Bhopal : The lessons of a Tragedy - Sanjay Hazarika
Sanjay Hazarika (b.1954) is an Indian-born journalist, author, film-maker and expert on issues related to India's north-eastern region. He has made a television serial on the river Brahmaputra. After studying printing and journalism in London, he worked with a number of newspapers, including the New York Times. He has also worked with the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi. His second book, Bhopal: The Lessons of A Tragedy (1988), which won the New York Times Publishers' Award, gave him international recognition.
This extract is from Hazarika's prize-winning effort and focuses on a major environmental and industrial disaster that rocked India in December 1984. Shortly after midnight on 3 December, some 40 tonnes of highly poisonous methyl isocyanate (MIC) gas leaked from the multinational giant Union Carbide's insecticide manufacturing unit in Bhopal while the unsuspecting citizens lay asleep. The leak caused havoc, leading to choking suffocation and even death. In the days that followed, some 10,000 people were estimated to have died and thousands more were affected. Some of the effects were long-term: ten years later people were still being treated for respiratory problems, while both soil and groundwater were contaminated. Hazarika's reportage of the event and its aftermath is an invaluable documentation of a tragedy that could have been avoided if better safety measures had been invested in.
Raj Kumar Keswani, thirty-four, balding and bulky, felt he was suffocating. Keswani, a freelance journalist, slept next to an open window in his first-floor bedroom in the family home in old Bhopal. He had been writing until about midnight before going to sleep and was woken up by the noise of people on the roads and the sense of suffocation. At first, Keswani thought the irritating sensation he felt was the onset of the sore throat that accompanied his frequent colds. But the noise alert him to possible external danger.
Looking down from the window, Keswani was stunned by the bizarre "sight of the street, normally empty at this hour, crowded with people running, coughing and crying out, 'Allah, hum to mar gaye'. Keswani was alarmed and mystified. Obviously, there was great danger but from where and whom? He made two phone calls. The first was to police headquarters. A policeman, racked by cough, pick up the phone. What's happening? Keswani asked "The Union Carbide plant" has exploded and there is poison gas everywhere,' say the rasping voice at the other end. The second phone call was to N. K. Singh, staff correspondent of the Indian Express who worked closely with Keswani and lived in a government-allotted bungalow, about four kilometers away, in the new township. Singh said he knew nothing of a disturbance in the city although the first explanation that flashed across his mind was the possibility of a Hindu-Muslim riot. But he promised to call Keswani back. Keswani did occasional pieces for Jansatta, the Hindi daily published by the Express chain, the country's largest and most influential newspaper group.
After calling Singh, Keswani realized that his old parents and brother and sister were in the neighboring room. There had been no sound from them. Checking, he found all of them breathing with difficulty, coughing and rubbing streaming eyes. It was clear that they must all leave the house quickly. As they prepared to flee, the phone rang. It was Singh on the line. The rush of panicky people was then passing his home and he had called out to a group, asking about the exodus. The Carbide plant, he was told, had exploded. 'Get out of there, just leave', Singh snapped at Keswani. As he talked, Singh watched the great concourse of people rushing past his house. He and other writers and journalists lived in the bungalows colony in large, spacious homesteads. paying nominal rents to their landlord, the Madhya Pradesh Government. What amazed him was the orderly procession of the crowds outside his window. People were walking, he thought, as if in a trance. Obviously, they were tired, especially if they had rushed from Jayaprakash Nagar and its surrounding areas, up the winding roads, across the bridges and hills that separated old Bhopal from the new city. Then his wife began to cough.
The journalist quickly place her and their two children on his scooter and dashed to Arera Colony where prosperous professionals, including Union Carbide managers, businessmen and powerful government officials lived. The colony is located on a hill, a good ten kilometers from the plant. At the other end of the town. Keswani was on his scooter with his wife and sister. His younger brother, Shashi Kumar, drove the family's other scooter towards Arera Colony. But instead of following Kumar, Keswani drove towards the Union Carbide plant. The mist had begun to clear but the stream of refugees continued. They were coughing and collapsing, rising and walking on, supported by friends and relatives.
The women behind Keswani on the scooter were frightened but silent because the journalist had instructed them to save their energy and take shallow breaths. A half-kilometer from the plant, Sunita Keswani told her husband that he was taking too much of a risk and demanded that he go elsewhere. Her words jolted Keswani out of the rage and despair that had overwhelmed him since he had first been alerted about the tragedy. For the first time he realized he was putting others at risk. Without a word, Keswani turned the scooter around and headed for the home of a friend in the Idgah area, located in the old city, but on high ground. Dropping the women off he sped to Hamidia hospital, as the main government hospital was known. Painted a dirty cream and pink, its formal name was the Gandhi Memorial Hospital. But to everyone in Bhopal, it was just the Hamidia. The Hamidia was already swamped by a mass of patients. Junior doctors, interns, nurses and senior hospital staff were caught up in an often-losing battle to save lives and treat an unknown killer. In the first six hours alone, an estimated 20,000 patients flooded the hospital, sorely testing its facilities for it only had an installed capacity of 760 beds and was not particularly well equipped.
As Keswani arrived, still in his pyjamas, scores of corpses had begun to flow in. Later in the morning, they were to spill out of the morgue on to the roads and lawns outside the hospital's four-storey administrative block - hundreds of anonymous bundles, covered by sheets of white cloth, their exposed faces drawn in the rigors of a painful death, spittle on their lips, limbs contorted.
The sight of the bodies kindle "a new anger in Keswani and a surge of hopelessness. The portly "Sindhi, born and raised in Bhopal after his parents had left their ancestral village of Sukkur in Sind, Pakistan, during the 1947 partition of the subcontinent, had for more than two years warned of the dangers from the Union Carbide plant. In three articles published in September and October 1982, Keswani had predicted the death of his city. The first of the articles in Rapat, his own magazine, in Hindi was titled 'Save, Please Save this City'. This was followed by 'Bhopal in the Mouth of a Volcano' and 'If You Don't Understand, You Will Be Wiped Out'. Five days after the second article, a gas leak from the plant started an exodus from the shanties around the factory. Warning sirens rang but the leak was quickly plugged.
Embarrassingly for the company, it took place during a 'Safety Week' when senior executives from corporate headquarters at Danbury, Connecticut, and the Asian head office at Hong Kong were in town. Keswani's final warning came on June 1984 in Jansatta, the Indian Express publication, when he repeated his old charges. The next time the factory leaked its deadly gases, he asserted, there will not even be a solitary witness to testify to what took place. "The journalist had begun taking an interest in Carbide's affairs after a friend of his, a plant employee, spoke to him of safety hazards there. But Keswani moved from academic interest to active involvement after a December 1981 incident when a plant worker named Ashraf Mohammed was drenched with liquid phosgenes while cleaning a pipe. Khan died the next day.
Phosgene is the killer gas that the German Army used in the First World War 2. Union Carbide uses it to manufacture MIC. Keswani was provoked into investigating the plant. Nine months later, his first piece appeared in Rapat. Rapat earned neither a reputation nor money for its owner. No one seemed to pay heed to what were regarded as the ramblings of an obsessed man. Reluctantly, Keswani closed his paper. And traveled to the nearby city of Indore where he worked with a local Hindi newspaper. A year later, he returned to his hometown as a writer for Jansatta. On 3 December 1984, as he watched corpses and victims being unloaded at the Hamidia hospital, Keswani came close to weeping. It was a moment of shame, he says.
Yet, there was one incident that gave him some comfort. As he had driven towards the plant early in the morning, the reporter had watched a burkha-clad woman, a child in her arms, running, then walking and faltering in her flight. As she tired, a car passed by her. The woman stopped the car, pushed her child into it and watched as it drove off. There were no questions asked, no answers needed. Elsewhere in the city, too, bonded by a common courage in the face of unknown fear, strangers helped each other to get to hospitals, to reunite families split by the initial panic, to transport the sick and needy to safe places. In the initial hours, as state and city administrators still gathered their wits, information and officials, a massive voluntary public effort saved the lives of thousands afflicted by the gas.
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