Looking out over that calm lake at
dawn, with its fishing boats and flying cranes, it was hard to believe that
this beautiful place had been the scene of the worst industrial accident in
history.
But months earlier, at about midnight
on a cold winter night in December 1984, an airborne blanket of poison gas fell
over a sleeping city. By dawn, 1,750 men, women and children were dead. More
than 500 people suffered injuries, many of whom died of cancers and other
diseases.
The city was
Bhopal, in northern India. By the time the case came to court nearly two years
later, almost 4000 people had died, 40 were totally disabled and more than 2600
others had lasting partial disability. The agricultural chemicals plant was
owned by the giant and now defunct US chemicals firm, Union Carbide, that made
an arguable case for sabotage.
At Carbide’s
Connecticut headquarters, chairman Warren M. Anderson pledged
his company’s moral commitment to the victims and their
families, and flew to India a few days afterward, accompanied by some technical
experts and a medical aid team, only
to be arrested and sent home by the
Indian government before he and his colleagues had
even visited the site of the catastrophe. The US and Indian
Carbide companies offered nearly $2 million in immediate emergency relief, and
afterward pledged more than $20 million more in funds and services. Carbide
employees and its retirees voluntarily raised more than $120,000 for the relief
organizations working in Bhopal.
But UCIL,
the Indian company, was less quick off the mark. While it did much to provide
relief for the victims’ families, and endured national ostracism with a brave
face, it was almost as though its entirely Indian management had been paralyzed
with shock. In particular, it had failed to tell its side of the story
adequately. This was why, about ten
months after the tragedy, I and my colleagues met Warren Anderson with Carbide colleagues
at a working lunch at the company’s impressive Danbury, CT, headquarters. He was
seeking help for the local directors in Mumbai, then Bombay. As a member of a
New York firm of public relations consultants that advised Carbide, I was assigned
to fly to India to develop and implement an India-wide program to better explain
the situation to the public at large, to its 23,000 Indian stockholders, Parliament
and the many communities where it had numerous plants, five operating divisions
and 9,000 employees.
Although I’d worked all over the Pacific
Rim, I’d never been to India, but within two or three days of that first
meeting with Anderson I was flying to Mumbai, on a solo as-long-as-it-takes
assignment. On the weekend I arrived
there was a meeting at my hotel. The meeting was attended by the Carbide
company’s Indian board of directors and the managers of their 13 facilities
based all over India.
My chief contact was UCIL’s chief
executive, Vijay Gokhale, a handsome, intelligent and civilized man who’d had
the misfortune to be promoted CEO only two or three months before the Bhopal
catastrophe. Within hours of landing I found myself giving, at Gokhale’s
request, a ‘reassuring presentation’ to his discouraged audience.
Having met and talked with the
worldwide managers in Danbury, and now to the earnest directors, all Indians in
Bhopal that weekend, it seemed to me tragic and ironic that, in India and the
many other countries where it operated, Carbide had always acted as a company
that cared. A major player on the Indian sub-continent since the early 1900s,
it looked after its employees and retirees well, and was a good neighbor in
every country and city in which it had operations. Carbide’s people were
convinced at the time, and its veterans still are, that the Bhopal disaster was
caused by sabotage. How else, they asked, would it be possible to pour, at dead
of night, as much as 200 gallons of water into underground tanks of poisonous methyl
isocyanate, in defiance of warning signs and color-coded faucets, causing gas
to erupt and escape? Since Anderson and
his emergency experts were denied access to the Bhopal plant by the Indian
Government, they could never carry out their hoped-for search for evidence.
But there was still an untold story
to tell. On the following Monday morning
my new Carbide colleagues and I set to work. Over the next few weeks we
produced a series of reports, each aimed at a special audience, describing what
we were convinced had happened in Bhopal, the social, economic, human and other
ramifications, and what action UCIL was now taking. While putting these
together, we trained the directors and other managers to handle interviews with
newspaper reporters, and on radio and television. Oddly, what I remember most
vividly of those long, videotaped training sessions in a stuffy top-floor
conference room was the constant squabbling and scrabbling of a flock of
vultures that had settled on the flimsy iron roof directly above us.
When we were ready, we issued this
new material to the Indian media. There are no fewer than 14 Indian languages,
yet English is the lingo of government and business, and most educated Indians
speak it well. And since India is a true
democracy, its media are unfettered and outspoken. While they were generally
unsympathetic to Carbide after the disaster, and skeptical about the sabotage
claim, the national and regional press, radio and TV generally gave fair space
and airtime to the company’s viewpoint.
Several
times during the assignment, I made the 450 mile train journey between Mumbai
and Bhopal, to see the community and the victims and meet the few remaining
Carbide managers there. It was a tough journey alone. Late one night, after an
abrupt stop, I woke and found myself looking down from the train window as two railroad
workers, lit by searing arc-lights, carried a headless man away on a stretcher.
He was presumably the hapless cause of the delay.
Because of the risk of a revenge
attack, no one associated with Carbide was allowed to stay at any of the hotels
in Bhopal. Instead, I lodged at a company-owned guesthouse in a compound that
included their research laboratories, which were still operating near the
now-locked and otherwise abandoned pesticide plant. The guesthouse and the
laboratories were protected by dense barbed wire, patrolled day and night by
armed security men with sub-machine guns. The buildings stood on the shore of the
placid lake, across the water from the city’s huge mosque.
The job took two months. Before
returning to New York I spent several days in Bhopal meeting with the overseas news
reporters who returned to India during the first anniversary of the disaster,
to write about the city and the continuing plight of the casualties. At that
time, angry crowds milled outside the barricades around the lakeside guest
house.
Fax machines and computers were
uncommon even in the US at that time, and probably didn’t exist then in India. I
wrestled with obsolete copying machines, typewriters and teleprinters that
broke down almost daily. There were few telephone lines between Bhopal and the
outside world, and those that were available were nearly 50 years old. Our
telephone lines were also tapped, which made security difficult, as did the
fact that the time in Bhopal was ten hours later than in Danbury and New York.
Then there was the heat in Mumbai, heart-rending poverty, and endless, pathetic
begging on every street. Above all, there was the touching resignation of the
people of India to their intolerable condition.
But for all
that, a movingly warm, almost affectionate relationship grew between us. These
men -- and they were all men -- were in such desperate straits in a company
that was now India’s public enemy. Some of them were expecting criminal
indictment, and they all so desperately needed help, encouragement and advice.
When I left, they gave me a memento, a bronze effigy of Lakshmi, the Hindu
goddess of prosperity. It has little intrinsic value, but is still one of my
most cherished possessions.
I returned to India a year later for a
further two months. This time, among other things, my mission included handling
local and foreign media relations when UCIL faced criminal trial by the Indian
government. It was a strange, anachronistic ritual. The law, and all the
trappings of the court, from the judge himself to the barristers and solicitors
and their robes and wigs, were reminiscent of nothing more than Public
Television’s then popular Rumpole of the
Bailey. Yet there was nothing
laughable about the prosecutors, and the cross-examinations, nor about the
sentence. UCIL was found guilty and fined $470 million.
But the most distressing thing of all
is that now, more tthan 30 years after the tragedy, far too little of that litigation
money has ever reached the survivors of that now distant nightmare.
oo0oo
