Wrong bone

It took over 10 days of fevered media chasing around the bushes before someone did the obvious: ask the man who was at the centre of the action about what really happened. Once Karan Thapar had got MK Rasgotra, foreign secretary at the time of the Bhopal disaster, to recount how Warren Anderson came to India and why he was allowed to go back, much of the competitive shouting by TV anchors over their respective ‘breaking news’ was exposed as needless excitement over a simple and straightforward story.

Anderson, it turned out, wanted to come to Bhopal but would do so only he if was assured safe passage. When he was promised that, he came; some local officials arrested him; the US embassy got into the act, Rasgotra checked with the home ministry and soon Anderson was out and on his way to New Delhi, en route to the US. In the capital, he met Rasgotra, and perhaps some others in high office.

This fairly simple sequence answered all the questions: why was Anderson allowed to leave? Because he had been promised safe passage. Who authorized it? The home secretary or the then home minister (PV Narasimha Rao). When Rajiv Gandhi (who was travelling in Madhya Pradesh) came to know, he did not protest. Was a criminal/mass murderer allowed to get away? Well, if he had not been promised safe passage, he would never have stepped into the country, and the question of his arrest and arraignment would not even have arisen.

After all, no other director of Union Carbide Corporation was ever charged with any crime, or sought to be extradited. Nor, for that matter, was any non-executive director of Union Carbide India, other than Keshub Mahindra, charged with any crime. Mahindra’s mistake seems to have been the same as Anderson’s: he went to Bhopal. (Moral for company directors: next time, stay away from the scene of the crime and no one will come after you.)

Set this straightforward story against the frenzy over Anderson, not just on the part of the media but also by an unthinking government and an uptight Congress. This last reacted strongly to what Rasgotra had said, as though Rajiv Gandhi was in the dock because he had not objected (after the fact) to Anderson being let off. A CBI officer said he got instructions from the ministry of external affairs to let Anderson off, and refused to comply•only for the ministry to react angrily and say that there was nothing on this in its records (someone in South Block forgot that Rasgotra was still around). A pilot said he did not know that his passenger was going to be Anderson, until the last minute•as though that made any difference to anything.

And there was much clamour for Arjun Singh to come clean (a TV reporter told the camera from outside Singh's residence that he went there three times a day in the hope that Singh would say something--not a great ad for choosing TV reporting as a career!). With little thought for the TV reporter's joys and frustrations, the then chief minister of Madhya Pradesh maintained his sphinx-like silence, and it was left to ever-useful Pranab Mukherjee to come up with the unconvincing line that Anderson had to be sent out of Bhopal because Arjun Singh feared violence. That begged an obvious question: if he only had to be sent out of Bhopal, why was he also sent out of the country altogether?

All the dissembling and denying, it turned out, was quite unnecessary. If the government promised safe passage, it would be unthinkable for it to renege on its promise, or its international credibility would be mud. And if it did not promise safe passage Anderson would never have come to India. So what was the Anderson story all about? Pretty much nothing.

The real issues therefore got pushed into the shadows, while the spotlight stayed on Anderson:

1. How and why did the government agree to settle for an eighth of the compensation it had initially demanded from Carbide? No questions asked, and so no answers given.

2. Why was even this absurd sum not distributed promptly among the victims? No questions, and no answers.

3. How and why did the Supreme Court do what it did, in reducing the charge to a less serious one? Ahmadi was questioned by Barkha Dutt, he came out with carefully bland answers, and it was left to her  to expose the then Chief Justice by getting the then CBI director, Madhavan, on the same show to tell it like it was.

4. And why, after 25 years, had the government not done its basic duty by the Bhopal victims, irrespective of whether Carbide had paid and whether Anderson was living out a peaceful retirement? No questions again, therefore no answers.

That these were the real issues became clear towards the end, as the new group of ministers got down to work on precisely the issue of relief and rehabilitation. Ministers who might have been in the dock for the post-Bhopal scandals of betrayal and neglect, could get away scot free while the Congress and the government got exercised about protecting Rajiv’s fair name on a non-existent charge.

Not to worry, though. The TV news channels got their required quota of a scandal per week, and they milked it for all it was worth, so that the the eyeballs stayed glued.

Next week, there will be another scandal to rant about.