Is this equality? A response to Vir Sanghvi

Vir Sanghvi is taking too much credit for the outrage over Bhopal on behalf of the burger generation that he is trying desperately to identify with. In "Never, ever again, Because we are worth it" (HT June 13, 2010) he tries to argue that when Bhopal happened India was a weak nation, indeed its very survival was in doubt and today a new generation which has grown up on the benefits of liberalisation is asserting equality with the Americans and would like to place US corporates on the mat. There is outrage today he says because "a newer generation, which believes that India must be treated as an equal by the great powers and rich nations, has now come of age."

True, the anger in the media about Bhopal today is mystifying, not because it would have been natural for a generation that grew up or was born after the gas leak to forget it and move on as they keep asking the victims to do today, but because this generation is the one that actually did not care what happened to Bhopal when activists walked all the way to Delhi and even sat on a hunger strike near Jantar Mantar. It did not care when the PM would not give them an appointment even a month after they had sought it while they sat on the pavement outside Jantar Mantar  on a dharna in 2006.

This new generation in the media did not care that victim of Bhopal were demanding that Dow Chemicals be held answerable for the pollutants still lying on what the media now loves to call ground zero. And all those documents being displayed and waved on TV screens today were not obtained by a new generation of equality asserting, gotcha- crying new media but the survivors whom our government and judiciary colluded to reduce to the status of victims.  

The media interest in Bhopal at this belated stage may end up winning some crumbs for the victims but to characterise this adrenaline-driven search of TV anchors for sensation, even the need for catharsis, as the maturing of ideas of egalitarianism is to delude oneself.

Sanghvi talks as if this is the first time the political class has been taken by surprise by the outrage at the Bhopal judgement. That has always been true of Bhopal. The ruling class has always thought that money was more important to the poor of Bhopal than justice. The experienced and shrewd Arjun Singh knew better. He arrested  Warren Anderson because he himself was being abused on the streets of Bhopal as a coward who ran away that night to save himself from the poisonous gas. He knew that this  dramatic stroke would resurrect his fallen reputation. Unluckily he had to let Anderson go almost immediately, whereas holding him even for a few days would have helped refurbish his tarnished image. When the anger at Anderson’s state-assisted flight began to scorch him he retreated into ambiguous silence blaming a phone call for the decision.

In February 1989 came the settlement that quashed all criminal liability of Carbide in return for a pittance. The Supreme Court of India directed a final settlement of all Bhopal litigation in the amount of $470 million, to be paid by March 31 that year and both the Government of India and Union Carbide accepted the court's direction.  The Rajiv Gandhi government that quietly sold out the Bhopal victims, was taken aback when thousands took to the streets to condemn his government and the Supreme Court whose help the government had sought to make the Settlement look respectable.  That outrage was manifested on the streets and reflected in the media.

In the years that followed, aware of the celebrity-hunger of the media, Bhopal survivors even tried to get some celebrities to attend their dharnas but even that did not help. Let us not forget that in April 2006 when Aamir Khan made a stop at Jantar Mantar he had come to meet the people of Bhopal holding a sit-in and had crossed the street to greet the Narmada people. His statement on Narmada got all the media hype because it was so sensational, and this younger generation, who according to Sanghvi is very sensitive to justice, did not give Bhopal a byte or a line.

Luckily for Bhopal this time there has been that oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that we heard very little about till the judgement arrived. We can’t really turn that oil spill into our drama so what better than ask our so called Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to do an Obama and even look for scapegoats in the past. The search for the guilty however, even now, stops before it reaches the doors of our first family, the Nehru Gandhi family. No wonder the discussion on Bhopal does not move beyond December 7, 1984, the day Anderson was arrested and released. Even there, the attempt is to find out if the PM actually knew about the arrest or not.

There is no attempt to hold the then Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi, accountable on grounds of collective responsibility of the cabinet. Anderson is being held answerable as the head of a corporate giant. It is nobody’s case that he set out to murder people. He was the head of Union Carbide, he knew or is presumed to have known, what the company knew about the lethality of gases in his factory so he is responsible for what followed, goes the argument. The slavish media of course does not apply the same logic to our family number one and its inexperienced scions insistent on being Prime Minister, de jure or de facto.  

To believe Sanghvi, India was a much weaker nation when Bhopal happened. He says that because of the PM’s assassination and the Sikh riots in 1984 ‘there were global fears that India would not survive as a nation’! The fact is that Indira Gandhi led a far stronger nation and she had the courage to tick off Americans on matters like the Tarapur fuel issue. The Soviet Union had not yet collapsed, the non aligned movement was still alive and India could stand up to the bullying of the US. India played a more independent role on world stage at that time than the global player Sanghvi would have us believe India is, does today. Today we have a prime minister who even staked his government to sign the Hyde Act to keep a promise to an outgoing Bush administration.

Did this generation with its strong sense of ‘assertion of national identity and pride’ react to it with outrage? Oh no, they argued themselves hoarse in its favour of the nuclear deal, desperate for plutonium and nuclear energy to sustain their Manhattan type profligate lifestyles of never switching off the lights. Today to please that same US the government is bringing in a nuclear liability bill to limit the compensation amount in case of a nuclear accident but the new generation has organised not a single protest. The youth of yesteryear was far more alert to any threat to national sovereignty: students flooded the streets waving black flags outside embassies of the US and UK.

The generation born after Bhopal was hardly interested in the issue of equality till the Bhopal judgement happened. In fact to declare this interest in the case as an affirmation of new found equality is to stretch the truth. Those who want parity with foreign players have to demand equality at home too. We see no signs of that in this schizophrenic generation that is more comfortable with its fantasy of equality with the international elite than with the fact of inequality and misery at home. It would much rather quote Obama’s "kick ass" frustration than the slogans of the poor struggling on our streets.

Sanghvi’s  main purpose of course is to deflect attention from the uproar to fix blame for Bhopal. Frankly the debate about whom the blame should rest on, Arjun Singh or Rajiv Gandhi is worth the footage only because it has served to make our politicians say what we had never dreamed they would dare say. The fact is both were responsible and if people with more power are more responsible then Rajiv Gandhi was definitely more responsible.

What is more Rajiv Gandhi was the head of our government in 1989 and the government was the sole representative of the victims of Bhopal and must be held accountable for bartering away the rights and interests of the victims of Bhopal. To let him off the hook because he is dead is to say Hitler should not be blamed for what the Nazi party did. And if inexperience is to be his excuse as the shrewd Subramaniam Swamy was first to suggest, an excuse later taken up by others, this generation had better ask why this great nation deserves to have inexperienced PMs? Suppose there had been a war a week after Rajiv took over the reins?

This new and aggressive generation of TV journos are not hammering down the door of 10 Janpath to ask Sonia Gandhi to explain what her husband did or did not do to Bhopal. They can hound Arjun Singh and get his daughter to speak to them but they will not ask the Prince Charming to make a statement on Bhopal. They can ring the bell of Anderson’s house and tout the two sentences of his wife Lillian as an exclusive but they will not even be able to step up to the gates of the royal family of India. So much for their sense of equality that, Sanghvi would have us believe, is behind this outrage.

Sanghvi adroitly skips over these crucial questions and principles. He begins with Rajiv Gandhi’s press conference at the National Press Club in Washington where he is reported to have said ‘yes’ to a question on whether multinationals adopted lower safety standards in the third world. He makes it making it sound like a statement by a forthright PM not afraid of annoying his hosts. But sections of the American people and media were also taking that position then.

And then he writes, "But this position was quietly diluted in the years that followed. Officials say that they were asked to go easy on the case by Narasimha Rao’s 90s government and subsequent governments were as wary of going after Carbide or its officials."  

Then Sanghvi moves on to an empowered new generation. "But a newer generation which believes that India must be treated as an equal by the great powers and rich nations has now come of age. If the economic recession-- to which he gives some credit to for the disillusionment with global capitalism--did not affect India, it was thanks to the much reviled left parties who held Manmohan Singh’s economic policies in check.

He writes, "So, while the older generation still looks for global favour and is reluctant to demand accountability for Bhopal, the younger generation wants revenge for decades of being treated badly ??" and Bhopal is a symbol of those years when Indian lives were regarded worthless." Indian lives are still worthless. Look at the data of accidents related to the  Commonwealth Games, deaths and casualties in the tribal areas and countless other cases in this country of disasters.   

Sanghvi’s capitalist friends may now find it easier to be pampered in spas but the fact is most Indians are have been made more unequal by our new economic policies of liberalisation. And our current government a better servant to its American masters. Let him not tell us that MM Singh belongs to the older favour-seeking generation that still rules us and has brought us to this pass. The fact is the young visitor of dalit families is as much in charge of this government with his mother, who has taken to purdah to ward off  questions.