New Villains Haunt Victims of Bhopal Disaster

The late afternoon is sunny and pleasant, the breeze refreshing. Not like that night a decade ago.

Inside a dark hovel, Safiya Khan, 55, lies inert on her unkempt cot. Her eyes are glassy, and she wheezes painfully. She paws at her left hand, swathed in rags to soothe the itching that began 10 days ago.

“She is on her deathbed,” says husband Shahejed Khan.

If there is a human symbol of the agony and misery still being caused by the greatest industrial disaster in history, this small, suffering woman with limp, tangled gray hair and fishlike eyes must be it.

The tiny storage shed where she lies dying is right by the seven-foot brick wall of Bhopal’s Union Carbide plant. The venting tube that spewed a killer cloud of methyl isocyanate, or MIC, in December, 1984, is just 150 yards away. Nobody lives closer.

In February, 1989, Union Carbide Corp. and its Indian affiliate paid a settlement of $470 million to compensate victims of the tragedy that authorities say snuffed out 4,000 lives in its first days. Few would appear to have a better claim on the money than Safiya Khan and her husband, who reside on the grounds of an icehouse, where he works as the watchman.

But to this day, the moribund Safiya Khan receives only an interim compensation payment of 200 rupees, or $6, per month. “We’re poor people; that’s why they do this to us,” mutters her 70-year-old husband, who wears a devout Muslim’s white knit skullcap. “This is God’s will.”

Playwright Rajiv Saxena, whose “Story of the Gas Tragedy” has been staged all over India, is not as fatalistic. He is mulling over revising his script to make Indian officials, along with Union Carbide, the villains of the catastrophe. “At this point in time, the government is more guilty, because they have taken the money and haven’t distributed it,” Saxena charged.

Walk into the slums of J. P. Nagar across the road from the now-closed plant or other Bhopal shantytowns, talk to other accident victims, and more elements of this distressing mosaic emerge. In case after case, bureaucratic chicanery, fraud, corruption and callousness, conflicting political ambitions and most victims’ illiteracy and ignorance have combined to make a sham of Indian officials’ promises of generous compensation and free medical care for the Bhopal victims.

“There is only harassment for us in the courts,” said Hazra Bii, 50, who was widowed by the accident. Since the 40 tons of MIC and other toxic gases gushed from the factory’s No. 610 tank, one of her two adult sons has contracted incurable tuberculosis, the other psychological problems.

“The courts demand all sorts of papers,” the petite woman complained. “We have to spend a fortune on photocopying. And they keep putting off our hearing dates. They ask all sorts of questions that don’t have anything to do with our case. How can we remember these things after 10 years?”

But in the past 10 months, officials of Madhya Pradesh state, of which Bhopal is the capital, have dramatically accelerated the settlement of claims. They now say they have cleared more than 100,000 compensation cases, compared with a total of only 9,000 as of a year ago. One recently processed file is Bii’s, who is supposed to get a 25,000-rupee ($810) settlement this month.

Perversely, though, the most grievously injured victims, who consume a maximum of the magistrates’ and government officials’ time, are being bypassed for now--intentionally.

Some disgusted Bhopalis say it’s rank politicking by leaders of the Congress (I) Party, in power in this state and at the national level.

“This is a political decision to please the majority--the people who need the money the most aren’t getting it,” fumed Dr. D. K. Satpathy, director of the government’s Medicolegal Institute here. “It’s a sort of blackmail, and the poor are the victims.”

Of the nearly half-billion-dollar settlement handed over by Union Carbide, $102 million has been paid out in claims, officials say. That sum is far less impressive when interest accumulated by the award kept in the vaults of the Reserve Bank of India is factored in. Government officials estimate the money has earned $48 million, while activists say it’s more like $340 million.

“So what they’ve paid in claims is only a fraction of the interest they’ve made,” charged Abdul Jabbar, an organizer of gas victims.

Of 15,969 death claims, only 6,650 had been accepted at last notice and a little less than $2 million paid out. Doubtless some claims were fraudulent or impossible to verify, because Bhopalis tend to blame the gas for just about every health problem.

But many bona fide claims cannot be proven because of the chaos that reigned after the gas leak, when civil authority ceased to exist and volunteer groups--like drama clubs--filled the vacuum by organizing medical relief and the cremation or disposal of the dead.

“This is our money, and they are harassing us when all we want is our due,” Bii said.

C. S. Chadha, principal secretary in the state government’s Bhopal tragedy relief department, says the Congress government that came to power here a year ago intends to settle all claims in the next two years. Activists, who have insisted on speedier compensation, say what is being implemented is a rip-off on a huge scale.

“Under pressure, including from us, they are adopting faster disposals of the cases,” said Alok Pratab Singh, president of the Poisonous Gas Struggle Accident Front, one of several victims organizations. “But speed is not necessarily justice. The government of India’s attitude now is to settle the claims for amounts that are insignificant and to save most of the money.”

Welfare Commissioner A. D. Qureshi has set 25,000 rupees as the minimum figure for compensation, and many gas victims, even those who complain of disabling lung injuries or other serious ailments, say they are being pressured to settle for that sum.

“There’s almost arm-twisting, and it works, because these people are poor,” reported N. K. Singh, a veteran Bhopal correspondent for India Today magazine. “If they appeal the award, they know they won’t get their hands on the money until their case is decided and that they may lose the appeal.”

Munibee Khan, 35, a mother of seven, suffers from stomach pains so severe she can’t work or even eat normally. In 1990, she had a tumor removed. She lives a mile from the Union Carbide plant and breathed in so much MIC her respiratory tract felt, she recalled with a shudder, like it had been “filled with red chili peppers.”

She has been offered the minimum compensation, she said, on condition she not appeal for more. “But it’s not enough,” the uneducated woman in a long black burkha, or Muslim robe, gently objected. “I feel I’m entitled to twice that.”

To register their protests, members of the group she belongs to, the Bhopal Gas Affected Women’s Industrial Organization, plan to storm the weed-choked grounds of the Union Carbide factory next month on the anniversary of the disaster and demolish the now-idle plant that once manufactured agricultural pesticides.

On its rubble, the women will lay stones inscribed with the names of the people who died in the lethal, choking pall 10 years ago.

What transpired in this pleasant, lakeside city in the heart of the Indian subcontinent--a place where more than 1.6 million people now reside--is usually described, antiseptically, as “history’s worst industrial accident.”

Fran Pathak, a high school chemistry teacher, remembers the terror-filled hours with images that make a listener’s flesh creep.

Around midnight on the night of Dec. 2-3, 1984, after a still-mysterious introduction of water into the No. 610 tank, the huge quantity of deadly gas spurted into the outside air. While people slept, the gas advanced like the plague in Cecil B. DeMille’s “The Ten Commandments,” Pathak said. Only it was milky white and not green.

More than twice as heavy as air, the vapor slipped silently under people’s doors and through their windows. Some, like the Pathaks, it woke by giving their 6-year-old daughter coughing fits. Others, it asphyxiated as they slumbered.

Like more than 100,000 other Bhopalis, the Pathaks fled their home. Their eyes streamed with tears, their throats and insides burned as though they had been seared with a hot iron, and their noses ran.

As the white cloud stealthily advanced in the dead of night, people and animals collapsed and died on the city’s roads, at the rail station, on the outdoor string beds where many of the poorest sleep.

So many succumbed that in the following days Satpathy performed a staggering 3,000 autopsies--so many that he thinks the bronchial asthma he developed may have been caused by MIC released when he sliced open cadavers.

The victims’ blood, he says, was cherry-red: a sign that they had inhaled lethal cyanide.

To date, 639,000 personal injury claims have been filed demanding a share of Union Carbide’s settlement money, which outraged activists still say was an inadequate pittance. Government officials estimate that more than half the claims are bogus, serving only to clog an already overburdened compensation system.

“If you consider major to minor ailments, maybe 200,000 to 300,000 people were affected,” Chadha said.

To sort out the validity of claims and fix the amount of compensation, 38 special courts run by assistant commissioners have been created, as well as five appeals courts. For many functionaries, the scheme has been a gold mine.

“Of each lakh (100,000 rupees, or $3,240) paid out, 20,000 to 30,000 goes back to the pockets of government officials,” said Vimla Ghumarkar of the Gas Affected Women’s Industrial Organization. “Assistant commissioners of relief, clerks, secretaries, doctors, magistrates--they’re all involved. If you want more than 25,000 rupees, you give bribes.”

The pupils of beggar Mohammed Sheikh’s brown eyes were turned a milky white by the gas as he slept outdoors a mile and a half from the Carbide plant. Now nearly blind, and illiterate and with no family members to help him, he was late in filing a damage claim. “So they (corrupt officials) want me to pay a bribe so I can have money,” the 50-year-old pauper said.

Conversely, people who aren’t entitled to compensation can obtain it--for a kickback. Last June, a gang counterfeiting documents to support such phony claims was busted. In cahoots with employees in Qureshi’s office and the special claims courts, the racketeers were charging cheaters 50% of their take.

Officials don’t deny that graft and fraud are rife but say that’s the way things are in India.

Until a final compensatory award is set, residents of 36 of Bhopal’s 56 wards that have been officially designated “gas affected” receive the 200-rupee monthly interim payment, which is often their only means of support.

Some activists say that many recipients were unable to get their payment this autumn, further increasing the temptation to accept the minimum of 25,000 rupees.

People designated “gas affected” are also supposed to get free medical care and drugs. But government efforts so far seem to have chiefly focused on building large hospitals; the major beneficiaries may not be ailing Bhopalis but Madhya Pradesh’s construction industry.

Three times, Shahejed Khan has carried his sick wife from their corrugated shed on the icehouse grounds to a motorized rickshaw for a trip to a state hospital. He seethed when he recounted how she was treated.

“The doctors put her in a dirty place,” he said indignantly. “And they never gave her any medicines. They asked me to buy everything in a chemist’s shop.”

Officials say new hospitals with 1,000 more beds for gas victims will be opened in the next two years. One new facility costing an estimated $21 million is supposed to be built by the Danbury, Conn.-based Union Carbide Corp., using the proceeds of its September agreement to sell off its controlling share in Union Carbide India Ltd., the Bhopal plant’s owner and operator, to a Calcutta company.

In its interpretation of the gas leak’s health consequences, Union Carbide cites a Madhya Pradesh government report mentioning 40 totally and permanently disabled people, 2,680 partially and permanently disabled people and almost 19,000 people who were permanently injured but can still work.

Wide-ranging debate, however, still continues about the effects of the MIC discharge.

A 15-member team of foreign doctors who visited here in January estimated that 10 to 15 survivors of the tragedy die every month after prolonged suffering.

Gas victims may suffer acutely from breathlessness, chest pain, diminished vision, muscular fatigue, hypertension and anxiety, chronic depression, menstrual irregularities, tuberculosis and other physical and mental ailments, the visiting physicians found.

Some who inhaled MIC now have a condition known as “chronic obstructed airways disease,” doctors say. The substance that entered the lungs, a gas being used to manufacture a general-purpose pesticide, triggered an allergy-like response of the respiratory system and inflicted a debilitating condition akin to asthma.

As time goes by, even more health consequences may surface--and on an unknown scale, physicians warn. “Everybody who was living in Bhopal was exposed,” said Dr. B. S. Ohri of Jawaharlal Nehru Hospital, a facility built for those affected by the gas.

Critics of today’s compensation policy, like India Today’s Singh, say that by processing the easiest cases first, the government may in effect be condemning the more seriously injured to death. “They need money now,” Singh stressed. “If they don’t get it, it will be of no use later. They may be dead.”

Chadha replied that officials are moving as fast as they can. He also rejected as “absolute rubbish” allegations of bureaucratic pressure on victims to settle for the lowest award. “The cases are in the courts, and it’s the courts, not the government, that decides what is fair,” the member of the elite Indian Administrative Service said.

Today, the rusted gate to the Union Carbide plant stands locked, with angry graffiti like “Killer Carbide” scrawled on its pillars and barbed-wire-topped wall. Slum-dwellers from J. P. Nagar use the grass in front as an open-air latrine.

Not a single person has ever been tried for one of the greatest catastrophes in modern times, a fact that sickens activists and ordinary Bhopalis. “Forget the Carbide executives; what’s happened to the person who gave the safety certification to the UCC plant without checking, our own people who cheated us?” Satpathy asked. “They should be hanged.”

Every two weeks or so, a magistrate here convenes a hearing as an investigation drags on to identify and punish those responsible for “culpable homicide not amounting to murder” at Bhopal. The probe grew out of a 1991 Supreme Court ruling overturning the quashing of possible criminal proceedings in return for Union Carbide’s payment of $470 million.

The U.S. chemical giant blames the gas discharge on sabotage by a disgruntled employee. Whatever the truth, lawyers and reporters here expect nothing to result from the slow grinding of the wheels of Indian justice. Today, like that dreadful night 10 years ago, Bhopal’s people are “helpless spectators” to what goes on in their city, activist attorney Vibhuit Jha said.