Episode 4: We Were Blinded by the Gas; What Excuse Does the Government Have?

EPISODE 4: WE WERE BLINDED BY THE GAS; WHAT EXCUSE DOES THE GOVERNMENT HAVE?

ACT I

Apoorva: In the summer of 1985, protestors demanded the government provide jobs for survivors of the tragedy. Those protests began a decades-long struggle for justice that continues to this day.

Molly: Rasheeda Bi, Champ Devi, and her fellow survivor-activists had no idea what they were signing up for when they asked a simple question: why are we not paid equally? That snowballed into a decades-long crusade. In order to get equal wages, they had to fight not only cultural barriers but even the structures that were seemingly set up for them: the tailoring skills center was set up specifically for gas survivors; the government centralizING claims allegedly for bargaining power; and the political parties who kept promising that they would amplify the survivors’ voices. 

Apoorva: I don’t know if snowballed is the right word because it implies that life happened to them — when in reality, they seized control of their own lives. Overcoming poverty, overcoming patriarchy, overcoming the narrow vision of what they were told their lives could and should be. It all started with a simple question of why and a simple belief in why not.

Rasheeda Bi: When we arrived, the Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi refused to meet with us. So when Rajiv Gandhi wouldn’t meet us, we sat under India Gate for 10 days. In those days, there wasn’t so much security. We used to eat and sleep and sit there all day and night. We got to the PM Mansion at 2am one night. That’s where we ran into Suresh Pachouri – a politician from Madhya Pradesh in and out of Congress.

     And then said that whatever asks we have, he will fulfill all of them. We said, great, why don’t you write it down? And he said, what you don’t trust me? In those days, we were so naive that we believed him. We had never left the house, we weren’t educated, so how were we supposed to know that politicians lie? 

[music]

Rasheeda Bi: From that day to today, we never saw that man again, let alone got any of his promises fulfilled. A few years later, Rajiv Gandhi came to Bhopal to visit the survivors, and we said to him that we came to see him on foot. And he said he had no idea, no one told me. After he left, Gandhi never looked back. Then, Rajiv Gandhi died in his car accident.

Apoorva: But Rasheeda and the others did not give up hope. They decided to try another route – taking their fight into the court system, as well. 

[music]

Rasheeda Bi: We went to tribunal* court. And after 6 years of the case going on, the judge says we were in the wrong court; we need to go to the High Court. After another 3 years, you’re still in the wrong court; you need to go to the Labor Court. So 10 years of our lives were just wasted away like this. 

     In the Supreme Court in 2013, we got the decision that we should get Rs 1500 in wages and 2 lakhs in lost income extra. So finally, we won, but we still have not got full justice.

[music]

Molly: They finally won almost $3,500 USD present-day. Rasheeda Bi and the other women started their journey in 1989–

Apoorva: Well, really, they started in 1985, when they began to demand real jobs with decent wages. 

Molly: And didn’t receive the final ruling from the Indian Supreme Court until 2013. That’s almost 30 years of waiting for a verdict.

Apoorva: A verdict as to whether or not being affected by the gas tragedy – which was completely outside of their control – and suffering with its consequences for decades should keep them from making a living wage. 

 

INTRO

[music]

Molly: This is the story of the Bhopal gas tragedy, of the men, women, and children who survived it, and the decades-long struggle for justice, compensation, and the right to clean drinking water.

Apoorva: This is the story of the Bhopalis who were shaped but not defined by the disaster, of hope, of resilience, and of memory. I’m Apoorva Dixit.

Molly: This is They Knew Which Way to Run. Please note that this podcast contains depictions of death and loss that some people may find disturbing. 

Apoorva: And I’m Apoorva Dixit.

—

Molly: Episode 4: We Were Blinded by the Gas; What Excuse Does the Government Have?

 

ACT II

Molly: As you probably remember, Union Carbide was an American company. Its president was Warren Anderson. According to The New York Times, Anderson was a carpenter’s son who had devoted his life to climbing the Union Carbide corporate ladder, arriving at work at 7 a.m. and frequently moving from city to city. As president and chief operating officer, Anderson ruled over an empire with 700 plants in more than three dozen countries. His major concern before the tragedy was disappointing financial results: in 1979, the company had predicted its sales would reach $13 billion in 1983. But in 1983, they were around $9 billion, and earnings had dropped more than 90 percent. 

     And then came Bhopal.

Apoorva: The news of the tragedy began spreading immediately. There was no cell phone footage but plenty of horrifying photos began circulating. Photos of bodies covered in white sheets lined up in the yard in front of the hospitals, photos of people with eyes wrapped in gauze and clutching their heads. So Warren Anderson came in to assess the damage and offer his…  thoughts and prayers. 

Molly: Here’s another phone call I had with Apoorva during her first couple months in India. 

Apoorva [phone interview]: I mean, that’s the American response to any tragedy, you know? You need to have a strong PR front; you need to be there, on the ground to be, like, “Yes, we are here supporting the local people” or whatever. But the moment he showed up, obviously, it was just such a huge– the scale was so beyond anything that anyone had imagined. He did not realize how angry and violent that people were about to get.

Molly: While Anderson was in India, however, he and UCC realized how bad the situation really was, and he was charged with manslaughter.

     This was, at the time, shocking. Anderson had only come to India under the assumption that he would be given safe passage. But when he arrived, he was arrested by Madhya Pradesh police and taken to the Union Carbide guest house and put under house arrest. It was clear that he was in danger – protests were getting violent and officials refused to let him visit the factory when he asked to. Anderson began to realize that he might not be allowed to leave Bhopal, and that he might be headed to an Indian prison instead.

Apoorva: In the Union Carbide guest house, it’s been reported that there was a landline phone in his room that he used to call the U.S. for help. Who he actually called, we have no idea. The Chief Minister for Madhya Pradesh at the time was Arjun Singh. Arjun Singh was not even in Bhopal that day. He was at an election rally elsewhere in the state when he received a call directing him to let Anderson go…

Molly: The details of this call – and, actually, many of the details surrounding what happened with Anderson – are still somewhat  a mystery. But what we do know is that after only a few hours in the guest house, Anderson paid Rs. 25,000 (roughly $450 today) for bond and was flown to New Delhi and then back to America. As part of his bond, he promised to return to India to stand trial. 

     He never did.

[music]

Molly: What we still don’t know about Anderson’s story, however, is who gave the official order to let him go. Arjun Singh, the one who received the call to let Anderson go, wrote in his autobiography that it was the Union Home Secretary who called him, quote “on the instructions of the then Union Home Minister” – his boss. But the Home Secretary claims that he didn’t become Home Secretary until 1985, a year after the tragedy.

Apoorva: In my time in Bhopal, I often heard the rumor that the call came straight from the top, that Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi himself intervened. Arjun Singh died in 2011, so that may be one element of the story that we can never truly know. However, this was just one more instance where many survivors believed their government was working more on behalf of America than its own people. 

Molly: In an interview with The New York Times five months after the tragedy, Anderson said that he felt lost and helpless. “You wake up in the morning thinking, can it have occurred?” he said. “And then you know it has, and you know it’s something you’re going to have to struggle with for a long time.”

Apoorva: But Anderson never even showed up to stand trial. And who could make him? The U.S. Court that dismissed the case in New York and sent it to India had only given India jurisdiction for the civil case, not the criminal one. Union Carbide maintains that it is not subject to criminal jurisdiction in India and has not consented to it. 

     But India made many attempts to extradite him. With the support of the US government, Anderson escaped extradition by insisting the 1989 settlement with the Indian government ended the chance to prosecute him for anything. He avoided subpoenas for civil cases by changing jurisdictions and moving between his homes in Florida, Connecticut, and The Hamptons. 

     Finally, in 1992, Bhopal officially declared him a fugitive. 

Molly: For years, there were protests in India to bring Anderson back and make him face justice for what his company had done. Even today, the vehement hatred for Anderson can be felt throughout Bhopal. The phrase “Hang Anderson” became a common slogan people scrawled on the walls of the factory, and on protest signs. 

Apoorva: I’ll never forget what Shahazadi Bi told me when I asked her about Anderson and the factory. Shahzadi Bi was my guide along with Nasreen Bi. She was wise with a quick laugh that almost hid how fierce she could be. 

Shahazadi Bi: When I hear factory, I think of the owner. If Warren Anderson appeared in front of me, I feel like I could just drink his blood. If he hadn’t built this factory, this would not have happened to us. Gas only leaked one night, but we drank the poison of that factory for 20 years!

Molly: This man became a central character in so many survivors’ lives. They blamed him, they hated him, and to this day, they remember him in infamy. 

Apoorva: The only criminal convictions to come out of the Bhopal Gas Tragedy were finally made in 2010. Seven middle managers of the Union Carbide factory, all Indian citizens and most in their 70s, were convicted for causing death by negligence. They were sentenced to two years’ imprisonment and fined about $2500, but all were released on bail soon after the verdict.

     And Warren Anderson? Nothing. Anderson died peacefully in 2014 at a nursing home in Florida at the age of 92. 

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ACT III

Molly: In 1991, around the same time Rasheeda and the other activists were just beginning their court battle, the Bhopali government started to build a road through Bhopal. In order to do so, they had to demolish many of the slums throughout the city, and particularly around the factory. These were people’s homes. Many of the families in these slums had lived there for decades. Their kids had grown up there. They had made their livelihood there. They experienced the gas tragedy there, and worked through the aftermath there – together, as a community. 

Apoorva: Here’s Nasreen Bi, who served as one of my guides during my research. She was a younger survivor, only a couple of years old when the Gas Tragedy happened, and she had since grown into a savvy community health worker and organizer. She grew up in the Hamidia slum next to the factory and the iconic Hamidia Hospital where many gas victims ended up the night of the tragedy, and many, many nights after. She and her entire family were moved 15 miles away from their home to make way for what is now known as the VIP Road – a highway to run alongside the Big Lake of Bhopal. Here she is telling us about the protests that were organized against being relocated.

Nasreen:  The energy was terrible. We were so stressed and sick. None of us had been paid yet for the gas disaster, and there was a lot of poverty in general. We did a lot of protests near the VIP Road for 3 days. They bulldozed all of our homes. It was raining so much then. Back then, the new land where they moved us to was all dirt, so all of this flatland had become swampy and crawled with insects. I got stung by a scorpion 3 times! So I was very sick. They broke 700 buildings in my neighborhood. The rest of the people here came from different parts and at different times. One neighborhood came from Barkhedi, another came after the Bhopal riots in ‘92. Most of the people they moved here are gas survivors.

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Apoorva: Nasreen Bi and many activists believe that this was more than just development. They believe the slums were bulldozed intentionally to break up the gas survivor communities, and that these families were moved to the outskirts of town to make it more difficult for the survivors to organize. 

Molly: Well, what do you think about that?

Apoorva: It’s just so difficult to know. But the thing is that they are right. Breaking up these communities had a significant effect on their ability to organize. And around this time, organizing was really starting to ramp up. Because now, more than seven years after the tragedy, people still had not received any compensation.

 

ACT IV

Apoorva: Income inequality in India looks a lot like it does in the U.S. It is visible, extreme, divisive. And as is often the case, the poor did not have the safety net the wealthy did. While the whole of Bhopal was gas affected, the poor were gas, and poverty, and caste affected. My dad explained it well:

Ashish: It’s the poor who are the real poor. They work very hard, and they hardly have enough  food on the table by the end of the day. Then there’s the middle class, which is typically the government employees and people who are not ultra rich, but they’re okay. Their kids go to good schools, and they’re able to educate them. Then there’s the rich class, which is people who can do whatever, they can buy whatever. I kind of fell in the middle, which is kind of upper, higher middle class, but not rich class.

     In that society, there was not much mention of Bhopal. First off, because there were not many victims from that class of people. Secondly, there was hardly that – affected that class. So the poor suffered, and the poor struggled, and the poor protested, but the people who were better off were hardly even affected. Except for probably the long-term effects that happened to them for being in Bhopal. It was never a discussion topic among us. Not because we were immune; it was just not a topic of discussion. Hardly ever came about.

     Initially, like I said, the whole city came to a grinding halt, and the whole city came together to help. And then after that, the facts of the case – who was right, who was wrong – we didn’t hear much. My exams for that year were postponed. So that was the direct thing that affected me.

Molly: In fact, life for the middle and upper classes continued on in a lot of ways as was planned. People who were planning to move moved, people that were planning to stay stayed, buildings that were planned to be constructed were constructed. Here’s Apoorva’s neighbor, Karan, talking about Judge Colony. 

Karan Gupta: At that time, this house in which you’re sitting right now wasn’t even made. It was all a mountain at that time. No construction was there at that time. When my grandfather decided to build up a colony here, 500 meters around the house which was given to him by the government officials, as he was the district judge at that time. So that goes to show that even the judges didn’t feel that there were some remaining harmful effects in the nearby area, and they were completely okay with building up a huge colony there.

     Even now, this area is essentially the heart of the city. There have been no effects of this on the surrounding resources, on the water table, etc. There have been no effects of these kinds because we drink– there have been borewells here. We get our water from the nearby lake, which could have been contaminated. It was the largest man made lake at that time. And still people consume water from that lake. So that goes to show that the situation was handled really well by the city officials and everyone. How they didn’t let the resources be hampered, and how the new generations don’t even feel any effects of it.

Apoorva: Karan is the child of a gas survivor, just like me. He is a proud Bhopali. So is my dad, so is Rasheeda Bi, so is Nasreen Bi. And yet, their memory of the tragedy that devastated their city, that was a global event, their perception of the government is so dramatically different. People in the US often ask me if the gas tragedy is better remembered in Bhopal, if it’s just the US that’s forgotten. But how can you remember something you were never taught?

[music]

Molly: While life returned to normal for many people in Bhopal, those most affected were still waiting on compensation. Years went by and they received nothing. They protested and they received nothing. 

     Finally, as we mentioned in Episode 3, the news came that the Government of India had settled with Union carbide for $470 million, but that was less than a seventh of the original $3.3 billion ask. So the gas survivors, led by NGOs on the ground, appealed. In 1991, however, the Supreme Court upheld the original settlement, but they did add that Union Carbide would have to pay an additional $17 million to fund a hospital for the victims. The Court also ordered the Indian government “to purchase, out of the settlement fund, a group medical insurance policy to cover 100,000 persons who may later develop symptoms” and cover any shortfall in the settlement fund. 

Apoorva: Now the question became how to distribute the settlement. Bhopal set up courts, where survivors were meant to come, present their case, and claim their compensation. If a family member died, you received a certain sum. If you were affected, you received a different sum. People were classified into “grades” as to how badly affected by the gas they were.

     Many survivors were left helpless in the chaos of trying to understand the paperwork they would require to actually receive compensation. They needed proof of identity, proof of address, proof of death, proof of injury, and all kinds of other proofs people did not have. And many could not read, even if they did. After the hurdle of paperwork came the hurdle of making a court date and actually receiving the money. Here, again, the wealthier classes were advantaged, and the poor were left vulnerable to exploitation. Here’s how my dad remembers it:

Ashish: So then I went to Pune for my studies, worked in Bombay, came back to Bhopal in 1990, and started my own business. Then the big event was, they’ll be distributing some relief. So this is more like ‘94, ‘95. There was money that was claimed by the government of India because they passed the Bhopal Gas Tragedy Act, but people never saw any money. Eventually, they set up courts to distribute money.

     For me being direct in the line of attack of the Bhopal Gas Tragedy, I received initially, I think, Rs. 50,000. I had to file my paperwork and case, and probably ‘95 or ‘96 I got 50,000, which in dollar terms would be $700. And then later on, they had some more money to give out. Overall, as a victim of the Bhopal Gas Tragedy, and for the damages suffered, I received $1,000.

Molly: $1000. That’s it. For a chemical leak that turned a city into a gas chamber, that brought about scenes of the apocalypse, that tore apart families, and irreparably damaged so many more. For all of these, the survivors received $1000 – at least, the ones who actually got their compensation at all. 

Apoorva: The survivors are rightfully angry to this day. Bano Bi met me in her home, one of the few houses that still had exposed brick. The red of the brick glinted off her henna-dyed hair and black kurta with red embroidery. Here’s how Bano Bi felt about her “compensation.”

Bano Bi: They gave us a crumb so long ago: Rs. 25,000. First they only gave us 200, then they gave us 12,500, and then more. Until finally they gave us 25,000. What is 25,000? Just $352. The value of a human is great. It is priceless. Who knows how much a person can earn in a lifetime? 25,000 isn’t even enough to run a household. Why did they give us that money? As a loan? They didn’t give us our right. Everyday, we die. We couldn’t see the sunlight for months. 

Molly: While the actual sum of the compensation is a slap in the face, in and of itself, the chaos of distribution of the sums was another. Here’s Judge Patel describing the courts. 

GS Patel: Why: They do not have any law and order. It was complete chaos. I was not in favor of them. There was no evidence to back up peoples claims. There was no need for witnesses or anything, so you could receive compensation just for saying you were affected. There was not even proper distribution of money. There was no inquiry to figure out if the people who people say died actually did die.

     What about the people who actually did die, but there were no records of them? Basically, the problem is that those that were not affected received money, and those that were greatly impacted received nothing. The distribution was not fair. 

Apoorva: One of the stories I remember very clearly is that of Sushila. I met Sushila Bai in my grandfather’s neighborhood, in Judge Colony. She worked as a housekeeper in the house down the street. She kept the marble floors shining as she had for decades, working for the same house as it passed from one owner to the next. She had been in Bhopal the night of the Gas Tragedy, living down the hill less than three miles from the factory. She had stampeded that night, and recalling it still brought tears to her eyes.

     The injustice that still plagued her most to this day was that committed by a local lawyer, not Union Carbide. Sushila told me of a lawyer who came by to her slum and promised her and her neighbors that he would get them their money. He helped them acquire paperwork, won their trust. But when it came time to collect the money, Sushila said he took their documents, collected money on their behalf, and disappeared. Years later, Sushila found out he had built himself a nice house in old Bhopal. And she and her family never saw a single rupee. 

[music]

Molly: There have been more rounds of compensation since the first, and each round has gone on for a while. It’s very hard to pin down the timeline for them all. Apoorva asked many people during her research, and they would generally sort of mix all of them together. 

Apoorva: Something I do remember, though, is that compensation was still ongoing in 2003. The reason I remember it is because my family lived in India that year. I was in third grade, and I remember playing with all of the other elementary school kids in the neighborhood. There was Rishu and Rashi who lived next door, there was Shilpa with a parrot down the street, and Adi across the street who had a garden full of sweetpeas. We left in 2004. When I came back to visit a few summers later, all of my friends had moved away as well. 

Molly: None of your childhood friends were left? 

Apoorva: Very few. It was not until I moved back as an adult to conduct this research that I figured out why so many had left. Their parents were judges that had been brought in to hear the compensation cases, and they were renting homes in Judge Colony. The reason they had all left by 2006 is because that is the year Bhopal finished hearing cases. In September 2006, the Welfare Commission for Bhopal Gas Victims announced that all original compensation claims and revised petitions had been “cleared”.

Molly: To this day, there are pending cases in the Indian Supreme Court to appeal for more compensation. Activists argue that because incorrect mortality numbers were used in the 1989 settlement, they deserve more now. And many gas-affected survivors, like Vishnu Bai, feel betrayed by the sub-par quality of care from the Indian government. 

Apoorva: Vishnu Bai is another survivor-activist I met in JP Nagar, right across the street from the factory. She is a petite woman, less than five feet tall, with somber eyes that would fill up with tears every so often while she talked. It was so clear that when she spoke, she was no longer in her blue brick home but back in 1984, reliving it all. 

Vishnu Bai: The gas affected at least have the gas to blame for their blindness. What excuse does the government have? 

[music]

Apoorva: Some good, of course, did come out of the compensation. Some people were able to get treatment that they badly needed, or at least pay for some of their medical bills. Some people were able to move forward with their lives, even in small ways. Nasreen Bi, who we introduced at the start of the episode, was one of those people. 

Nasreen Bi: When we befell bad times, we didn’t own our house. We had a tough time getting 100 rupees together to even pay rent. Then a nearby house was selling for 15,000, so I went to my mother to ask her for the money. When I have the money, hopefully one day, then I can pay her back. At that time, I was 3 months pregnant with my son, and that’s when I got. 33,000 for the Gas Tragedy. I am D grade because I inhaled more gas. When I got that money, I gave that money to my mom. I put the money on a plate and I put flowers on top, and then I took the money over to her decked in flowers. 

     That’s why I feel that if I want to help empower someone or get something or give something, then not until the debt is repaid can someone move forward, neither you nor them. 

[music]

 

ACT V

Molly: Apoorva had the chance to work with several non-governmental organizations during her time in India, and we’ll describe those in a minute. But first, here’s what her take was on the differences between the types of organizations when we spoke on the phone in December of 2017.

Apoorva [phone interview]: So essentially there are like two kinds of NGOs in Bhopal, from what I’m understanding, currently. There’s very much the old guard that has been around since the day the tragedy happened – since Day One they’ve been activists, they’ve been fighting for justice. But they’re older, you know? They’re not tech-savvy, they do not trust foregin funding, they do not trust international interference of any kind. They believe their fight is with the Indian government, who is responsible for them. And their supporters are mostly older. They’re older, and poorer, and they’ve been with them since the beginning.

     Then there’s the new guard, and when I say new, I mean they came around in the ‘90s, not that they happened yesterday. But they didn’t come around like at that time. But the new guard is very much tech-savvy, like they know English, they know how to advertise themselves. They very much accept foreign funding, because they believe accepting money from the Indian government will actually curtail how much they can criticize the Indian government.

Molly: So Apoorva worked with three main organizations while she was there. There’s the Sambhavna Clinic, which is headed by Satinath Sarangi, who we heard from in previous episodes. He is affectionately known in the community as Sathu Bhaiya, or “older brother.” At the Sambhavna Clinic, gas tragedy survivors receive free medical care through a variety of Eastern and Western techniques less than half a mile from the Union Carbide factory. They’re what Apoorva considered one of the New Guard.

Apoorva: Then there’s the Chingari Rehabilitation Center, which I introduced in Episode 3. Rasheeda Bi and her friend Champa Devi Shukla co-founded the center for gas survivors’ children with disabilities. This center is part of the New Guard, too, and actually partners with the Sambhavna Clinic. 

Molly: And lastly, Apoorva worked with Bhopal Gas Peedit Mahila Udyog Sanghathan, which means Bhopal Female Gas Survivor Labor Union. We’ll be referring to them as BGPMUS, because I can probably only get that name right this one time. BGPMUS is part of the Old Guard. They’ve been around pretty much since the beginning, functioning since the tragedy in 1984 and then as an official organization a few years later. 

     All of these organizations grew out of the movements that Rasheeda Bi, Champa Devi, Nasreen Bi, and so many others began decades ago. Today, they are still taking care of the survivors in their communities and advocating for long-term solutions. And every year, they commemorate the anniversary of the gas tragedy, although they do so in different ways. Here’s a clip from a phone call I had with Apoorva just a few weeks after she went to some of the 33rd anniversary rallies. 

Apoorva [phone interview]: So it used to be that in the weeks leading up to the anniversary, it used to be this huge thing in the newspapers, and all of the media– local media and international media! But now, so many years later, it is definitely pattered down. The last time that major Western media reported on the Bhopal tragedy was three years ago, on the 30th anniversary. This year, I was looking for it, so I started noticing stories, like 4 days before, 3 days before, but they were always on like the fifth page, it wasn’t the front lines.

     So I ended up going to two rallies. The first rally was on the night of December 2nd. This was the Sambhavna Clinic rally, and it was a candlelight memorial. We started marching at this historic park, we marched across one of the major roads in Old Bhopal, called VIP road, and we crossed this brand new bridge. We ended in this historic field called ___. But it was decked in photographers. Mostly the photographers, from what I could gather, were from the NGO itself. And it was obvious that they had done this many, many years now. And what this NGO and many other younger NGOs that work with this NGO understand is what’s important isn’t necessarily making a big stink in the local community, but what’s important is getting your message out of Bhopal, and out of India. But essentially, they know how to play the game. They know how to play the 21st century NGO game. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I think they’re smart.

Apoorva: I ended up spending more time with these newer NGOs during my time in Bhopal than I did with the Old Guard, like BGPMUS. But for the anniversary rallies, I found myself much more moved by BGPMUS than the New Guard rallies. 

Apoorva [phone interview]: So then I went to Bhopal Gas Peedit Mahila Udyog Sanghathan’s rally, on December 3rd, which was Sunday. And that was actually way larger. There were many more people there, at least 1,000, and this was again a much more standard Indian rally. They had hired this huge stage, and this tent, and they had these old-looking speakers everywhere. And the crowd was very different. This crowd was much poorer than Saturday night’s crowd. They were much more Muslim. There were many more survivors here. Like I said, there were 1,000 of them.

     And I specifically remember one of the speakers I heard. I had gone with her to deliver invitations to this rally a few weeks earlier. And when I say deliver invitations, I essentially mean we drove around in this little auto-rickshaw making announcements that the rally was happening, and people should come, and we were gonna update them on the status of pending court cases. This woman that I had gone with, she has been an activist for a very long time. She herself is now above the age of 60, recently had heart surgery, is herself aging and in many ways still suffers the effects of long-term exposure to MIC gas.

     She begins telling the story of that night. Which is something that most all of the speakers had avoided, because everybody recognizes that everybody in the crowd has a similar harrowing tale. And so she gets up there, and she starts telling the story of that night. People told her to run so she grabbed her son and daughter, and children, and started running. But then at a certain point they realized that they were missing one of her grandchildren. So then they abandoned running and they were just going around looking for this child. And she saw these horrible things while they were looking for this child. And she remembers, instead of the child, she finds her son, or her cousin, who’s dying, and essentially has to leave him behind because she’s determined to find this child. And people were crying. Like most of the crowd had tears in their eyes. I had tears in my eyes.

Apoorva: The drive that motivates Amida Bi to tell her story year after year goes deeper than reliving the past. It is about the deeper meaning of what that memory reveals. The darker themes of humanity that Bhopal showed that continue to echo in contemporary disasters. Sathu, head of Sambhavna Clinic, who we introduced earlier, put it well.

[music]

Sathu: For me, there are stuff that happened in different periods of time that basically raise civilizational questions. Like the rise of the Third Reich, that raised questions about who are we, how are we as people? And can we become really, really evil? And the answer is yes. And stuff like that. So I think Bhopal is something like that. It exposes the true nature of corporate business. It shows that corporations would kill you, maim you, poison you for life, make you sick, just so they can make profits. And at the same time, it was a leak in what I would call the civilizational fantasy that governments are there to protect you. That scientists are there who will find the truth and give you protection and help science, help people. And the judiciary is there to give you justice and decide what’s right, and what’s wrong. And so all that is one huge, what can I say, BS, you know, at the end of the day.

Apoorva: I am an optimistic person, and honestly, I think, in some ways, so is Sathu. Yes, the meaning of Bhopal and Bhopal’s memory, to him, is a complete shattering of his belief in the system we live in, a complete shattering of the civilizational fantasy that someone is going to come take care of us. And yet, he has dedicated his life to this cause. He has spent decades running a free hospital in J. P. Nagar, planning large-scale protests, inspiring journalists and authors to share Bhopal’s story. 

     I think the deeper meaning of Bhopal is a belief in this community, a belief in this community’s power, and the fundamental truth that yes, humans can be evil, but we can also be good. No individual or institution is morally absolute. We all have a Warren Anderson in us, and we all have a Sathu Satirangu in us, and every day, we choose. We choose to not look away, we choose to accept that we are capable of goodness and badness, and we choose to do something about it. 

 

OUTRO

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Molly: You’ve been listening to They Knew Which Way to Run. Tune in next time to learn about what’s happening in Bhopal today – a parallel crisis that was brewing under Bhopal at the same time as the gas tragedy – also the direct result of the Union Carbide factory. 

Apoorva: We encourage you to check out our website at www.TheyKnewWhichWaytoRun.com, where you can learn more information about the tragedy, see photos of the survivors and make a donation to NGOs on the ground still fighting for justice today. You can also read a transcript of this episode. This podcast series is written, edited, and produced by me and Molly Mulroy. Quinn Mulroy is our sound editor and Associate Producer.

Molly: If you liked this episode, please be sure to rate, review, and follow us. All the interviews used in our podcast were conducted by Apoorva Dixit both independently and while working with Sambhavna Clinic and photographer Francesca Moore. Our head of marketing is Shreya Joshi, our transcription specialist is Avi Dixit, our copy editor is Julia Hamilton, our cover art was designed by Amey Zhang, our website designer is Ljiljana Brusic, and all of our music is composed by Derek Renfroe. 

Apoorva: A very big thank you to everyone who supported us with this podcast and the following Bhopalis for sharing their stories for this episode: Rasheeda Bi, Shahzadi Bi, Nasreen Bi, Ashish Dixit, Karan Gupta, Bano Bi, Judge GS Patel, Vishnu Bai, and Sathu Satirangi. Also thank you to our voice actors: Rachana Dixit, Vartika Shukla, Durran Noorani, Meena Kasargod, and Garima Misra.

     I’m Apoorva Dixit.

Molly: And I’m Molly Mulroy. Thank you for listening.

 

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*CORRECTION: The episode audio says “Criminal Court.” Due to a transcription error, it should have been “Tribunal Court,” which is an alternative to the traditional courts and is meant to provide faster adjudication. While we cannot edit the podcast audio itself, we are noting the correction in the online transcript.