Bhopal Activists Reportedly Detained : India: Government denies political motive in arrests on eve of tragedy’s anniversary.

On the eve of the 10th anniversary of the Union Carbide gas tragedy, activists Friday angrily accused local authorities of detaining people by the thousands to torpedo their plans for giant protest rallies.

“They didn’t want a big crowd here,” asserted Abdul Jabbar, a leader of a group of victims of the 1984 gas leak.

In the last several days, Jabbar claimed, 11,000 people were arrested here and at other locales across central India’s Madhya Pradesh state to prevent them from congregating in Bhopal.

Another activist, a leader of impoverished and illiterate tribes people whose homes and livelihoods are menaced by a controversial dam under construction, said thousands were turned back.

“They were prevented from coming here because the government was afraid,” the activist said.

Madhya Pradesh Home Secretary Vijay Singh confirmed that some arrests had taken place in the eastern districts of the state, India’s most vast.

But he denied that they were linked to the marches and demonstrations called to commemorate the Dec. 2-3, 1984, leak in Bhopal of deadly methyl isocyanate.

“It was a drive by the railways to check ticketless passengers,” Singh maintained.

In the last three days, 1,500 passengers who were trying to travel for free on trains were pulled off and fined, said Singh, the state’s highest-ranking civil servant charged with maintaining law and order.

“There’s no question of a political motive,” he said.

Jabbar and other organizers of the Bhopal anniversary protests conjectured that the government of Chief Minister Digvijay Singh may have been frightened by the slaughter that followed a Nov. 23 street rally in the neighboring state of Maharashtra.

In Nagpur, where the Maharashtra state assembly was meeting, a police charge on a protest by poor, uneducated tribes people demanding preferential job quotas touched off a deadly stampede in which 114 people were trampled to death.

“They are worried about the violence problem,” Jabbar said. “So they want to keep people away.”

Jabbar’s Bhopal Gas Affected Women’s Industrial Organization has proclaimed the anniversary of the Union Carbide accident a national day of shame to protest the government’s failure to prosecute those responsible and its laxity and slowness in compensating and aiding victims.

Although Union Carbide Corp. and India agreed in 1989 on a $470-million compensation payment by the U.S.-based multinational, only one Bhopal resident in six who claims to have suffered ill health because of the gas has had his case settled.

The exact death toll taken by the toxic cloud that seeped from the now-closed pesticide plant is disputed and extremely controversial, but Madhya Pradesh officials say 4,000 people perished in the accident’s immediate aftermath.

As a tacit admission of how tardy officials have been in handing out compensation awards and ensuring medical care and employment to survivors, Madhya Pradesh’s assembly on Friday reaffirmed by unanimous vote its commitment to faster action.

That was not enough for Babulal Gaur of the opposition Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, the former head of the ministry created to provide relief and rehabilitation to gas victims.

Gaur accused the central government of indifference to the plight of the more than 600,000 Bhopalis who claim that their health was harmed by the poisonous vapor. He said every city resident should receive compensation.

It is true that the main events in Bhopal are not supposed to occur until today, but a unified show of strength by several groups of protesters on Friday was a decidedly anemic affair. Only about 1,500 people took part from the Bhopal women’s group, organizations representing Madhya Pradesh’s tribes and opponents of the giant and controversial Narmada dam.

Under a brilliant afternoon sun, the marchers ended up on a traffic circle dominated by a garlanded statue of India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru.

Survivors of the Bhopal tragedy and foes of the Narmada dam sat together on the asphalt and chanted “Death to Union Carbide!” and slogans against the huge dam in neighboring Gujarat, which if completed will inundate the homes of about 200,000 people, half of them tribal peoples.

The dam is being built to harness the Narmada River, India’s fifth largest, for irrigation and hydroelectric power generation and drinking water.