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June 21, 2007
Invisible India: the foul legacy of corporate impunity
LATHA JISHNU, ASSOCIATE EDITOR, BUSINESSWORLD, JUNE 2007
Anger against Union Carbide/Dow Chemical spills on to the Tatas as Bhopal gas survivors demand justice
The pavement around Jantar Mantar, just off Delhi's Parliament Street, is the last hope of the wretched. It is strewn with makeshift camps of the dispossessed, the victims of atrocities and of countless others who have been at the receiving end of an unjust, uncaring system.
The protesters come and ago; the camps are not allowed to be permanent. Some catch the media spotlight—if a Medha Patkar is in the vanguard, or if the TV channels spy a celebrity presence (Arundhati Roy, perhaps, or a Nandita Das). Then the outdoor broadcast vans land up in droves. For the most part, however, they are ignored since the pavement of lost causes has limited appeal in a world of multiplying protests.
Protests in Bhopal against Ratan Tata, chairman of the Tata group, for his offer to clear the path for Dow Chemicals' investments in India
Business and industry, however, should not ignore at least one of these groups—the survivors of the Bhopal gas disaster. These are dogged campaigners for justice who have stayed the course for 22 years now, the only activists here who have taken on a global corporation, fighting them through the labyrinths of the US legal system, at the company headquarters and in variety of forums despite the most dispiriting of setbacks.
Last year, they had come back with a fresh reminder of their decades long campaign for justice. Around 50-odd men and women had marched into Delhi after more than a month on the road, having trudged 800 km from Bhopal behind a dusty banner that proclaimed their struggle. These were the survivors of the world's worst industrial disaster, the Bhopal gas leak that killed several thousand people on the night of December 3, 1984, and injured another 150,000.
These men and women, many of them old and ailing, were on a hunger strike when I met them, drawn by their singing late one evening when the buzz around the Narmada Bachao Andolan camp on the opposite pavement had died down, after the union ministers, sundry politicians and high-profile activists had come and gone. The Bhopal victims rarely grab media attention, but they fight on regardless. At the core of their struggle is a steely determination to secure reparation for one of the worst assaults on a civilian population after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And they were not in the midst of any war.
“We will fight to the end to force Union Carbide/Dow Chemical to clean up Bhopal. We simply will not give up. Their negligence killed so many of us 22 years ago, and their refusal to clean up the contamination is killing so many more every year, ” declares Champa Devi Shukla, a gentle, worn woman who has been a driving force in the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal (ICJB). It is not until one of her group prods her that she lets on that she is the 2004 winner of the Goldman Environmental Prize. Champa Devi, who lost her husband in the disaster, is not in good health herself. Neither are her fellow campaigners.
Champa Devi Shukla, secretary, Bhopal Gas Peedit Mahila Stationery Karmachari Sangh
How could they be? More than 27 tonnes of methyl-iso-cyanide and other deadly gases leaked from Union Carbide's pesticide factory and enveloped Bhopal, turning parts of the city into a gas chamber. According to figures put out by ICJB, around half a million people were exposed to the gas and over 20,000 have died till date as a result of their exposure. Among the 150,000 seriously affected by exposure to the gases, at least 50,000 are too sick to work for a living. Worse, children born to gas-affected people suffer from serious congenital defects. Some have no lips, ears or noses, others no hands or feet. For Bhopalis, the nightmare never ends.
Some like Rashida Bee, who lost six of her family to cancer in the aftermath of the leak, have put their personal tragedy behind them to campaign for a larger cause. Rashida, who is the co-winner of the Goldman Environmental Prize, made international headlines a couple of years ago when she along with Champa Devi staged a hunger strike in front of Dow Chemical's headquarters in Midland, Michigan. That had serious repercussions on the giant's share prices—and public opinion in the US —although she says Dow executives misled its shareholders about the company's legal liabilities in Bhopal. Rashida Bee and Champa Devi met as workers in a stationery shop and founded the union that they head as president and secretary respectively.
The Bhopal Gas Peedit Mahila Stationery Karamchari Sangh may be a humble little union representing a clutch of women workers, but its courage is known worldwide. For them Union Carbide/Dow Chemical will remain Enemy No. 1 and friends of Dow are viewed as inimical to their demands (see What They Want). That's why the Tata group is now the focus of the survivors' anger and the Tata group chairman Ratan Tata has joined their pantheon of corporate exploiters.
* Union Carbide/Dow Chemical to clean up the site or provide just compensation for those who have been injured or made ill by this poison;
* Fund medical care and research while providing all the information it has on the leaked gases and their medical consequences;
* Provide alternate livelihood to victims who cannot pursue their usual trade because of their debilitating illness;
* Stand trial in Bhopal, where Union Carbide faces criminal charges of culpable homicide (manslaughter), and has been absconding these many years
Some history will explain Dow's legacy in the Bhopal case. In 2001, Dow Chemical (rank 36 in Fortune 500) bought Union Carbide Corp, which is now its fully owned subsidiary. Although through such a purchase under the US law, Dow would assume Union Carbide's assets and liabilities, the global giant maintains that it has no liabilities. It says the 1989 settlement with the Indian government that was brokered by the Supreme Court of India—the settlement was for a paltry $470 million against the $3.5 originally sought by Delhi —had resolved its liabilities. Under this settlement, the heirs of the dead were given $2,000.
Incensed survivors who have got no more than $500 per head for their horrific suffering—there were 574, 273 claimants in all—say they will settle for nothing short of a cleanup of the highly contaminated site where abandoned chemicals have been seeping into the ground since that disastrous night in 1984. The principle of polluter pays does not seem to hold in the case of Dow whose 2005 revenues crossed $46 billion. What is particularly galling for them is the different standards it uses to measure compensation. In 2002, Dow settled with Union Carbide workers in the US who had sought huge damages for exposure to asbestos in the workplace. Although the case was filed before Dow's acquisition of Carbide, Dow was forced to arrive at a settlement. It has also set aside $2.2 billion to address future liabilities.
In Bhopal, on the contrary, they have set their face against reparation. They have refused to clean up the site, or to make arrangements to provide safe drinking water. Nor will they compensate. Worst of all, say the survivors, is their stubborn refusal to disclose information about the health effects of the leaked gases, which doctors could use to treat the victims more effectively.
That's why the four major organisations fighting for the Bhopal gas survivors are determined to make their campaign against Dow Chemical more high-pitched. In April this year, after weeks of camping out in Jantar Mantar, the ICJB won a partial victory. They got to meet Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who promised to provide them with clean drinking water and to clean up the toxic wastes that have made the groundwater too deadly to consume. In fact, this is the worst problem for the Bhopal survivors: the water is poisoning a whole new generation along with the breast milk of those who drink the poison-laced ground water. The milk of nursing mothers has been found to contain lead, mercury and organochlorines.
Rashida Bee, president, Bhopal Gas Peedit Mahila Stationery Karmachari Sangh
In fact, many of those in Jantar Mantar were people who had settled in Bhopal after the gas leak. One woman who looked a couple of decades older than her stated 45 years said the people she knew suffered either nausea and dizziness or rash, fever and eruptions on the skin. All of them were constantly exhausted.
It is people like this that the government and corporate India should meet to understand the intensity of feeling against big companies. It is said that a large segment of Indians harbour a pathological dislike of MNCs and large industry in general as a hangover of the socialist indoctrination of the early decades of independence. Bhopal has turned this dislike into seething rage against the corporate world.
The Tata group got the first taste of it when demonstrators blackened posters and hoardings of its telecom service. A portrait of Ratan Tata was paraded in Bhopal for “facilitating the expansion of Dow Chemical in India”, according to the organisations of the survivors. A boycott of Tata products is also underway, starting with a mass consumption item like Tata Salt.
Ratan Tata has been singled out for several reasons. For one, he is co-chair of the Indo-US CEO Forum that also includes Andrew Liveris, president and CEO, of Dow Chemical. The Tatas have just now offered to lead a remediation effort at the site. Another reason is that Keshub Mahindra, former chairman of the Union Carbide India and one of the accused in the gas disaster, has been on the boards of various Tata companies.
Ratan Tata's clean-up offer was a response to Liveris's publicly stated reluctance in October last year to making further investments in India after the ministry of chemicals and fertilisers filed an application in a district court asking Dow to contribute Rs 100 crore for remediation of the site. Liveris had reiterated the chemical giant's legal position on the disaster at the India-US CEO Forum meeting. He wants the claim withdrawn.
But as the government allows it to make fresh investments in India, in Reliance's Jamnagar complex, for instance, questions about social responsibility will continue to haunt Dow. Rashida Bee and Champa Devi will not allow the global giant to forget Bhopal's nightmare.
Posted by bhola at 10:01 AM | Comments (0)
June 05, 2007
Noam Chomsky on Microsoft and Corporate Control of the Internet
CorpWatch, May 6th, 1998
This 1998 interview has proved prophetic. To preserve our freedom of thought and expression we should refuse to use Microsoft products and instead switch to open-source software. [Ed]
CorpWatch's Anna Couey and Joshua Karliner caught up with Noam Chomsky by telephone at his home in the Boston area to ask him about Microsoft and Bill Gates. The following is a transcript of our far ranging conversation.
CW: So our first question is, how significant do you see the recent skirmishes between the Department of Justice and Microsoft? Do you see it as an important turn of events?
NC: There's some significance. We shouldn't exaggerate it. If there are three major corporations controlling what is essentially public property and a public creation, namely the Internet, telecommunications, and so on, that's not a whole lot better than one corporation controlling, but it's maybe a minor difference. The question is to what extent parasites like Microsoft should be parasites off the public system, or should be granted any rights at all.
CW: Give us a little bit of historical context. How does what's happening with Microsoft's growing power, and its role in society fit into the history of U.S. Corporate power, the evolution of corporations?
NC: Here's a brief history, a thumbnail sketch.
There were corporations as far back as the 18th century, and beyond. In the United States, corporations were public bodies. Basically, they were associations. A bunch of people could get together and say we want to build a bridge over this river, and could get a state charter which allowed them to do that, precisely that and nothing more. The corporation had no rights of individual persons. The model for the corporation back at the time of the framing of the Constitution was a municipality. Through the 19th century, that began to change.
It's important to remember that the constitutional system was not designed in the first place to defend the rights of people. Rather, the rights of people had to be balanced, as Madison put it, against what he called "the rights of property." Well of course, property has no rights: my pen has no rights. Maybe I have a right to it, but the pen has no rights. So, this is just a code phrase for the rights of people with property. The constitutional system was founded on the principle that the rights of people with property have to be privileged; they have rights because they're people, but they also have special rights because they have property. As Madison put it in the constitutional debates, the goal of government must be "to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority." That's the way the system was set up.
In the United States, around the turn of the century, through radical judicial activism, the courts changed crucially the concept of the corporation. They simply redefined them so as to grant not only privileges to property owners, but also to what legal historians call "collectivist legal entities." Corporations, in other words, were granted early in this century the rights of persons, in fact, immortal persons, and persons of immense power. And they were freed from the need to restrict themselves to the grants of state charters.
That's a very big change. It's essentially establishing major private tyrannies, which are furthermore unaccountable, because they're protected by First Amendment rights, freedom from search and seizure and so on, so you can't figure out what they're doing.
After the Second World War, it was well understood in the business world that they were going to have to have state coordination, subsidy, and a kind of socialization of costs and risks. The only question was how to do that. The method that was hit upon pretty quickly was the "Pentagon system" (including the DOE, AEC, NASA). These publicly-subsidized systems have been the core of the dynamic sectors of the American economy ever since (much the same is true of biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, etc., relying on different public sources). And that certainly leads right to Microsoft.
So how does Microsoft achieve its enormous profits? Well, Bill Gates is pretty frank about it. He says they do it by "embracing and extending" the ideas of others. They're based on computers, for example. Computers were created at public expense and public initiative. In the 1950s when they were being developed, it was about 100% public expense. The same is true of the Internet. The ideas, the initiatives, the software, the hardware -- these were created for about 30 years at public initiative and expense, and it's just now being handed over to guys like Bill Gates.
CW: What are the social and cultural impacts of allowing, not only a monopoly, but even if it's just a few large corporations, dominating something as basic as human speech, communication with each other?
NC: It's a form of tyranny. But, that's the whole point of corporatization -- to try to remove the public from making decisions over their own fate, to limit the public arena, to control opinion, to make sure that the fundamental decisions that determine how the world is going to be run -- which includes production, commerce, distribution, thought, social policy, foreign policy, everything -- are not in the hands of the public, but rather in the hands of highly concentrated private power. In effect, tyranny unaccountable to the public. And there are various modalities for doing this. One is to have the communication system, the so-called information system, in the hands of a network of, fewer or more doesn't matter that much, private tyrannies.
Let's take the media in the United States. These are corporate media, overwhelmingly. Even the so-called public media are not very different. They are just huge corporations that sell audiences to advertisers in other businesses. And they're supposed to constitute the communications system. It's not complicated to figure out what's going to come out of this. That includes also the entertainment industries, so-called, the various modalities for diverting people from the public arena, and so on.
And there are new things happening all the time. Like right at this minute, there's a dramatic example, that's the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), which is supposed to be signed this month, but they're not going to make it. The negotiations have been going on in secret for about three years. It's essentially a huge corporate power play, trying to give "investors" -- that doesn't mean the guy working on the shop floor, it means the board of directors of GE, of Merrill Lynch, and so on -- to give investors extraordinary rights. That's being done in secret because the people involved, which is the whole business community incidentally, know that the public is going to hate it. So therefore the media are keeping it secret. And it's an astonishing feat for three years to keep quiet about what everyone knows to be a major set of decisions, which are going to lock countries into certain arrangements. It'll prevent public policy. Now you can argue that it's a good thing, a bad thing, you can argue what you like, but there's no doubt about how the public is going to react, and there's no doubt about the fact that the media, which have been well aware of this from the beginning have succeeded in virtually not mentioning it.
CW: How would a company like Microsoft benefit from the MAI?
NC: They could move capital freely. They could invest it where they like. There would be no restrictions on anything they do. A country, or a town, like say, Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I live, where I work, could not impose conditions on consumer protection, environmental control, investment and set-asides for minorities or women, you name it, that would be ruled out.
Now exactly how far this would go depends on the disposition to enforce it. These things are not determined by words. There's nothing in the Constitution, or the amendments to the Constitution, which allows private tyrannies to have the right to personhood. It's just power, not the wording. What the MAI would mean in practice depends on what the power relations are, like whether people object to it so strenuously they won't allow it to happen, maybe by riots, or whatever. So those are the terms that they're going to try to impose.
A crucial element of this is what they call the ratchet effect; that is existing legislation is to be allowed, but it has to be removed over time. It has to be rolled back, and no new legislation can be introduced conflicting with the rights of Microsoft to do anything they like in the international arena, or domestically. Well over time that's supposed to have a ratchet effect, to turn the world over more and more in the hands of the major private tyrannies, like Microsoft, with their alliances and interactions.
CW: Economist Brian Arthur argues that with the rapidly changing nature of technology, no one will remain in a monopoly position for long, so that monopoly power in the technology industries is different than what we've historically seen, and is nothing to worry about.
NC: But there never was monopoly power; or there very rarely was monopoly power. Take highly concentrated power systems, like the energy industries. But they're not strictly speaking monopolies. Shell and Exxon are competitors. This is a highly managed system of market administration, with enormous state power entering in the interests of a small collection of private tyrannies.
It's very rare to find a real monopoly. AT&T was a monopoly for a time, that's why it could create things like the transistor, for example. It was a monopoly, so therefore they could charge high rates. But that's certainly unusual.
CW: Do you think the whole monopoly issue is something to be concerned about?
NC: These are oligopolies; they are small groups of highly concentrated power systems which are integrated with one another. If one of them were to get total control of some system, other powers probably wouldn't allow it. In fact, that's what you're seeing.
CW: So, you don't think Bill Gates is a latter-day John D. Rockefeller?
NC: John D. Rockefeller wasn't a monopolist. Standard Oil didn't run the whole industry; they tried. But other power centers simply don't want to allow that amount of power to one of them.
CW: Then in fact, maybe there is a parallel there between Gates and Rockefeller, or not?
NC: Think of the feudal system. You had kings and princes and bishops and lords and so on. They for the most part did not want power to be totally concentrated, they didn't want total tyrants. They each had their fiefdoms they wanted to maintain in a system of highly concentrated power. They just wanted to make sure the population, the rabble so-called, wouldn't be part of it. It's for this reason the question of monopoly -- I don't want to say it's not important -- but it's by no means the core of the issue.
It is indeed unlikely that any pure monopoly could be sustained. Remember that this changing technology that they're talking about is overwhelmingly technology that's developed at public initiative and public expense. Like the Internet after all, 30 years of development by the public then handed over to private power. That's market capitalism.
CW: How has that transfer from the public to the private sphere changed the Internet?
NC: As long as the Internet was under control of the Pentagon, it was free. People could use it freely [for] information sharing. That remained true when it stayed within the state sector of the National Science Foundation.
As late as about 1994, people like say, Bill Gates, had no interest in the Internet. He wouldn't even go to conferences about it, because he didn't see a way to make a profit from it. Now it's being handed over to private corporations, and they tell you pretty much what they want to do. They want to take large parts of the Internet and cut it out of the public domain altogether, turn it into intranets, which are fenced off with firewalls, and used simply for internal corporate operations.
They want to control access, and that's a large part of Microsoft's efforts: control access in such a way that people who access the Internet will be guided to things that *they* want, like home marketing service, or diversion, or something or other. If you really know exactly what you want to find, and have enough information and energy, you may be able to find what you want. But they want to make that as difficult as possible. And that's perfectly natural. If you were on the board of directors of Microsoft, sure, that's what you'd try to do.
Well, you know, these things don't *have* to happen. The public institution created a public entity which can be kept under public control. But that's going to mean a lot of hard work at every level, from Congress down to local organizations, unions, other citizens' groups which will struggle against it in all the usual ways.
CW: What would it look like if it were under public control?
NC: It would look like it did before, except much more accessible because more people would have access to it. And with no constraints. People could just use it freely. That has been done, as long as it was in the public domain. It wasn't perfect, but it had more or less the right kind of structure. That's what Microsoft and others want to destroy.
CW: And when you say that, you're referring to the Internet as it was 15 years ago.
NC: We're specifically talking about the Internet. But more generally the media has for most of this century, and increasingly in recent years, been under corporate power. But that's not always been the case. It doesn't have to be the case. We don't have to go back very far to find differences. As recently as the 1950s, there were about 800 labor newspapers reaching 20-30 million people a week, with a very different point of view. You go back further, the community-based and labor-based and other media were basically on par with the corporate media early in this century. These are not laws of nature, they're just the results of high concentration of power granted by the state through judicial activism and other private pressure, which can be reversed and overcome.
CW: So take the increasing concentration in the technology that we're looking at with Microsoft and some of these other companies, and compare it with recent mergers in the defense, media, insurance, and banking industries, and especially the context of globalization . Are we looking at a new stage in global capitalism, or is this just a continuation of business as usual?
NC: By gross measures, contemporary globalization is bringing the world back to what it was about a century ago. In the early part of the century, under basically British domination and the gold standard, if you look at the amount of trade, and then the financial flow, and so on, relative to the size of the economy, we're pretty much returning to that now, after a decline between the two World Wars.
Now there are some differences. For example, the speed of financial transactions has been much enhanced in the last 25 years through the so-called telecommunications revolution, which was a revolution largely within the state sector. Most of the system was designed, developed, and maintained at public expense, then handed over to private profit.
State actions also broke down the post-war international economic system, the Bretton Woods system in the early 1970s. It was dismantled by Richard Nixon, with US and British initiative primarily. The system of regulation of capital flows was dismantled, and that, along with the state-initiated telecommunications revolution led to an enormous explosion of speculative capital flow, which is now well over a trillion dollars a day, and is mostly non-productive. If you go back to around 1970, international capital flows were about 90% related to the real economy, like trade and investment. By now, at most a few percent are related to the real economy. Most have to do with financial manipulations, speculations against currencies, things which are really destructive to the economy. And that is a change that wasn't true, not only wasn't true 100 years ago, it wasn't true 40 years ago. So there are changes. And you can see their effects.
That's surely part of the reason for the fact that the recent period, the last 25 years, has been a period of unusually slow economic growth, of low productivity growth, of stagnation or decline of wages and incomes for probably two thirds of the population, even in a rich country like this. And enormously high profits for a very small part of the population. And it's worse in the Third World.
You can read in the New York Times, the lead article in the "Week in Review" yesterday, Sunday, April 12, that America is prospering and happy. And you look at the Americans they're talking about, it turns out it's not the roughly two thirds of the population whose incomes are stagnating or declining, it's the people who own stock. So, ok, they're undoubtedly doing great, except that about 1% of households have about 50% of the stock, and it's roughly the same with other assets. Most of the rest is owned by the top 10% of the population. So sure, America is happy, and America is prosperous, if America means what the New York Times means by it. They're the narrow set of elites that they speak for and to.
CW: We are curious about this potential for many-to-many communications, and the fact that software, as a way of doing things carries cultural values, and impacts language and perception. And what kind of impacts there are around having technology being developed by corporations such as Microsoft.
NC: I don't think there's really any answer to that. It depends who's participating, who's active, who's influencing the direction of things, and so on. If it's being influenced and controlled by the Disney Corporation and others it will reflect their interests. If there is largely public initiative, then it will reflect public interests.
CW: So it gets back to the question of taking it back.
NC: That's the question. Ultimately it's a question of whether democracy's going to be allowed to exist, and to what extent. And it's entirely natural that the business world, along with the state, which they largely dominate, would want to limit democracy. It threatens them. It always has been threatening. That's why we have a huge public relations industry dedicated to, as they put it, controlling the public mind.
CW: What kinds of things can people do to try to expand and reclaim democracy and the public space from corporations?
NC: Well, the first thing they have to do is find out what's happening to them. So if you have none of that information, you can't do much. For example, it's impossible to oppose, say, the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, if you don't know it exists. That's the point of the secrecy. You can't oppose the specific form of globalization that's taking place, unless you understand it. You'd have to not only read the headlines which say market economy's triumphed, but you also have to read Alan Greenspan, the head of the Federal Reserve, when he's talking internally; when he says, look the health of the economy depends on a wonderful achievement that we've brought about, namely "worker insecurity." That's his term. Worker insecurity--that is not knowing if you're going to have a job tomorrow. It is a great boon for the health of the economy because it keeps wages down. It's great: it keeps profits up and wages down.
Well, unless people know those things, they can't do much about them. So the first thing that has to be done is to create for ourselves, for the population, systems of interchange, interaction, and so on. Like CorpWatch, Public Citizen, other popular groupings, which provide to the public the kinds of information and understanding, that they won't otherwise have. After that they have to struggle against it, in lots of ways which are open to them. It can be done right through pressure on Congress, or demonstrations, or creation of alternative institutions. And it should aim, in my opinion, not just at narrow questions, like preventing monopoly, but also at deeper questions, like why do private tyrannies have rights altogether?
CW: What do you think about the potential of all the alternative media that's burgeoning on the Internet, given the current trends?
NC: That's a matter for action, not for speculation. It's like asking 40 years ago what's the likelihood that we'd have a minimal health care system like Medicare? These things happen if people struggle for them. The business world, Microsoft, they're highly class conscious. They're basically vulgar marxists, who see themselves engaged in a bitter class struggle. Of course they're always going to be at it. The question is whether they have that field to themselves. And the deeper question is whether they should be allowed to participate; I don't think they should.
Posted by bhola at 12:13 PM | Comments (0)
Bhopal survivors condemn government of West Bengal for colluding with Dow Chemical
Bhopal Gas Peedit Mahila Stationery Karmchari Sangh
Bhopal Gas Peedit Mahila Purush Sangharsh Morcha
Bhopal Group for Information and Action
June 05, 2007
PRESS STATEMENT
Addressing a press conference in Kolkata today, a delegation of organizations of survivors of the December 1984 gas disaster in Bhopal condemned the West Bengal state government and the CPM party for inviting American multinational Dow Chemical to the proposed chemical hub at Haldia / Nandigram. They said that as owner of Union Carbide Corporation since 2001, Dow Chemical is responsible for the poisoning of ground water, soil and causing health damages to over 25,000 people in Bhopal. Despite repeated demands from survivors’ organisations for the last six years, Dow Chemical refuses to clean up the over 5,000 tons of chemical waste that lie in and around the abandoned Union Carbide pesticide factory in Bhopal.
Yesterday 21 members of the Bhopal survivor organisations along with four members of Youth for Social change, Chennai and two members of PUCL, Tamilnadu visited two areas of Nandigram. The group met with victims of firing, beating and rape by West Bengal police and CPM cadres in Gokulnagar where four people were killed on March 14th and looting and burning down of 62 houses by CPM cadres on May 29th in Satangabadi. Along with the West Bengal state government and CPM party the organisations blamed Dow Chemical for the violence in Nandigram and said that it is a premonition of the violence that would be let loose by Dow Chemical if it starts producing hazardous chemicals in this area.
The Bhopal survivors’ organisations stated that as per the “polluter pays” principle, Dow Chemical is legally liable to pay for clean up and pay compensation for health injuries including unusually high rates of congenital malformations due to contaminated ground water. They said that in Madhya Pradesh High Court, the Indian government has sought Rs. 100 crores from Dow Chemical as an advance for cleaning up hazardous waste from in and around the Bhopal factory. However, through its counsel, Congress spokesperson Abhishek Manu Singhvi, Dow Chemical has told the High Court that because it is a corporation registered in USA it will not be bound by any decision of the MP High Court.
Union Carbide Corporation which is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Dow Chemical is absconding from charges of manslaughter, grievous assault and other serious offences related to the world’s worst industrial disaster in Bhopal District Court.
The Bhopal survivors organisations said that it is utterly shameful that the West Bengal government is inviting Dow Chemical that is evading its Bhopal related liabilities. The organisations shared copies of a letter they had sent to the CPM Polit Bureau in December 2005 calling upon the leadership of the party to deny entry of Dow Chemical in to West Bengal. They said that they have yet to receive a response to their letter and the West Bengal government is going ahead with its plans to invite Dow Chemical to Nandigram / Haldia. The organisations stated that CPM’s open support to Dow Chemical is particularly reprehensible because the CPM and its affiliates have been part of the campaign against Dow Chemical on the issues of the Bhopal disaster.
The organisations presented copies of documents obtained from the Prime Minister’s office that clearly show that Dow Chemical has promised to invest billion of dollars in India provided the Indian government does not hold Dow liable for environmental and health damages in Bhopal.
The survivors’ organisations informed that their supporters in USA will be protesting against the participation of West Bengal Industries Minister, Mr Nirupam Sen at the meeting of US-India Business Council in Washington D.C. on 27th June where Mr Sen is expected to strike a deal with Dow Chemical Company regarding investment in Haldia / Nandigram.
The organisations expressed satisfaction that at the recently held National Convention on Nandigram & SEZs in Kolkata, organisations from all over the country have resolved to stop Dow Chemical’s investment at Nandigram / Haldia or any where else in the country.
Rashida Bee, Champa Devi Shukla
Bhopal Gas Peedit Mahila Stationery Karmchari Sangh
+99 (0)9302432298
Syed M Irfan
Bhopal Gas Peedit Mahila Purush Sangharsh Morcha
+99 (0)9329026319
Rachna Dhingra, Satinath Sarangi
Bhopal Group for Information and Action
+99 (0)9626167369
Contact : House No. 60, Near Cold Storage, Union Carbide Road, Bhopal 462 001
Please keep visiting www.bhopal.net for updates on the continuing disaster in Bhopal. To take action against those responsible please visit www.studentsforbhopal.org
(THE PRESS RELEASE BLOG IS OUT OF ORDER. UNTIL IT IS FIXED, PRESS RELEASES WILL BE PUBLISHED HERE.)
Posted by bhola at 11:43 AM | Comments (0)