Print Email to Friend| From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 9, Issue 27, Dated 07 July 2012

CULTURE & SOCIETY   BOOKS

The Justice Leak

Anjali Deshpande’s novel on the Bhopal gas tragedy sounds alarm bells to our collective consciousness, says Indra Sinha

Delayed or denied? Anjali Deshpande Photo: Shailendra Pandey

ANJALI DESHPANDE, journalist and long-time activist for the victims of Bhopal gas tragedy, describes herself as an iconoclast and supporter of lost causes who relishes debate, the noisier the better. She claims to live without discipline, any sense of design or patience, and to cultivate the virtue of laziness. We may take all this as the Bhopalis take their chai, with a pinch of salt, for she has been disciplined, patient and industrious enough to write a novel not just full of noisy debate but of rare timeliness and importance.

Impeachment Anjali Deshpande Hachette 376 pp; Rs 395 ALSO READ Air, Water, Earth And The Sins Of The Powerful The Night Bhopal Was Poisoned In Its Sleep Fighting the good fight

Impeachment is set during the public furore that followed the Rajiv Gandhi government’s infamous 1989 Settlement with Union Carbide. It describes the efforts of a group of Delhi professionals, among them a journalist and a lawyer, who are trying to redress the deal’s many injustices via a ‘curative petition’ in the Supreme Court. For an intense few months, the group’s personal lives — no longer quite as private as they would like — are twisted tightly together by the struggle. Their stories, problems, dilemmas and crises are deftly handled and the narrative switches easily from one to another in a way familiar to us from TV serials. I was completely engrossed by Impeachment. I devoured it in a sitting, and a few days later read it again.

The spotlight falls mostly on Avidha, a journalist in whose feisty personality it is impossible not to read the character of her creator. She is having an affair with a married ministry official whom one yearns to punch in the mouth. The sadness of this relationship, of waking up with a man who, she realises, does not love her, is delicately caught:

“She now felt ashamed of everything, even her embroidered coverlet that was now thrown over the hotel quilt. The clear morning light stole the haziness of its colours and the uneven stitches stood revealed for what they were, crooked with no harmony, no symmetry, not even delicacy.”

Mukta is a lawyer whose own rage grows as public anger cools, and who sees more clearly than anyone else the betrayals in store for the Bhopalis as political expediency begins to taint the group’s once-unsullied idealism. Vineeta, a desperately sweet but bullied and undervalued housewife, was the most sympathetic of all, perhaps also because she in all the group was the only Bhopali and her memories of the morning after the leak were utterly authentic and provide some of the book’s most powerful moments:

“Vineeta had helped a woman sit up and eat two slices of an apple. The woman told her how she had run out without her shawl and had not felt cold at all. My lungs are burning, she said, taking Vineeta’s hand and laying it on her chest. Can you feel the heat?”

Only someone who had been in Bhopal on that terrible morning could have written this. Reading this, I think of Ghafooran Bee, a Bhopal victim, who felt there was a fire in her head and said that when she coughed she could taste the gas again.

The biggest problem for a novelist dealing with important historical events, especially an event as devastating as the gas disaster in Bhopal, is to find a way to present exegetical commentary naturally through the lives of the characters. In my own novel inspired by the Bhopal survivors, I tried to avoid the problem by setting the story in an imaginary city, presenting the history and politics as a hazy backdrop and focusing on the foreground characters. Anjali has taken the difficult, head on, approach. If she pulls it off, it is because Avidha and Mukta between them can express what needs to be said to enable the reader to understa nd the iniquity of the 1989 Settlement.

Anjali’s own experience as a journalist in Bhopal produces some startling passages. Are they fiction or fact? Here, for example, is Avidha with the rest of the press, outside the front gate of the Carbide guest house in Bhopal where Warren Anderson is being held under house arrest:

“They had waited and waited till agencies flashed the news that the chairman had left Bhopal; he had been smuggled out the unused rusty back gate, rowed across the lake in a boat and taken to the airport to be flown to Delhi.”

Rowed across the lake in a boat? A revelation indeed, if true.

The publication of Impeachment could hardly be more timely as today there is again a chance, however faint, of addressing the injustice done to the Bhopalis 23 years ago. On 7 June 2010, in a criminal trial that lasted 23 years, eight Indian staff of Union Carbide were found guilty, fined Rs 1 lakh each, sentenced to two years in jail, and immediately freed on bail. (The US accused did not appear, they have been boycotting the court since 1992.) Indian media and public reacted to the verdict with rage. India’s Law Minister described it as ‘justice buried’ and a scared government said it would file a ‘curative petition’ to reopen the 1989 settlement.

That new ‘curative petition’ is now before the Supreme Court. It seeks additional compensation from Union Carbide, but instead of basing the claim on figures of dead and injured verified over the years by its own officials, the government is sticking to the original estimated figures, even though it knows them to be wrong.

‘Secret’ minutes of the Group of Ministers meeting revealed that the ‘curative petition’ would quote 5,295 deaths instead of 22,917; 4,902 permanently disabled instead of 508,432, and use the same unjust injury categories as in 1989. Survivors asked the government to present the correct figures and amend the flawed categorisation system that excluded 93 percent of victims. Ministers did not respond. So last 3 December, the 27th anniversary of the Union Carbide disaster, the Bhopalis decided to make their point by stopping the trains.

A 65-year-old woman M and her 82-year-old mother went with 18 other women from their neighbourhood, all survivors of the disaster, to lie on railway tracks in Bhopal. Arriving at the Barkhedi crossing, they found thousands of other people already on the tracks, chanting slogans. The police would later charge 35 named and 2,000 unnamed survivors with a list of crimes, including attempted murder. Several old ladies aged over 80 and suffering from severe health problems were accused of violent rioting using swords and country-made guns. Here, according to M, is what actually happened: “There must have been 100 cops with lathis who just started to beat up women. They did not bother to look at who they were hitting, they continued with lathis and whoever came in their way got hurt. During all of this one of the police lathis hit me in my right eye and then came the second lathi which hit me in the back of my head. I saw blood coming out, I realised that I had to leave and also had to get my mother out as she is very old and it would be hard for her to run. I grabbed my mother’s hand and then my mother was hit by a police lathi on her head. She fell down and she was bleeding badly. Her sari was covered with blood. There was so much blood it seemed like someone had slaughtered a goat.”

Home Minister P Chidambaram, who as a corporate lawyer used to represent Enron and is a known friend of Dow Chemical, has said that the figures and categories will not be changed. What hope for the Bhopalis of justice? What hope of compensation?

The importance of Impeachment is its clear warning about the duplicity of politicians and the susceptibility of even Supreme Court justices to outside influence. In telling of the mistakes and failures of 1989, it urges us to be on our guard this time and leaves us in no doubt that the survivors will never get justice unless the public demands it.

Indra Sinha’s novel Animal’s People was shortlisted for the 2007 Man Booker Prize for Fiction.