LONDON: Hunger strikers in India are attempting to refocus international attention on what they see as the unfinished business of the 1984 Bhopal gas disaster, the country’s — and one of the world’s — worst industrial accidents, which left a still growing death toll of around 20,000 with tens of thousands more injured.

It may be that December 3, 1984, is not a date imprinted on the global psyche like September 11, 2001; but for the people of Bhopal, in central India, the terrible events of that day are almost too agonizing to recall and nearly two decades later the legal wrangles and protests rumble fiercely on.

In the early hours of December 3 as the densely populated town slept, lethal gas suddenly erupted from a chemical plant run by the Union Carbide India Limited (UCIL) — a subsidiary of the giant US Union Carbide Corporation (UCC). The factory manufactured pesticides to spray on cotton crops and the gas methyl-isocyanate driven by the wind, drifted into people’s houses. They awoke choking, their eyes and mouths burning, their lungs seemingly on fire. A survivor described it as ‘like having a blowtorch at my eyes and acid poured down my throat’.

Up to 8,000 died that night and more than 500,000 were exposed to the poison.

Since then, a further 12,000 people have died, making some 20,000 fatalities in all. The toxins from Carbide’s factory damaged lungs, brains, kidneys and muscles as well as the gastro-intestinal, reproductive and immune systems of those affected. An estimated 150,000 survivors among the city’s residents are still chronically ill and 10 to 15 people die each month due to injuries received in the disaster.

The gas emission was triggered by the ingress of a large volume of water into the gas tank, according to a UCC finding. Explanations as to how it happened vary from poor maintenance and inadequate or inoperative safety systems to the action of a disgruntled employee. But the tragedy sparked a labyrinthine and lengthy legal battle on two continents over responsibility and compensation and the issuing of an arrest warrant in India for the UCC chairman, Warren Anderson.

The Indian government passed an act in its parliament establishing itself as sole plaintiff on the Bhopalis’ behalf, and the action started in the US and finished in India in 1989 with an out-of-court settlement of $470 million that granted company officials immunity from prosecution. India’s Supreme Court later struck out the immunity clause. UCC also pledged to build a new hospital in Bhopal. The Supreme Court said that compensation levels provided for in the settlement were well in excess of those normally payable under Indian law.

But many in India were unhappy with the settlement and in particular with the way the compensation has been administered. Survivors have each received only around $500, barely enough to cover a year’s medical expenses.

In 1999, Indian lawyers filed a class action suit against UCC charging the corporation with violating the human rights of the victims and alleging that Union Carbide ‘demonstrated a reckless and depraved indifference to human life in the design, operation and maintenance of the facility in Bhopal’. The lawsuit was dismissed on 20 August 2000 in a Manhattan federal court on the grounds that compensation had been settled.

But protestors, supported by international environmental and human rights organizations and anti-globalization campaigners, launched a hunger strike in June this year to bring pressure on the he Indian government to compel Dow Chemicals — a multi-national corporation with sizeable interests in India and which merged with Union Carbide last year — to assume any future UCC liabilities. They also — successfully — demanded a more tightly-defined redistribution of compensation among survivors.

The protestors are also angry that the Indian government is applying to the Bhopal court to reduce 11-year-old criminal charges outstanding against Warren Anderson from culpable homicide to criminal negligence, which carries a much lighter sentence.

Barbara Dinham, director of an educational charity, Pesticides Action Network, accused it of ‘prioritizing corporate interests over their own communities’ and called for a withdrawal of its application and for steps to be taken immediately to extradite Anderson.

The government nevertheless submitted its application on July 17, although the Bhopal court judge accepted a counter submission from survivors’ groups and has adjourned the case until August 27.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.