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BHOPAL.NET HAS SET ITSELF THE NEAR-IMPOSSIBLE TASK
OF PUTTING THE WHOLE STORY OF BHOPAL ON THE WEB

Individual journalists have delved into this or that aspect of the Bhopal aftermath - the medical consequences, engineering and management shortcomings, lawsuits, Union Carbide's and Dow's use of PR to avoid taking responsibility, the role of Indian politics at Central and State level, the environmental consequences of the contaminated factory - no onehas ever yet put the whole picture together. The story is too vast and complex and journalists tend to specialise.

New Scientist’s Debora Mackenzie, writing in February 2000, as Bhopal survivors began a new class action suit against Union Carbide in New York, recalled legal proceedings of fourteen years earlier:

Why wasn’t Carbide taken to task? The inadequacy of the plant’s safety systems was easy to uncover, even for the novice reporter I was then. I had the smoking gun. But virtually none of my media colleagues was prepared to explode the myth that Bhopal could somehow be excused by allegations of sabotage. In 1986, while sitting in a New York courtroom as a judge considered whether Union Carbide should be tried in the US, I decided it was time for a little spin-doctoring. I found a reporter from The New York Times and told him my story. But he wasn't interested. “I'm a business reporter. I don't understand that technical stuff.” Needless to say, the judge ruled that the tragedy was one for the Indian courts. (Debora Mackenzie, New Scientist, February 2000)

The story was always complicated. If just two years after the disaster it was already too complex for Debora Mackenzie’s New York Times colleague , the passing of more than two decades has so thoroughly tangled its threads that unravelling them now is a huge task.

A complex web of issues interelated and entangled over 21 years

From the beginning, the story of Bhopal involved issues of planning, design, engineering, funding, unproven technology, chemical risk, labour relations, management competence, the Indian subsidiary’s relationship with its US parent and decision-making process, cost-cutting, lack of maintenance and a near-complete and well-documented disregard for safety. (There had been several gas leaks, some fatal, prior to 1984.)

With the catastrophic gas leak of December 1984 the subject acquired a horrific medical dimension and began to sprout lawsuits and legal stand-offs (eight distinct phases of legal warfare can be identified). The original gas-disaster has been succeeded by a second and largely unknown calamity in Bhopal. Union Carbide abandoned its factory without cleaning it. Thousands of tons of lethal chemicals remain piled in warehouses open to the elements, or in rusting drums, or simply dumped in the open. Twenty monsoons have washed these toxins deep into the soil and into the underground water supply. For several years now they have been contaminating the drinking wells of 20,000 people - a whole new generation being slowly poisoned in Bhopal.

Human disaster or public relations problem?

Ruined lives, children born with blighting mental and physical disabilities, people with scarred lungs that will never heal, a death toll that has already passed 20,000 - Bhopal is a massive human catastrophe, but for the companies involved, Union Carbide and now Dow Chemical, it has never been anything but a PR problem.

From day one Union Carbide was playing the public relations game. It kicked off with a cynical acceptance of 'moral responsibility' (the idea of PR consultant Peter Hargitay, who has since expressed regret for his involvement with Warren Anderson and the rest of Carbide's board). Next, it claimed that the factory had been sabotaged by 'Sikh terrorists' from a fictitious organisation called 'Black June'. This story was met with derision, so the company changed its story. Now the sabotage was the work of 'a disgruntled employee'.

Factory workers, trades unionists, independent investigators and journalists say otherwise. The plant was mismanaged, run down, neglected and earmarked for closure because it was losing money. Warnings by Carbide's own safety auditors, citing the possibility of 'a major toxic release' were ignored. On 'that night', not a single one of the factory's safety systems was working. These are things Dow/Carbide don't mention on their propaganda website, www.bhopal.com. Anyone who wants a line-by-line, lie-by-lie dissection of bhopal.com should head for our commented version, bhopal.con.

Jumping on the 'terror' bandwagon

Carbide's allegations about "sikh terrorists" were particularly cynical because they were madeonly months after Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had been assassinated by her sikh guards.

Post 911, Carbide and its new owner Dow saw a new opportunity. This time their terrorists would be the gas victims themselves. As reported by the New Jersey Star-Ledger, the drill, conducted in conjunction with the Piscataway Police Department's SWAT team, commenced "peacefully with five demonstrators marching outside a gate at the River Road plant. They were protesting against Warren Anderson, who was the CEO of the Dow subsidiary Union Carbide..." Let others take up the tale:

Three "Justice for Bhopal" terrorists were shot dead at a Dow Chemical facility in Piscataway, New Jersey on December 14, 2003. Bhopal activists -- seeking redress for Dow's failure to compensate victims of the worst industrial accident of all time -- stormed the Dow facility, took eight Dow workers hostage killing one. Later a SWAT team took out the three terrorists.

For the record, it was Piscataway police dressed as the Bhopal "terrorists" in a mock drill. The slur had no basis in fact. In this post-911 age activists are often equated with terrorists when they are just exercising their First Amendment rights. What does this reveal about Dow's attitude towards those seeking social justice?

Read the original Star-Ledger article.
Dow wins worst corporation award for its "terrorism" slur on Bhopalis
See also this article about Bhopal and the nature of terror

Why Bhopal.Net and the other Bhopal websites are so important

Dow (with Union Carbide sitting like a toxic Jonah in its belly) boasts that it is the biggest, richest chemical corporation in the world, with a net worth of $9,186,000,000.00, or just over $9 billion.

Dow can afford to, and does, employ hordes of expensive lawyers, political lobbyists, advertising and PR agents and web designers to peddle its odd mixture of evasions, half-truths and lies.

The Bhopal survivors have nothing, in many cases literally. If 33,000 of them pooled the 'compensation' they got from Union Carbide, currently worth about 6.5¢ a day each, they could just about afford the daily fee of one top US attorney.

Websites like bhopal.net, studentsforbhopal.org, icjb.org and others run on shoestrings. Yet the work of getting the survivors' story out to the world could not be important. Their struggle is the struggle of those who have nothing against those who have it all.

Back to the quest for the missing link

Bhopal.net is like an archaeological dig, with the lowest levels still preserving untouched material from 1999 and 2000.

In one sense it is a piece of history which needs to be preserved as documentation of the Bhopal struggle. However all the 2,000+ pages of news, information and documents in the website need to be made easily accessible from as near the front page as possible. 

Among the riches lurking in the depths of bhopal.net are:

– Union Carbide's "poison papers". Private Carbide documents obtained ia discovery. They are available in .gif format, ie exact facsimiles of the actual documents. Try this interesting example.

We will shortly have a databased catalogue of major source documents, original photographs and significant media and web articles.

Meanwhile, if you have any urgent requests, please contact me. Thank you for your patience.

And finally…

This last is probably a bit of a cheek, given that you are reading this page only because you couldn't get the one you wanted, but if you feel moved to help the Bhopal survivors in their unequal struggle, please consider making a small donation, either to the justice campaign, or to help provide free medical care to those who are still seriously ill in Bhopal. You can do either – or both – here.