarity. “Har zor zulm key takkar mein sangharsh hamara nara hai! We will fight against all forms of oppression!” hundreds of voices shouted in unison.
For the multinational that had built a large part of its reputation on the slogan “Safety First,” these hunger strikes and the accompanying demonstrations were unacceptable blackmail. The reaction was swift and drastic. All political and trade union meetings inside the factory were banned. D.S. Pande, the dynamic head of personnel, had no reservations about setting fire to the tent that served as the main union’s command post. In the ensuing scuffle several people were injured, among them Pande himself, with the result that the trade union leaders were promptly laid off. Without renouncing the fight, Shankar Malviya and Bashir Ullah kept up their action outside. Meetings and processions denouncing the death of Mohammed Ashraf and demanding better safety were held one after another throughout the city, seriously denting the company’s unanimously respected image in the public eye. Curiously, neither Warren Woomer, nor his Indian assistants appeared unduly alarmed at this fierce outbreak of discontent. After all, wasn’t this kind of labor unrest to be expected in Indian firms, where workers had been known to lock their bosses in their offices for weeks? But at Carbide, the fact that an ordinary worker could lie down on the pavement and defy the world’s third largest chemical giant felt like a crime of lèse-majesté; a crime that impugned the ideal of “giving India’s peasants a hand” dreamed of in New York; a crime that destroyed the myth that working for Carbide was the best possible sign of a prosperous karma; a crime that diminished the prestige of the uniform with the blue-and-white logo a whole generation of young Indian graduates dreamed of wearing.
“I knew the factory wasn’t perfect,” Warren Woomer would say later, “but we were constantly improving it. Until Ashraf’s death we’d had an excellent safety record unique in the company’s history.” The American works manager could see no reason why this situation should deteriorate. He had blind faith in his colleagues. After all it was he who had trained them in Carbide’s celebrated safety culture. He knew that the four hundred pages of notes they had compiled on their return from Institute were their bible. A man’s death was a dreadful blow but it should not cast disgrace upon the whole system. Despite the budget cuts to some of the equipment at the time of construction, Woomer