From the archives of India Today (2004) | Bhopal gas tragedy: The midnight that became a daily nightmare

(NOTE: This article was originally published in the December 6, 2004 edition of India Today)

It was a slightly chilly November morning when three Americans arrived at Vakil Mohammed’s thatched cottage on the outskirts of Bhopal. He was offered a job as a laborer with a daily wage of Rs 3.60 in the newly built pesticide plant outside whose walls he lived. The smell of the factory made Mohammed nauseous, but what the hell, he thought. I could survive this and much more for this amount of money. It was 1970 and Mohammed was 21 years old. He did not expect it to be a Faustian exchange, his entire life for a few coins from Union Carbide India Limited (UCIL).

Since then, all the money that came to Mohammed’s house (in the form of salaries, compensation and interest on compensation) came from UCIL. In exchange he took sweat, blood and his son. Outside the house, in a dirty, congested locality that reeks of open sewers, his wife Jamila points to Mohammed’s cart: “This is Vakil Saheb’s Maruti.” There is contempt in his voice. Jamila can’t stop cursing at Union Carbide while Mohammed doubles over coughing. It’s been that way, more or less, for the last 20 years.

December 3, 1984. Mohammed had just returned from the night shift and Jamila was heating up her frugal dinner. Her two children were sleeping in the yard, curled up under the quilts. Suddenly there was commotion outside. People ran past his house, screaming. Mohammed’s eyes burned, his lungs choked, and he knew that the killer gas, methyl isocyanate, had escaped. With his family of four, he ran in the opposite direction of the factory. Covering their faces with a cloth, they arrived at a dairy where there were many like them. It was the longest night of their lives.

In the morning, Mohammed returned to his shanty town. The roads were full of corpses. People collapsed while fleeing and died. The army had entered, but the smell of death lingered. Mohammed returned to his family and found his eldest son, 8-year-old Aqueel, struggling to breathe. He rushed the boy to the nearby hospital. They saw thousands there, with their eyes wide open, breathing hard and unable to stand.

The government, the police, the courts, the media, social activists and the rest of the world sprang into action. But Mohammed, whose last salary at UCIL was Rs 2,000, did not know how he would feed his family. Government inspectors offered a paltry sum of Rs 1,500 for each affected person. In 1985 the demand for adequate compensation grew. The activists reached Bhopal. The radio and television teams, reporters and correspondents did the same.

Then, as suddenly as they had arrived, they left in 1986-87. “We are among the few activists who have continuously raised the demand for compensation for the victims,” ​​says Abdul Jabbar, director of the NGO Bhopal Gas Peedit Mahila Udyog Sangathan. There have been others like him: Greenpeace activists, the Sambhavna Trust and survivors like Rasheeda Bi, Champadevi Shukla and Raisabi who fought for compensation and rehabilitation. Others established clinics and health centers. UCIL created the Bhopal Memorial Trust that runs the Rs 100-crore multi-specialty hospital.

Amid all this, the demand for the extradition of Warren Anderson, then-CEO of Union Carbide, would wax and wane. Union Carbide has a website, www.Bhopal.com, where it disclaims all liability and misconduct. But the FAQs about the Bhopal victims do not say how Mohammed makes a living. By 1989 he had already exhausted the money he received from his provident fund. He now had a third son, three-year-old Wasim, born after the tragedy, and Aqueel was terminally ill. Ironically, the money again came from Union Carbide.

In a Supreme Court settlement order, UCIL agreed to pay $470 million (Rs 2,256 crore) for causing more than 3,000 deaths and affecting 5.7 lakh people. The Mohammeds received a pittance of $6.20 (Rs 280) per month from the corpus deposited in the Supreme Court. He also received Rs 25,000, a one-time settlement for each affected person. Mohammed built a two-room house and started selling vegetables.

It wasn’t until the 1990s that people clamored for the elimination of toxic waste. The water that Jamila drew from the hand pump was a deep yellow color. It contained mercury and lead 10 times more than permitted levels. The soil in a 5 km radius around the factory is still poisoned because the state government does not know what to do with the toxic waste stored in polythene bags in an old shed. In 1999, Dow Chemicals acquired Union Carbide. The same year, Muhammad lost Aqueel. “We spent the compensation money on him. Now we don’t have the money or our son,” says Jamila.

Every day, Mohammed pushes his vegetable cart in front of the memorial to the gas victims and the “Hang Anderson” graffiti. Their children are casual workers and occasional help comes in the form of monetary compensation. There is palpable relief because another payment is due in December. This is the final agreement before the Bhopal gas chapter is closed. However, the story does not end for the Muhammads, who will celebrate another Black Day next year.

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