There was always room for another survivor
Sathyu Sarangi, Managing Trustee of the Sambhavna Trust Clinic
When I arrived in Bhopal soon after the disaster, I was rather unprepared. Rushing to the city from the small town four hours away where I worked in an NGO, I had very little information (the news on the government-run radio station had drastically downplayed the tragedy), almost no local contacts and only a hundred-odd rupees in my pocket. I had along a few changes of clothes, because I didn’t think I’d be staying in the city for much more than a week, helping out with emergency relief.
In the early hours of 3rd December, 1984, 40 tons of toxic methyl isocynate (MIC) and other lethal gases were accidentally released from the Union Carbide plant that manufactured the pesticide Sevin. Later investigation pointed to water having entered the storage tanks, thus raising the temperature inside the storage tanks, leading to the deadly gas bursting from tanks that were not designed to manage the pressure. The magnitude of the disaster was not fully known right then. Indeed, some of the impact is coming to light over 26 years later.
The day after the gas leak, the train to Bhopal was nearly empty, and the few on it seemed to have no knowledge of what had really happened at their destination. Yet as soon as I walked out of the railway station I could see thousands of people in utter pain – their eyes swollen, tears streaming down their cheeks, huddled together with family and friends. I saw some attempting to walk with unsteady steps, before falling down – unconscious or dead, I didn’t try figure out.
The enormity of the pain all around and my helplessness to offer any kind of help was numbing. I just stood at the station exit and stared.
My head and hands finally began to work again when I saw hundreds of people helping the victims. Young and old, mostly men, from various social and religious organisations and many more unaffiliated, were busy caring for the survivors. A bus stop just outside the railway station had become a medical relief camp, where survivors could get milk, fruits, water and words of comfort.
Medical supplies were limited to eye drops and antacids to deal with the burning sensation in the eyes and stomach, and tablets for breathlessness. Knowing that these were of little help, most of the volunteers in the area were focused on carrying survivors to passing vehicles, to be taken to the nearby Hamidia Hospital. I joined them for a while, and then decided to continue into one of the neighbourhoods near the station. There, I found the situation to be much worse. Open a door at random, and you were apt to see an entire family sprawled on the floor – some unconscious, some groaning, only a few able to talk. I went back to the main street and soon had more than 50 volunteers join me in carrying people from their homes, lifting them onto passing vehicles. Not one of the drivers of these cars, trucks or auto-rickshaws refused to take the victims to the hospital; there was always room for another survivor.
The evening sky on my first day in Bhopal was lit up by the mass cremation pyres that I was told had been burning non-stop since the previous day. I met a man whose hands were covered with blisters. He lived next to a graveyard. Not knowing what else to do, he didn’t stop digging mass graves for three days and three nights, unmindful of what the work was doing to his unpractised hands. I must have been in a similar state of mind. It was only several days later that I began to make some sense amidst the chaos and uncertainty: Is the water safe to drink? Is the food okay to eat? The unborn babies who had no place to escape to from the poison clouds, were they okay? And I found things to do amidst the millions that needed to be urgently done.
Bhopal Group for Information & Action
Through chance encounters and word-of-mouth I met with local students, activists and social and political workers, as well as volunteers like myself who had come to Bhopal from elsewhere. Overnight, an organisation committed to the people’s struggle for rehabilitation and justice was formed. Three individuals – an activist scientist, a lawyer and the chief functionary of a left political party – were chosen to lead the new group, which almost automatically began to attract gas victims into its fold.
Several other newly-formed organisations were active in distributing relief material, carrying out preliminary medical research and running emergency clinics. Despite this good and crucial work however, internecine conflicts were already palpable, as ideological differences and personality clashes between the leaders prevented a co-ordinated response to the disaster. Our organisation focused on mobilising survivors to demand their rights to healthcare and rehabilitation, collecting, generating and disseminating medical information, and garnering national and international support.
Soon after, we heard that a German toxicologist had arrived in Bhopal with 10,000 ampoules of sodium thiosulphate, which when administered intravenously assisted in the excretion of toxins ingested during the gas leak and thus provided relief. Yet while the ampoules were quickly distributed among government officials and the people they knew, the director of health services, apparently apprehensive of possible side effects, had passed an edict against administering it to common survivors. Our own research, with much help from scientist friends, showed that there were no side effects, and that sodium thiosulphate could indeed be effective in removing poisons circulating in the bloodstream, and thus saving lives of thousands, especially unborn babies. But there was no room for scientific debate in the heated environment, or in the face of vested interests.
Operation Faith
Meanwhile, the dumping of dead bodies by the local authorities, in their effort to downplay the effects of the disaster, quickly became common knowledge. The combination of factors – inadequate safety systems, poor maintenance of the plant, as well as faulty design and practices, all pointed to criminal negligence on the part of Union Carbide and its management. But the release of Warren Anderson, chairman of Union Carbide on bail, followed by his being escorted out of Bhopal under tight security, was confirmation that the government was colluding with the corporation.
We were also unsuccessful in stopping Operation Faith, the state government’s plan less than two weeks after the disaster, to allow Union Carbide to manufacture pesticides from the chemicals left behind in the leaking tank. Our attempts along these lines included highlighting the testimony of scientists detailing how methyl isocyanate, the raw material used to manufacture the pesticide, could be neutralised safely with caustic soda. However, we were just a few people and government officials had more faith in Union Carbide’s science. So we helplessly watched thousands and thousands of people leave their homes, fleeing again from the city before the factory was restarted. A number of survivor activists we had befriended stayed behind with us to guard their neighbourhood from the possibility of the factory leaking yet again. Sitting around log fires through the night, armed with wet rags for possible emergency use, we shared stories and ruminated in clichés about life, death and the meaning of it all.
Operation Faith was started with much fanfare. As pesticide production resumed in the factory a government helicopter sprayed water from the sky, jute screens were placed above the factory walls and water tankers sprayed water along major streets. Survivors commented that the jute screens would not even stop bidi smoke, let alone any leaking gases and wondered whether the gases would follow the wet roads. Another drama was on display at the same time. On the road leading to the factory, workers from RSS and other Hindu fundamentalist organisations marched alongside a truck in which a havan (burning of wood, incense and ghee) was being performed claiming that it would purify the poisoned air. We successfully stopped this procession at Qazi Camp before it could reach anywhere near the factory.
The government move that had dispersed the people who were beginning to organise was not entirely successful. Our first mass mobilisations began in the relief camps set up in another part of the city for those driven out of their homes. The camps were places where people from different neighbourhoods came together and shared their suffering and anger towards both Union Carbide and the uncaring Government of Madhya Pradesh. Here, people talked about the ‘big and the many ways that small people could change it. It was interesting to see how the disaster and its aftermath quickly became a crash course in politics related to corporations and governments, confirming and elaborating long-held wisdoms and convictions. When supplies to the camps were suddenly cut off we marched with several hundred survivors demanding that the governor request urgent help from the central government. Instead of additional help, however, there came orders to close down the relief camps.
Denial & opportunism
As the first few weeks went by, there remained little doubt that, left to its own devices, the MP government would continue to neglect survivors, and also that it would take far more than a few hundred people marching on the Bhopal seat of power to have it respond.
Meanwhile, Union Carbide was in full swing with its public relations campaign. Senior corporate officials were busy telling the world’s media that the leaked gases were similar to a potent tear gas, and unlikely to cause lasting damage. Medical professionals were flown in to Bhopal by the corporation – not to help with the treatment of those exposed, however, but rather to endorse the corporate view in press conferences. It was not just the magnitude and complexity of the unfolding disaster that was overwhelming; dealing with Union Carbide’s deceit and denial was equally challenging.
Then there were the American lawyers who began to descend on Bhopal. Through local agents, they began getting survivors to sign retainer forms – forms that many could hardly see through swollen eyes, let alone read the English-language fineprint – that promised up to 40 percent of any eventual compensation money to individual lawyers, as fees. As competition grew among these lawyers, they began doling out blankets and then cash to entice their new clients, all promising millions of dollars in eventual compensation.
With so much going on, and so much to be vigilant about, there was little time to ponder my own future plans. Questions as to whether, how and how long to stay on in Bhopal never entered my mind. Thanks to donations from local, national and international supporters, the volunteers had places to sleep and adequate meals, but we spent most of our time in the bastis, in the communities of survivors we had by then befriended. Perhaps this sounds odd, but amidst all the sadness these evenings were enjoyable, with people occasionally singing songs, playing music and sharing stories full of rare humour.
Dhikaar Divas
During the third week in Bhopal, we began preparations for a march to Chief Minister Arjun Singh’s house. We decided to have it on the 3rd January 1985, a month after the disaster, which we would observe as Dhikaar Divas (Condemnation Day). This would be an opportunity to publicly challenge the state government’s criminal neglect of the survivors, and to demand that it make arrangements for immediate healthcare and relief for survivors. As we moved from house to house, from one neighbourhood to the next, we found that the local people did not need much convincing – it was only desperate health problems that would stop most of them from joining the rally.
The march began with a few hundred people near the now-closed Union Carbide factory. As we proceeded, more and more groups of people holding hand-scrawled banners and chanting slogans joined the march. By the time we had covered half the distance, the march swelled to over 10,000 people. Our procession was far from orderly – people were everywhere, and traffic stood still. There were so many slogans being chanted by so many groups that it wasn’t possible to hear any one in particular; but what was clear was that these cries came from deep-seated anger and despair. People kept joining in waves, such that by the time we walked up the hill to the chief minister’s palatial, heavily guarded house there were over 15,000 survivors in attendance – far too many for the police to handle.
Once we arrived, we sought a meeting with the chief minister, which was not granted. So, after consulting the many community leaders who had been active in organising the march, we decided to sit on a dharna outside the chief minister’s residence, until he agreed to meet us. People determined enough to face any eventuality cheered the decision, and thousands of voices asserted that we would not move until the chief minister agreed to our demands.
A community of suffering, sharing and hope
Thus began one of my most memorable weeks in Bhopal. Among the rocks and bushes on the hillside outside of the chief minister’s residence, people found places to sit in small groups. Soon, some began to look for wood and to light small fires, and teams were sent to bring food. In the bastis, women breathless and choking more than usual with the fumes from wood stoves were making chapattis not just for their own families but for strangers as well. Families with so little to give were caring for orphaned children who had joined the dharna.
Unbeknownst to the vehicle owners, truck drivers were helping to transport food, firewood and groups of people from the shanties, slipping away from their delivery runs. Children found new friends to play with, and together they would chant the slogans they had begun to learn. A few volunteer doctors were tending to the sick, and there was always a team ready to carry people to the hospital.
Before nightfall, electricians from among the marchers had rigged up connections to the streetlights, which would power loudspeakers used for announcements regarding logistics and updates on the ongoing negotiations. Soon, the loudspeakers also became central for people speaking out. Breathless poets recited poems of dignity and courage; women who had rarely left their thresholds or showed their faces to strangers articulated their anger against a foreign company and a complicit state government.
Indeed, the entire area around the chief minister’s house was transformed, and I was happy to find the time to absorb this magic. It became a place of bustling human activity, intense communication and, most of all, a powerful assertion of the collective spirit of survival and cooperation. By the third day of our dharna the state government began to give way. Arjun Singh initially agreed to a meeting with a delegation of the leaders, but this proved unacceptable to the mass, who insisted that he speak to all of them. Finally he relented and appeared before the survivors, who were all invited into his residence. Of course, he did not agree to all of their demands, and after the week-long siege we had to fight other battles. I can’t remember exactly when it was, but some time in that week of dharna I decided to be part of this community of suffering, sharing and hope. Not once in the last 26 years have I ever regretted that decision.
Sathyu Sarangi, Managing Trustee of the Sambhavna Trust Clinic
Article first published on the 25th anniversary of the 1984 Union Carbide gas disaster
