Episode 7: The Fighters Might Die – The Fight Never Will

ACT I

0:00

Apoorva: I remember the way my Baba’s fingers used to wrap around the handle of his cane as he stood, his other hand leaning on my shoulder. Having fallen twice, he had stopped trusting his feet, so he placed his faith in his hands and in me. 

     Born in Bhopal and raised in Memphis, I chose to move back to Bhopal to live with my paternal grandfather, Baba, as I conducted my research. My decision to move back to India was just as much about spending time with Baba, really; the research was just the means to an end.

     People would ask me if I got bored living with him, and I, honestly, didn’t. Every day, at 10 am sharp, we would read together. Every few minutes, I’d pause my reading to test how much he was actually listening. And he would quip back that I’m not a schoolteacher, and he was listening just as much as he wanted to. He forgot that I got my stubbornness from him.

DN Dixit [on recording]: [singing] …to you.

Apoorva [on recording]: Happy birthday, Chota Papa [Uncle]!

DN Dixit [on recording]: Happy birthday to you, Chota Papa [Uncle]!

Apoorva [on recording]: Yay! Our 2-person celebration is ongoing for your birthday! 

DN Dixit [on recording]: [in Hindi] All right, turn off the video. 

Apoorva: He was my best friend, comforting me when the pain of the Tragedy overwhelmed me. After a long day interviewing survivors and activists, I’d come home feeling defeated, angry. He’d remind me that this Tragedy was much bigger than me – that it wasn’t my burden to bear alone. 

     Our quiet life together suddenly ended a few months into my living with Baba. On December 23 – 4 months into my Fulbright year – Baba died. 

 

INTRO

01:58

[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. I’m Molly Mulroy.

Apoorva: And I’m Apoorva Dixit.

—

Apoorva: Episode 7: The Fighters Might Die – The Fight Never Will

 

ACT II

03:03

Molly: This is our final episode of the series, and we’d like to take a moment to thank our listeners for taking this journey with us. For the finale, Apoorva, her dad, and I all sat down together for the first time in person in five years. 

Apoorva [interview]: All right, you ready? It is our first time all three of us, me, my dad, and Molly, in the same room in five years.

Molly [interview]: Minimum. Probably more like 10… 

Apoorva [interview]: But in specifically working on this podcast. The podcast has been long-distance the whole time. 

Ashish Dixit [interview]: I haven’t seen Molly for a good long time.

Molly: We reflected on this whole experience. This podcast is not exactly casual listening material. It is full of hard stories of tragedy and triumph. It’s been a lot, and it can be tough to digest, so we figured we would share what we have made of it all.

Molly [interview]: But so when she first decided to go … you were excited for her to go to India? I find that a little hard to believe …

Ashish [interview]: No…

Apoorva [interview]: No…

Ashish: Here’s why, right? So it was in a way was very good thing that she was doing, right? She was going back to her roots to find out what was going on. My father was super excited that she is coming back. In fact, he was probably the happiest in his life in a long time. The problem – not the problem, the concern which any dad would have, right – so having been grown there and know how things happen, I was kind of micromanaging some of that…

Apoorva [interview]: Kind of… kind of?

Ashish [interview]: And the reason being because she was right in my backyard, so I had all the connections. So whatever she was doing, I could call somebody and make sure that…

Molly [interview]: So sneaky…

Ashish [interview]: No, I was trying to help her, and she didn’t like it. And some of the things she did, even you, if you look back, probably you would rethink if you wouldn’t have done that. 

Molly [interview]: And I mean, there, haven’t been at least five years between, I mean, do you feel like you would have done anything differently? If you went back now, just sort of with more experience with the research specifically would have been different? 

Apoorva [interview]: It was a really hard year. Like everything that I know now, I don’t think I would sign up for a year like that again very easily. Not to say that I have any regrets about having gone and spent my first year out of college that way. I feel like, you know, obviously it was this like really formative experience, but I don’t know – like a lot of the things that Papa’s talking about, you know, being worried about they were tough. The patriarchy was real; it was ever-present. You know, it was hard being a young woman in India. 

     It was hard doing this research. It was hard, um, logistically, emotionally, in just like every sense of the word. So yeah, and I didn’t, I didn’t fully appreciate that when I first was like, “I got this cool scholarship, I’m going to go now!” Papa was like, “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” And I was like, “How dare you? I’ve done all this research and I know what I’m doing. And I’m going to go now.” 

Apoorva: By the time I got to India, I knew what I was capable of. At 22 years old, of course, I recognized there were nuances that were beyond me – there still are. But at the same time, I was confident. I was really looking to prove myself. For non-resident Indians (a term so common it actually has its own acronym: NRIs) like me, India is often sold as a faraway place that is, above all else, unsafe. This is especially true for a young woman. There’s only one sentence that I was told more frequently than being asked what the heck I was doing in Bhopal, and that was: I do not know and should not trust India. 

     But the thing was my physical safety was never really an issue my year in India. The real issue I faced was people underestimating me: underestimating my ability to bargain with a taxi driver, underestimating my ability to eat pani puri without getting typhoid, underestimating my ability to drive left-hand, stickshift, in jam-packed Indian traffic, and most importantly, underestimating my ability to do this research. 

[music]

 

ACT III

08:21

Apoorva: Many of the stories I heard were crazy for me, as I’m sure they’ve been for our listeners. Sometimes, I also wondered if I was capable of this kind of research. I often felt guilty at my reactions – at how much pain I was feeling from merely listening to others’ pain. I couldn’t even imagine what it felt like to actually go through it. But the thing was that many of these stories were old ones for the storytellers. They had lived through this decades ago and they were forced to make it their normal. 

     Then, I lost Baba. And what had started out as an academic exercise began teaching me lessons on life. Of course, my loss was very different from that of gas survivors. Baba lived a long and full life. He was not taken by a human-made disaster. But it was my first experience with death and with grief. 

Molly: So, what was it like living his house after he had passed away?

Apoorva: Honestly, it was a constant reminder of my loss, so I left, actually. I lived in Mumbai for a month, and then I traveled around India for another. I remember when I first got to Bhopal, my primary goal was to see if I could fit in – if I could get to a point that no one could tell I didn’t grow up here in Bhopal. And after Baba passed, I found myself resisting it. I found myself avoiding my research. I tried not to think about Bhopal.

Molly: So, what was it like when you came back, then?

Apoorva: So my life in Bhopal had shifted. It was completely different after – the way my neighbors treated me was different, even the way I thought of my research was different. I thought of Rasheeda Bi and Rehana Bi and so many others losing their families: the lost memories of their elders, the memories that the young never got to form. Then, instead of avoiding my research, I decided to dive into it. It was the only way to distract myself. I don’t know. Then eventually, I came to realize that it was through remembering Baba that I would really be able move on. 

Molly: I remember a quote you shared with me once by a Buddhist monk, Orma Chodron – about how accessing compassion means we have to break through our fear of pain. She says: “Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a relationship between equals. Only when we know our darkness can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity.”

Apoorva: Yeah. Yeah, no, exactly. I think what really sticks with me about that quote is that compassion is about equals, not the healer and wounded. And that really allowed me to reframe my research from being a burden into being healing. It was not a burden for me to have to hear these stories. In a way, they were healing me. They were putting pieces that were missing from my family’s history back into place. They were teaching me how to grieve. They were showing me how we carry our loved ones with us – always. Now, when I remember my Baba, it’s still tough, even though it’s been so many years. But I remember his love, and I remember an imperfect man whose legacy I proudly carry with me. 

[music]

 

ACT IV

13:08

Bano Bi: They gave us a crumb so long ago: Rs. 25,000 … What is 25,000? Just $352. The value of a human life is great. It is priceless! They didn’t give us our right.  

Molly: Bano Bi and other gas survivors are understandably angry with the compensation they received for the 1984 Gas Tragedy. Not only did the amount of money they were given pale in comparison to the original ask, but the way the legal drama unfolded really deprived them of closure, as well.

Apoorva [interview]: I think that’s a big part of the story is the activists and the survivors, you know, felt silenced through the whole legal process and the compensation process. So like, it went beyond just specifically logistically what can be done for them, you know? There’s this, like, massive silencing of them.

Molly: An interesting modern-day comparison is to the current mass lawsuit against the Sackler family, the owners of Purdue Pharma, which caused the opioid crisis. Part of the settlement agreement is the Sackler family had to spend an entire day listening to victim impact statements read by opioid addiction survivors and family members who lost loved ones. The Sacklers did not have to apologize or even show emotion, but they had to listen. Victims described this as a powerful day to NPR. They said it gave them closure to look the Sacklers in the eyes, to force the villains of their lives to acknowledge their humanity, and to feel united with the other victims. 

Apoorva: It makes me think of Warren Anderson’s quote to The New York Times that we mentioned in Episode 4: “Every morning you wake up and think to yourself, did that happen? And then you realize it did…” That quote just makes me so angry. He is so full of pity for himself, for having caused this huge tragedy. And yet he never stood trial, he never took any accountability. The gas and water survivors never had the closure of looking him in the eye and truly telling him what he and his company did to them. So to this day, they burn him in effigy.

Molly: Well, he knew which way to run, right? Warren Anderson – Union Carbide, more generally?

Apoorva: Yeah, and it was honestly the perfect escape plan. Warren Anderson had no individual liability because it was the corporation’s fault. And the corporation Union Carbide was bought by Dow Chemical, so now there is literally no corporation left to take responsibility. 

[music]

Molly: Having been deprived of justice from institutions, activists in Bhopal have had to make their own justice. And they’re not finished yet. Here’s what Sathu says are the top three goals that he and other survivors are fighting for at the Sambhavna Clinic now:

Sathu: First thing is that have a system in which people can get better medical care, and particularly the next generation gets medical care and rehab – including not just gas people, but I’m including the contamination-affected people in, in this. That is the first thing. The second thing is that the hazardous waste should get removed. That Dow Chemical should accept its liability under U.S. and Indian laws. And that is the polluter pays principle. And there’s no further spread of the contamination. And the third issue is that people still have not been paid adequate compensation. Those poisoned by water have not been paid anything at all. So people should be paid adequate compensation so that they can get whatever the years they have left – that means not in so much agony and misery. 

[music]

 

ACT V

17:54

Molly: One of the things people have most commented on after listening to our podcast is how impressive Rasheeda Bi and the other activist-survivors’ marches to Delhi have been. 

Ashish [interview]: The women march was the tough one to listen to only because I know May and June, and then I know the heat. I can imagine these ladies without any money just marching and not having the money and not knowing where they’ll stay the night, just keep going on. Not knowing if they’ll meet the prime minister. And then there’s the snake story that you talk about. So yeah, that was just for them to endure all of that and reach Delhi.

     Women typically are not let go out of the household unless accompanied by males as such, so for these two leaders to have this kind of followship where all these women just decided to leave and march across India in June – that’s just awesome. I don’t think many people in Bhopal probably even realize that. 

Apoorva: The strength and conviction that it must take to be a part of those marches is truly awe-inspiring. But the key piece that’s always been missing in the Bhopal movement are the institutions. Nobody in a position of power has gone out of their way to actually serve the gas survivors. And this is important. 

     As we mentioned in Episode 5, there were all these political positions created in the local Bhopal government to address the Tragedy: Gas Tragedy Minister, etc. But the men put in these positions of power didn’t really do anything for the survivors. They were just politicians making promises they didn’t keep, and denying the fact that the water crisis is even happening.

Molly: Sathu is clear about how disillusioned he is with the systems and structures society has in place.

Sathu: This report in 2017, October 2017, by the Lancet Commission on Pollution and Health. And they showed that pollution was – industrial pollution – was responsible for 16% of deaths worldwide, which makes it one of the top five causes of death. And the fact is, I would say close to 98% of this industrial pollution is deliberate corporate activity. And pollution is actually too gentle a word for, uh, what should be corporate crime. So in board rooms, people are discussing, “Okay, shall we let this go? All this will disappear, no one will notice…”

     So all of this, and Bhopal is cooking in thousands and thousands of corporate boardrooms. And this is what Bhopal points out, because the good thing is that there’s so much of documentation of this, that this is how things were done. So I think to say that one sixth of the people are dying because of corporate crime and to show that it is the most ubiquitous and most immunity-prone prime, I think it’s one of the most important things that the world has to know as chemicalization goes and increases and further and newer ways in which corporations are making profits by imposing hazardous stuff on people.

Apoorva: People in power don’t just decide out of compassion to make things better – they do it because people demand it. And that’s the victory that the survivor-activists in Bhopal have won over the last 4 decades. They have stood up and demanded compensation, demanded equal pay, demanded clean drinking water. 

Molly: But the thing is activism needs to go hand-in-hand with institutionalized change. Rasheeda Bi, Sathu, Vishnu Bai, Champa Devi – they were able to create new institutions in their communities to address the harm caused by Union Carbide in Bhopal. But there’s only so much that they can do without the cooperation of existing institutions. 

Apoorva: And that’s still a huge issue in Bhopal. Rasheeda Bi and Champa Devi can’t physically remove the factory themselves. The government will have to acknowledge that the factory is still causing pollution and decide to do something about it. The government will have to build infrastructure for clean drinking water. The government will have to change the education curriculum to tell the story of Bhopal. As we heard from Sathu before, there’s still so much more that needs to be done.

[music]

 

ACT VI

23:15

Molly: Many people have told the story of the Bhopal Gas Tragedy. But what they don’t focus on is the victories, and what the activists have accomplished in the years since 1984.

Apoorva: Yeah, there have actually been a lot of movies and books. And they all start before the Tragedy, and they all end the night of the Tragedy. And I think my hypothesis is that Bhopal hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves because that’s the wrong spot to focus on. It makes it feel like it’s all tragedy and disaster. 10,000 people dying in one night – it’s too mind-boggling, and it’s easier to just make those victims into a statistic. 

Molly: Yeah, it’s important to focus on the positive outcomes and the inspirational stories of these activists to keep the story of Bhopal from being just the story of the Tragedy – switching the narrative into “No, these are real people who are still alive.” I think that’s always been the missing element any time people have tried to cover the story: it’s been from way too high of a vantage point. 

Apoorva: At that high of a vantage point, even remembering Bhopal feels simultaneously like too much and not enough. Yes, it is painful. Yes, there were so many lives lost. But there is power in remembrance. It is healing, and it begins to give back the respect to the survivors whose stories have been discarded by the world.

 

Molly [interview]: And I think that’s part of the reason that we wanted to do this podcast because you know, it’s not really a call to action specifically, right? We’re not saying, “Oh, you should do this. When you learn about the tragedy, you should do X, Y, Z.” 

     And I think that’s also why we wanted to include your voice and the voice of other survivors and those children of survivors. You know, as much as Aproova and I can talk about it all day long, we weren’t there, you know, I wasn’t directly affected at all, you know. And, and hearing it, I think for Americans or just other people to listen to the actual voices of people who were there and who have suffered and reflect on that, that’s not necessarily going to lead to direct change … but allow for that sort of like reflection and then people to be like, “Wow…” And listen to this strength, listen to what these people went through and how they overcame it.

Apoorva [interview]: Yeah, and see the metaphors. There’s so many parallels and metaphors that Bhopal provides, like you’re saying, like every day we’re seeing the same story play out again and again and again. And I think …

Ashish [interview]: Yeah. If you forget history, you’re condemned to repeat it. 

Apoorva [interview]: Yeah.

Molly [interview]: Absolutely. 

Ashish [interview]: So it’s important to remember, right?

[music]

 

ACT VII

26:41

Molly: When Apoorva started her research in 2017, she wanted to approach the academic side of things from the standpoint of auto-ethnography. Auto-ethnography is a term used in anthropology circles for when people go to a place that is special to them to better understand it. It’s typically their hometown or their place of birth that has been through some tragedy or hardship. The goal is to try to understand what that tragedy meant, what it means to the people still living there, and what it means to society at large. Even from the beginning, Apoorva intended for her story and her family’s story to be a key piece of her research. Consciously or subconsciously, her decision to go back to Bhopal was as much about understanding the Tragedy as it was about how her family remembered the Tragedy and how other survivors remember it.

Apoorva [interview]: Even before I got really interested in learning about the Gas Tragedy, I have always been really interested in learning about Bhopal. And even my common app essay for colleges was about Baba. 

Molly [interview]: I remember it. 

Apoorva [interview]: Yeah. And Bhopal. And like being, you know, like. Uh, growing up in, in our like bungalow on judge colony and, and right behind our bungalow is a slum. And growing up, I was always kind of taken aback by that, but like, it made me feel bad, so I didn’t look too closely. And so I ended up talking about that in my common app essay. And I remember at the end of the essay, um, my English teacher at the time, Ms. Douglas, was kind of like, “So what’s the takeaway? So what have you done about this?” And I was like, “I’m 18, I’ve done nothing about this. I noticed it. I am aware of it.” 

     But that kind of stuck with me, you know, and I was kind of like, “So what have I done about this?” You know, I’ve always been very acutely aware of my privilege. I mean, I think a large portion – a large motivator for going back to Bhopal and doing this research and this whole project was just like me processing my own, like shock at not having heard about something this big. 

     And I think what also gets lost in things like this is that I feel like we go … It’s either one extreme or the other: it’s either like you’re super privileged and you, like, weren’t affected at all. And you know, it’s like only the poor people that were affected and we’re fine. Or it’s the opposite: and people are like, “Well, you know, I went through it, too, and I’m just as affected” and “Oh my gosh, like, you know, we’re all victims.” And I feel like kind of the point of this project was to figure out the middle ground – like the nuance of yeah, you have these really crazy memories. This is a major world event and we can’t dismiss that by being like, “Oh, we’re so privileged.”

     Um, but at the same time, yeah, everything that came after was like totally different for our family compared to a lot of the people, um, that I met in India. So. It’s kind of like working through my own, you know, historical legacy – family legacy.

Apoorva: I grew up feeling a tension. The tension of being a gas survivor’s daughter, and yet being so insulated by my privilege that, far from experiencing the effects of the Tragedy, I had never ever heard of it. And even after my year in Bhopal, even after this podcast, the tension remains. The tension of wanting to undo a tragedy that happened long before I was born – of wanting to undo all of the suffering. But that’s not really possible. So the tension inside me ensures I never forget the community of survivors and advocates whose conviction now gives me purpose. I can’t resolve this tension, but I can channel it.

[music]

 

ACT VIII

31:11

Molly: The fight in Bhopal is far from over. The Union Carbide factory is still standing – just one of the many, many physical scars that remain, reminding Bhopali activists what they fight for. And the reality of these survivors is hidden from many other Bhopali citizens, and also from the rest of the world. 

     Here is Shahazadi Bi, Ansuiya Bai, and Rasheeda Bi.

Shahzadi Bi: People are exhausted. They have fought and fought, but we still continue to. The government is who has changed. They care less and less.

Ansuiya Bai: Well, the fighters will fight. As long as Sathu Bhaiya, Rachana Di, will fight, I’ll fight alongside them. The fight will never end … The fighters might die, but the fight will never die. 

Rasheeda Bi: There are plenty of people in the world that want to spread poison – especially in our India. They are opening the door to allow these people in and kill us and go without justice. Our thought is if our sisters recognize their strength, women are so, so strong, then this world will change. And we can save the world using our sisters’ effort and fight so that Bhopal never happens again. That is our hope.

Molly: Across from the Union Carbide factory gates a statue has been erected. The statue is a woman running, one arm hiding her face in a sob, and the other clutching her child to her breast. Another child grabs the back of her dress, trailing behind her. Behind the statue stands the J. P. Nagar — no longer a slum but a collection of homes painted in bright colors. The residents in this neighborhood suffer — they have been suffering every day since the tragedy in 1984 and before. 

     But more importantly, they live.

Apoorva: My social studies textbook in 7th grade was wrong. Bhopal is not the second worst industrial disaster in history – it’s the worst. And it’s ongoing. But that one sentence led me to a year of listening to the stories of Rasheeda Bi, Baba, my dad, and other survivors, which led me and Molly here: to this podcast, telling them to you. 

     So now, we’ll leave you with the words of Hazra Bi.

Hazra Bi: I believe we have victory only when history remembers our fight … I want our stories printed in books. Coming generations will continue the fight by reading and remembering us. 

     That will make sure Bhopal does not happen again.

 

OUTRO

34:54

Molly: You’ve been listening to They Knew Which Way to Run. Keep an eye on our social media for updates and new content, including a TEDx Talk that Apoorva gave on the Bhopal Gas Tragedy coming out this summer. The talk was selected for special release by the National TED Conference for “represent[ing] valuable and timely ideas for TED’s global audience” of 35 million subscribers. 

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: Very big thank you to everyone who supported us with this podcast and the following Bhopalis for sharing their stories for this episode: Ashish Dixit, Bano Bi, Sathu Satirangi, Hazra Bi, Shahzadi Bi, Ansuiya Bai, and Rasheeda Bi. Also thank you to our voice actors: Meena Kasargod, Vartika Shukla, Garima Misra, and Rachana Dixit.

     I’m Apoorva Dixit.

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