Five Past Midnight in Bhopal - Dominique Lapierre [68]
It was one of thousands of weekly newspapers that India published in its innumerable languages. Bhopal’s Rapat Weekly was in Hindi, and its modest circulation—six thousand copies— gave it very little impact in a mostly Muslim city where the predominant language was Urdu. The reliability of its investigative journalism and its independent voice had, nevertheless, earned the Weekly a fringe readership with a taste for scandal. Digging into the latter was the particular slant the founder and only editor of the Rapat Weekly had chosen.
The son and grandson of journalists, thirty-four-year-old Hindu Rajkumar Keswani belonged to a family originally from the province of Sind, who had come to Bhopal after the partition of India in 1947. At sixteen he had left college to contribute to a sports journal, then worked at the city news desk of the Bhopal Post. For years this indefatigable investigator had reported on the minor and major events that occurred in the City of the Begums. After the Post folded, Keswani had sunk his savings into the creation of a small weekly to serve the true interests of Bhopal’s citizens. For this man mad about poetry, botany and music, the threat posed by modern industry to the safety of the city was very real. The discovery of irregularities in the allocation of industrial licenses drove him to look for collusion between Carbide and the local authorities. The mysterious fire in the alpha-naphthol unit had already tickled his curiosity. The poisoning of Mohammed Ashraf clinched the matter. He embarked upon an investigation that might have turned him into a savior, if only people had listened to him.
“As luck would have it, I knew Ashraf,” he would recount. “He lived just next door to the fire station where I’d set up my office. He often had comrades from work round to his house. Together, they would talk about the dangers of their profession. They spoke about toxic gases, deadly leaks and the likelihood of explosion. Some of them made no secret of their intention to resign. I’d thought the plant was producing an innocent white powder, like the one I used to protect the roses on my terrace from greenfly, and I found what they said terrifying.”
No sooner had he carried his friend Ashraf to his grave, than the journalist rushed to see the deceased’s colleagues. “I wanted to know whether his death was an isolated incident or the result of some failure on the part of the factory.”
Keswani gathered enough witness statements to accuse Carbide of negligently violating its own safety standards. Bashir Ullah, one of the dismissed trade union leaders, even managed to smuggle the journalist inside the site at night. As he went through the various production units, he could smell phosgene’s odor of freshly cut grass and methyl isocyanate’s aroma of boiled cabbage.
Not having any scientific training, he next paid a visit to the dean of the chemistry department at an important technical college and consulted all the specialists’ works in its library. The conclusions he came to made his blood run cold.
“Merely appreciating that methyl isocyanate and phosgene are two and a half times heavier than air, and have a tendency to move along at ground level in small clouds, was enough to make me realize at once that a large scale gas leak would be disastrous,” he explained later. “After detailed examination of the safety systems in place in the plant, I knew that tragedy was only a matter of time.”
An unexpected visit was to provide Rajkumar Keswani with the technical arguments he needed to drop his journalistic bombshell. In May 1982, three American engineers from the technical center for chemical products and household plastics division in South Charleston landed in Bhopal. Their task was to appraise the running of the plant and confirm that everything was functioning according to