Bhopal : A Prayer for Rain

Bhopal : A Prayer for Rain, a film on the Bhopal gas tragedy of 1984, was declared tax-free in Madhya Pradesh by chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan. "Such tragedy should never take place in any city of the world and development should never take place at the cost of human being's existence," he said after watching its premiere at Ashima Mall, a local Cineplex on the occasion of 30th anniversary of the world's worst industrial disaster. Chouhan also praised the director and actors of the film for their "heart-rending" performance. However Mr. Babulal Gaur, Home Minister of the state, accompaning the Chief Minister claimed that the film was in favour of Warren Anderson. He said that the film praised Warren Anderson and blamed the local officers of the factory for the mishap. He also said that the film depicts Union Carbide adhering to the local laws in all other countries of operation, which is wrong.

Bhopal The Carbide Timeline

Artist Pete Dunne's Untitled. Dunne was living in a small town less than 100km from Bhopal at the time of the disaster

Tweeter session from 3rd December 2014   tinyurl.com/n8r49dz  

In 1917, a merger of four companies in USA creates the Union Carbide & Carbon Corp., makers of carbon rods for street lights, electrodes for furnaces and Eveready batteries.

1920 Expanding into chemicals, Union Carbide establishes the first commercial ethylene plant.

1947 The company acquires a facility in Institute, West Virginia. The Kanawha River Valley site will be dubbed “Chemical Valley” as chemical companies cluster there.

1960 Production of the trademarked insecticides Sevin (carbaryl) and, later, Temik (aldicarb) commences at the Institute plant. A key intermediate chemical is the highly reactive MIC, or methyl isocyanate.

1969 Union Carbide India Ltd. (UCIL) opens a facility in Bhopal, the capital of Madhya Pradesh state, producing insecticides for the agricultural market in India. The formulations are made with imported chemicals.

The Ghosts Of Bhopal - Part Four

Part Four: Mass Tort

John P. Coale, lawyer, behind his desk at his 22nd Street office. Dudley Brooks/The Washington Post via Getty Images

John Coale was in the back of a taxicab, riding down Washington, D.C.’s Massachusetts Avenue. The radio was on, the news announcer relating details of a catastrophic gas leak in India at a facility owned by Union Carbide, total casualties as yet unknown.

Coale didn’t need to know the final number. What was running through his head like an old stock ticker tape was this thought: “That’s a huge American legal case and I want to be a part of it.” This was before Big Tobacco, a colossus of a suit. Coale was a key member of the so-called Castano litigation, a class-action that went after the tobacco companies for fraud, deceit and negligent misrepresentation in not informing smokers of the addictive properties of cigarettes. That action, which Coale would deem “the mother of all lawsuits,” launched a decade after Bhopal.

The Ghosts Of Bhopal - Part Three

Part Three: Post Mortem

Dr. Satpathy ordered that each unclaimed body be photographed and identified by number.

Dec. 3, 1984.

Stones tapping at the window.

What time is it?

Certainly past midnight.

The sound is loud enough and persistent enough to rouse Dr. D.K. Satpathy from his slumbers.

Fie. The man throwing these stones is a known drunkard. This is what the pathologist thinks to himself. The doctor cannot be bothered with such nonsense at this hour.

Dr. Satpathy was certainly not lazy. He would want the world to understand this. Though his workweeks were long, he prided himself on his readiness to conduct a post-mortem at a moment’s notice. Sundays. Holidays. Diwali. Such occasions mean nothing to a true professional. Suppose a mother has lost her son and it is Good Friday. (This is how he would phrase it.) If he were not to conduct a post-mortem in the instant, the body could not then be prepared for burial and the whole day will be a black day for her.

How long does an autopsy take? To incise a Y formation, from the clavicle, coming to a single rill down the torso to the pubis, an examination of viscera. One hour? Two at most. And then, the pathologist may resume his private affairs. His day remains to be enjoyed. (This is also how he would phrase it.)

The Ghosts of Bhopal - Part Two

Part Two: Building a New India

Daulat Singh Rajput, a local farmer

The village square in Dhamarra, 30 kilometres north of Bhopal, is centred by a vibrantly painted Hindu temple (hibiscus pinks and sea blues), a russet-coloured made-in-India Massey Ferguson 1035 DI tractor, and two cows.

In a moment, the tractor will taka-taka-taka out to the fields, the two cows will amble behind and farmer Daulat Singh Rajput will wade into his soybean and chick pea acreage to recount the story of a rural revolution.

The acrid heart of the world’s worst industrial disaster lies within the corrosive skeleton of the Union Carbide pesticide factory in Bhopal.

But in a way, its soul lies here, in rural India.

The Ghosts of Bhopal - Part One

Part One: Wedding Season 

Nadir Khan

The night was black as batwings and the winds were growing colder as Nadir Khan clocked out of his job at the Union Carbide factory, strode past the security guard station, then through the front gate and headed for home.

Sunday, Dec. 2, 1984. The date carried no significance when Khan commenced his shift at 3 p.m. It was a Sunday like any other. Eight hours later, as he returned to his rough shanty in the bustee of Jaiprakash Nagar, there was little to remark upon. Or at least little that was known to Khan.

It was wedding season in Bhopal, the lake city of Madhya Pradesh, the state that lies in the very heart of India. If a bejeweled white stallion had cantered along Berasia Road that December night and disappeared like an apparition into the wind, no one would have batted an eye, least of all Nadir Khan. Baraats, or wedding processions, reach their peak in the winter months and Khan had come to know this as a seasonal commonplace.

To see Khan that night would be to observe a 35-year-old, slight of build, medium height, with a full head of dark hair and a pencil moustache that arced dashingly above his plush upper lip. He walked south on Berasia, then east along what had come to be known as Union Carbide Road. He was not the type to hurry his walk.

Bhopal - Thirty Years Later

Thirty years are enough to heal wounds and rebuild lives. But for the people of Bhopal, their past haunts them and clouds their future. From the photographs of long lost loved ones on their walls, to the constant trips to hospitals, every day comes with a reminder of 3rd December, 1984.

“I lost my son and husband...people continue to die.
 There is poison in our bodies.”
 - Shamshad Begum Survivor and activist

That day, poisonous methyl isocyanate (MIC) gas leaked from the plant of Union Carbide Corporation (UCC) and killed up to 10,000 people. Hundreds of thousands more were left with permanent disabilities. The effects have now trickled down to the second generation.

BusinessLine travelled to Bhopal on the 30th anniversary of the industrial disaster and found a city that was helpless about its past but was clinging on to a slim hope of a better future.

New Plan for Bhopal

The international fight for justice by survivors of the 1984 Bhopal gas disaster in India has been a rollercoaster ride of delay, disappointment and few victories for families of the tens of thousands of people who died in one of the world's worst industrial disasters. However, three recent major legal and environmental developments suggest that the fight following the catastrophe is far from over. The Indian government earmarked $50m for the recovery, which could be used to implement an ambitious five-year action plan to finally clean up the toxic factory site and surrounding area. The poisoned land, where children still play and animals graze in ignorance, contaminates water sources - causing serious health problems for nearby communities. The new plan by the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), a New Delhi-based public interest research group whose funders include the Indian government and the European Commission, is based on a meta-analysis of 15 existing studies to assess soil and groundwater contamination in and around the former Union Carbide factory site. More than 350 tonnes of surface chemical waste, with thousands more buried underground, have been left unsecured since the gas disaster, causing widespread contamination, according to CSE.

Bhopal - Going Beyond The Gas

Concerned official circles in Madhya Pradesh are now in the action mode and have started defining the strategy to “leave behind the grim legacy of Union Carbide gas disaster of 1984 and carve out a future and build Bhopal as a global environment city” as emphasised by Prime Minister’s advisor Sam Pitroda during his visit to the state capital earlier this month.

Mr Pitroda, who has agreed to be a mentor for the state government for achieving this objective, has also told the state government that the goal of developing Bhopal as an “environment-friendly global city” should be achieved within five years.
Before announcing this target, Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan had written to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh stating: “We aim to reposition Bhopal as a global model of best environmental practices, and a symbol of 21st century environmental consciousness”
When contacted, an official source here pointed out said that the idea is to transform the image and perception of the city by integrating the environmental concerns in various planning processes. The strategy is to go for “branding” of Bhopal by mapping ecological foot-prints and by addressing in a focused manner different environmental issues.
Asked to spell out priorities, the official source said bench marks would be created and special stress would be laid on management of land and water resources, transportation, solid waste, drainage and sewage. There will also be concerted efforts backed with research and development to ensure energy efficiency across all sectors of activity. The immediate priority, he said, is to detoxify the abandoned Union Carbide factory and its surrounding areas, ensure round-the-clock water supply to the citizens, develop satellite towns with proper residential and industrial area demarcation, make the city slum free, go for energy efficient housing and construction.

From tragedy to travesty: Drugs tested on survivors of Bhopal

Secret reports seen by The Independent reveal that drug trials funded by western pharmaceutical firms at the Indian hospital set up for survivors of the Bhopal disaster violated international ethical standards and could have put patients at risk.

Some 14 patients died during the three trials examined by the reports. In one trial, for an antibiotic, five out of seven patients died during the trial or soon after it finished. While there is no suggestion that every death merits compensation, critics say there has been no adequate investigation into whether compensation was appropriate in any of the cases. None has ever been paid.

At least eight other trials were carried out on hundreds of Bhopal gas victims. The Independent has evidence of patients who were unaware that they were taking part in a trial at all. The conduct of the trials has exposed the hospital to furious criticism from activists who say that survivors have been used as guinea pigs without proper informed consent.

The reports on the three trials at the Bhopal Memorial Hospital and Research Centre (BMHRC) – carried out on behalf of Theravance, Sanofi, and Wyeth, which is now a part of Pfizer – shine a spotlight on serious ethical violations which experts say are endemic in India. BMHRC is the country's only hospital dedicated to treating the surviving half a million people affected by the deadly gas leak which campaigners say killed 25,000 in December 1984. The hospital made more than 10m rupees (£140,000) from British, US and French drug companies for carrying out the trials for treatments that have since been approved for use in Europe and the US.

The Bhopal trials were first exposed by the leak of a memorandum sent by the hospital trustees – several of whom also served on the ethics committee that would have approved the studies – ordering "all current and proposed trials to be immediately stopped".

The public outcry in Bhopal at the memo triggered three inspections by the Indian drug regulator, which found numerous failings in the trials. The secret inspection reports seen by The Independent criticised the hospital's ethics committee for failing to protect patients by approving trials without proper consideration of potential safety hazards.

None of the 14 deaths in the three inspected trials were independently investigated and several were not reported to authorities within legally imposed time limits. Not a penny was given to patients to compensate them for travel expenses, inconvenience or loss of income. The inspectors failed to talk to any of the patients or families to check whether proper informed consent had been obtained.

The reports also show that doctors doubled up as trial facilitators, making it harder for their patients to say no.

A subsequent state government inquiry, widely criticised by local media, found no evidence of wrongdoing after speaking to three patients who came forward in response to newspaper adverts. The hospital admits that the majority of gas victims it treats are illiterate.

The controversial decision by the hospital trustees and drug regulator to sanction the hospital as a site for clinical trials highlights serious concerns about what critics see as inadequate protection for patients in a country growing more popular with drug companies.

More than 1,500 drug trials involving 150,000 patients have started across India since 2009. The Independent yesterday revealed that at least 1,730 patients died between 2007 and 2010. Many of these patients were seriously ill and could have died regardless of the trial. But campaigners argue that often no proper inquiry takes place – and when compensation is paid, it is unduly low.

Moreover, in the Bhopal case, medical experts have questioned the scientific value of testing drugs on gas victims when the long-term affects of exposure to Methyl Isocyanate (MIC) are poorly understood. The drug companies unanimously defended this decision and said it was up to doctors to assess if patients were medically suitable to participate.

Several of the Bhopal trials were outsourced to contract research organisations (CROs), Indian and multinational, which get regulatory and ethics approval, recruit patients and oversee the trial at arms-length from the drugs companies.

Drug companies often put the blame for negligence on CROs, making it near-impossible for poor people to hold Western companies to account when violations are exposed, according to the Dutch NGOs Somo and Wemos.

But Rachna Dhingra, head of the International Campaign for Justice for Bhopal, insisted that the drugs companies should bear responsibility, called the conduct of the trials "disgusting and appalling" and demanding legal action against the firms involved. "The people of Bhopal have been doubly victimised by the unethical trials," she said.

The three inspections known to have been carried out by the Drugs Controller General of India (DCGI) should make uncomfortable reading for an industry which insists that ethical and scientific standards are uniform across the world.

One study named "Attain", sponsored by Theravance and run by the CRO Quintiles, compared two antibiotics to treat hospital-acquired pneumonia – a potentially life-threatening condition. Three patients died during the trial, two others soon after. Again, it is not possible to determine whether the deaths were the result of participation. The hospital made a profit of 623,820 rupees after study costs are accounted for.

Serious shortfalls were found with the ethics committee, medical records, quality assurance protocols and training procedures. Information about some of the deaths was inadequate; the study was not reviewed by the ethics committee despite the fact that the death rate was unusually high. After the inspection, warning letters were sent out to both companies. What action was taken, if any, is unknown.

Theravance reiterated that it had "hired a CRO to manage the study in compliance with applicable laws, rules and regulations at multiple study sites in India, including BMHRC".

In another of the three trials, an antibiotic study carried out by Quintiles on behalf of Wyeth, now a part of Pfizer, 32 out of 34 patients were gas victims. Participants in the "Tiger" trial suffered five "serious adverse events" and three deaths. The deaths were classed as "unrelated" to the investigational drug without independent or laboratory tests, and were not eligible for compensation. BMHRC made a profit of 1,936,158 rupees.

Pfizer insists it conducted only two trials there; the hospital says it received money for four. Pfizer said the studies were "conducted by doctors at the hospital" and were carried out "with the informed consent of the study participants and with oversight by the hospital's ethics committee. The standards were no different than for trials conducted in the US, the EU, or elsewhere in the world." Compensation is always approved by principal investigators, ethics committee and regulator, the company added.

The Oasis-6 cardiac trial, in which six Bhopal patients died, highlights the problem of assigning responsibility. GSK purchased the test drug, fondaparinux, from the French company Sanofi-Synthelabo (now Sanofi-Aventis), in 2004 when the trial had already started in India. Under its contract, GSK say Sanofi remained responsible for the conduct of the study, while it was responsible for evaluating the data. A CRO was employed in India; the study co-ordinator was in Canada.

Sanofi refused to answer detailed questions but said: "Sanofi's clinical trials are conducted ethically and are in line with Good Clinical Practice guidelines, and are conducted under the supervision of the institutional ethics committee."

GSK said: "We conduct our clinical trials to the same high standards irrespective of where they are held. With regards to [the Oasis 6] study, GSK was not the sponsor ... The study would have been run in strict accordance to a protocol."

The Oasis 6 inspection concluded that the deaths were reported to the ethics committee, but again this did not trigger a necessary review. Yet the committee chair at that time, retired professor of cardiology Dr Ramesh Bhargava, told The Independent that "there were no adverse effects or deaths" reported.

Committee meeting minutes seen by The Independent show that discussions about potential trials were superficial and brief. In one meeting, three trials were approved and one rejected. One committee member, Kusum Arendekar, told The Independent that decisions about clinical trials were left up to medical staff because "they knew best".

The workings of such committees are another area of difficulty. There are only two accredited institutional ethics committees in India. Most are like the one in BMHRC, recruited by the hospital management, working without a standard operating procedure and little insight into how patients should be protected, says Dr Amar Jesani, the editor of the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics.

The principle investigator in the Oasis 6 trial, Dr Skand Trivedi, is also head of cardiology. He is married to the secretary of the ethics committee, Dr Prabha Desikan, who plays a key role in approving trials. Dr Desikan was a sub-investigator in at least one trial she approved. "A family member on the IRB is a serious conflict of interest," said Dr Jesani. "A person on the IRB should have no part of the trial. These are bare minimums."

The Independent spoke to patients from a cardiology study known as PLATO, on behalf of AstraZeneca. The patients said that they were never told that they had participated in the trial. One participant, a 53-year-old woman who wished to remain anonymous, said: "I thank God that nothing happened to me and I don't want any trouble with the hospital, so I would rather just try and forget it."

AstraZeneca said: "We have strict processes in place to monitor all of our clinical studies on an ongoing basis to ensure patients have been properly consented. Through this, it was discovered that some patients at BMHRC were not properly consented during the PLATO trial. These errors were promptly corrected by the investigator."

Quintiles, the world's biggest CRO, actively recruited patients at BMHRC in four studies and conducted preliminary work in three others. It said in a statement that "clinical staff visited the sites on a regular basis to ensure the studies were conducted as dictated by the protocol and in accordance with international and national ethical guidelines."

BMHRC and its doctors who conducted the trials refused to answer any questions from The Independent.

Case study: 'Of course I'm angry. I didn't even know what a clinical trial was until it was already over'

Ramadhar Shrivastave, 64, a former electrician, first knew he had participated in the Plato clinical trial, sponsored by the British company AstraZeneca, when a local journalist presented him with documents in June 2010.

Mr Shrivastave has suffered from vision and digestive problems since the Bhopal gas disaster in 1984, but first registered with BMHRC in November 2007 after a heart attack. He was admitted to ICU and treated with an angioplasty – a technique used to mechanically unblock arteries – before being discharged. He was given two bottles of unlabelled pills by a doctor he hadn't met before, and asked to sign a form which was written in English, and which he didn't understand.

For about two years, Mr Shrivastave and his wife Kamlesh said, the same doctor rang every month to remind him to collect his pills; each time he signed a form which contained the names and signatures of 10 to 15 other people. He was never given any verbal or written details about the trial. Despite his poor health, Mr Shrivastave took a bus to BMHRC every month because a rickshaw cost 100 rupees (£1.25) each way, which was unaffordable; he received no money towards transport costs.

"Suddenly, one day, Madam Doctor told me that the course of medication was finished and I didn't need to come back," he said. "Instead I could collect my other medication from a nearby BMHRC satellite unit. I didn't even know what a clinical trial was until my son explained to me after all this came out."

The hospital refused Mr Shrivastave's request to see his medical notes but The Independent has seen a copy of his discharge summary, which confirms his participation in the Plato trial. The family still fear he could be reliant on the hospital again. "If he becomes ill, then we would have no choice but to go back; we cannot pay for hospital treatments," Mrs Shrivastave said.

The trial drug, Ticagrelor, was approved in Europe in December 2010 for the treatment of heart attacks and unstable angina.

"Of course I'm angry. I've been angry ever since I found out," Mr Shrivastave said. "But what can I do? We are poor people. If I had money I would have filed a case against them straight away, but we don't have money. If I'd known it was a drug trial I never would have agreed. How can I ever trust them again? These people should do trials on their own families, not poor people like me. God has saved me twice: first I survived the gas disaster and now this."

Case study 2: 'The doctors said that they always did trials for new drugs, and there was nothing to worry about'

Sanjay Munshi, 35, has lived near the Union Carbide factory all his life, and suffers from chronic respiratory and eye problems. He was recruited onto a trial sponsored by US company, Progenics, on his first admission to BMHRC in 2007 for bowel surgery. He was suffering from chronic constipation as a result of a rectal prolapse. 

The night before his surgery, two doctors talked to him about a drug trial and gave him 10 pages in Hindi to read. “I didn't understand a lot of it," he said. "I got scared, but the doctors said there was no need to worry, that they always did trials for new drugs, and there was nothing to worry about. But I was scared, I have young children, what if something goes wrong, what would my family do?” 

The junior doctors tried to reassure him. “They said 'what do you know about your surgeon? You don't know much about him but he is good. You don't have to know about the medicine, it is good.' Everything was arranged so I was worried that if I said no, I would ruin their plans and maybe my operation wouldn't be done properly, so I didn't say no.” 

He was so afraid that he 'stole' the consent form and gave it to his younger brother who had come to visit. “I told him to take the paper, so that if something goes wrong, you will know what happened. When the doctor came to ask for the form I pretended the nurse had taken it, so they gave me another one which I signed. I didn't know what the new drug was for, what the side effects might be; they just told me it would be fine.” 

Progenics says it has a letter approving the trial but information provided by BMHRC to the Indian Parliament does not mention it. The CRO Progenics contracted to conduct the trial, subcontracted out at least part of the work to another CRO in Mumbai, including ethics approval by its own commercial committee. Yet Progenics admit that “It is a standard industry practice to work with a central IRB [ethics committee] when conducting a clinical trial.” 

A spokeswoman added: “The CRO acting on Progenics’ behalf monitored the study site throughout the trial as required by its contract, and conducted an audit of the trial activities.” 

The drug, Methylnaltrexone, was approved by the European Medicines Authority in July 2008 to treat constipation caused by opiate medications, such as morphine. The BMHRC trial was part of a separate study but the drug was found to be ineffective in treating post-surgery bowel complications.  

Mr Munshi was never told about any of that. He stayed in hospital for around 10 days after the surgery and was given an injection of the drug every day. “After I was discharged I came back for blood tests, but nobody ever mentioned the drug trial again, I've no idea what happened to that drug. I am angry, and I am shocked that the hospital or doctors made money, but I am happy that God saved me.”

-Report in The Independent

Dancing In Bhopal

The current episode of media frenzy over Bhopal is waning now. Today the Cabinet will discuss Group of Minister’s (GoM) report on Bhopal, which is likely to be approved with some superficial change here and there. The Communist parties are done giving their usual sound bytes,  the gas victim activists have played their part. 

The known steps of an old dance has been performed again, with expectations of repeat performances in near future.

The GoM, formed to divert attention of nation from the recent Bhopal verdict, to protect the Nuclear Liability Bill , offering Rs. 300 crore liability for nuclear plants (recent Indian broadband wireless auctions earned the government more than 38,000 crores) and stop talking about Bhopal during the visit of US president Obama to India. The media, and in turn the people in general, were fed with rumors about extradition of Anderson and many other claims. Reading tweets of just one person is more fruitful then waiting for 26 years (and counting) for the Indian government to find out the truth.

From $500 “enough for an Indian”, to Rs 10 Lakh/death; from not finding Rs 983 crores since 2008 to finding the money in 983 seconds and releasing it a few hours before the first meeting of GoM (link), Indian Rupees, with a new symbol, is the be all and end all solution for every problem.

Meanwhile, the city of Bhopal has become as synonymous with gas as football is with Brazil.  Bhopal’s economy has stalled, in spite of industrial success. Proposals (1, 2)  for moving beyond the gas is floated time to time, all eventually going up in gas.

Bhopal tourism has lately developed the added attraction of the gas tragedy site to it's portfolio. The government has identified the opportunity and proposes to add the Bhopal Union Carbide site as a tourist attraction. Interestingly, one minister has stated earlier that the groundwater in the factory area is now potable and the chemicals will be washed away by rain, while even today the agencies are at dark over how to clean the site.

Even the activists for Bhopal Gas Victims, are a divided lot. In place of complementing each other, there appears to be little or no coordination between the agencies (check this). Inspite of the considerable mind share and awareness about Bhopal incidence in the world and funds from donations, book royalty (Animal’s People, Five Past Midnight At Bhopal), the actual victims of Bhopal continue to suffer and die. 

The dance performance started more than 25 years ago continues.

Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain

A film starring top Hollywood actors that dramatises the Bhopal gas disaster has been criticised by campaigners and participants in the tragedy for misrepresenting individuals and the facts.

Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain is due for release this autumn with Mischa Barton and Martin Sheen in leading roles.

Shot largely in India, it portrays the events around the world's worst industrial accident, in which clouds of toxic gas escaped from a chemical plant run by a part-owned subsidiary of American company Union Carbide.

More than 8,000 people, mainly living in slums around the plant, died immediately when the gas leaked shortly after midnight on 3 December 1984. At least 25,000 others are estimated to have died over subsequent years and many more continue to suffer today.

Ravi Kumar, the writer and director, said the film was "a dramatisation, inspired by real events.

"There are 18- and 19-year-olds across India and across the world who have never heard of Bhopal. I could have made a four-hour documentary that no one would have seen.

"This way a whole new generation will learn about what happened and a whole series of very important and relevant questions can be discussed," said Kumar, a London-based paediatrician who has raised more than $5m from Indian private backers for the project.

Sheen plays Warren Anderson, the chief executive of Union Carbide, headquartered in Danbury, Connecticut. Barton plays Eva Gascon, a fictitious reporter from Paris-Match who learns of the problems at the plant from a local journalist but decides not to publish a story.

The film ends with an imagined present-day meeting between Anderson and Gascon in the former's country club in America. The journalist is racked with remorse. Anderson is unrepentant.

Earlier versions of the script, obtained by the Guardian and Bhopal campaigners, have angered many.

"There is not a single Bhopali with upright moral standards in the script. Of course the people of the city are going to be angry. They are made to look comic, corrupt or passive victims," said Satinath Sarangi, managing trustee of the Sambhavna Clinic which helps the estimated 150,000 suffering health problems due to the disaster.

Raj Kumar Keswani, editor of a local newspaper in Bophal, who wrote a series of articles before the disaster outlining the danger posed by the plant, said reading the script had been "very painful".

Keswani, portrayed in the film as a foul-mouthed buffoon, said: "My sincerity, integrity and commitment has been distorted and trivialised [and] other characters of Bhopal have not been treated fairly." Kumar said he tried to contact Keswani before filming but had been rebuffed. The journalist said no such attempts had been made and that he was "always accessible".

The film is also likely to reopen debate over who was responsible for the disaster. Union Carbide Corporation (UCC), now owned by Dow Chemical Company, has always claimed that its Indian subsidiary Union Carbide India Limited (UCIL), 49% of which was owned by local Indian investors, was solely responsible for the operation of the plant and that the accident was the result of sabotage by an employee who has subsequently been identified.

Union Carbide denies any safety issues at the plant before the leak.

Kumar, who was born in Bhopal, said that the sabotage theory had been "totally discounted". His film instead shows an ill-equipped and poorly-trained Indian workforce struggling to work with badly maintained equipment.

Tim Edwards, of the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal, said that despite serious flaws the film's script was "not all bad.

"It depicts the cost-cutting regime imposed by the parent UCC on subsidiary UCIL pretty well. There is also substance to the depiction of local management culpability. Overall, [the film] does make [Union] Carbide look like white-man's-burden colonialists who put big dreams and profits before practical worker health and community safety," he said.

However, Edwards said that the film "glossed over the degree of control and responsibility of US officials" and failed to portray strenuous efforts made by representatives of the workforce to get improvements on safety, particularly after a series of accidents and the death of at least one worker at the plant in the years before the accident.

Kumar said that Sheen had "sharpened" the character of Anderson, who is still alive, to make the message of the film "more black and white.

"Marty wanted him to be less ambivalent than in the original script.

"Now [Anderson] basically blames everything on the Indians and walks away," Kumar said.The Union Carbide plant in Bhopal was set up on an unpopulated site on the outskirts of the city in 1969 to manufacture pesticides for use in India's push to improve agricultural productivity. The city grew to envelop the plant, which started manufacturing the volatile chemical Methyl isocyanate, which forms toxic gas on contact with water, in 1979. Much of the action of the film takes place in the shantytowns which had grown up around the plant where most of the victims lived.

Hazra Bee, a resident of Bhopal whose grandchildren suffer serious birth-defects said that enough films had been made on the events leading up to the tragedy. The most important thing now was to highlight the ongoing consequences of the disaster, she said.

-Jason Burke

Changing Lives In Bhopal

The Lifting of the Veils

In the years after the poison cloud came down from the factory, the veils covering the faces of the Muslim women of Bhopal started coming off too.

The Bhopal Gas Peedit Mahila Udyog Sangathan (the Bhopal Gas-Affected Women Workers'

Organization), or BGPMUS, is the most remarkable and, after all these years, the most sustained movement to have sprung up in response to the disaster. The BGPMUS grew out of a group of sewing centers formed after the event to give poor women affected by the gas a means of livelihood. As they came together into the organization, the women participated in hundred of demonstrations, hired attorneys to fight the case against Carbide as well as the Indian government, and linked up with activist movements all over India and the world.

On any Saturday in Bhopal, you can go to the park opposite Lady Hospital and sit among an audience of several hundred women and watch all your stereotypes about traditional Indian women get shattered. I listened as a grandmother in her sixties got up and hurled abuse at the government with a vigor that Newt Gingrich would envy. She was followed by a woman in a plain Sari who spoke for an hour about the role of multinationals in the third world, the wasteful expenditure of the government on sports stadiums, and the rampant corruption to be found everywhere in the country.

As the women of Bhopal got politicized after the gas, they became aware of other inequities in their lives too. Slowly, the Muslim women of the BGPMUS started coming out of the veil. They explained this to others and themselves by saying: look, we have to travel so much, give speeches, and this burkha, this long black curtain, is hot and makes our health worse.

But this was not a sudden process; great care was paid to social sensitivities. When Amida Bi wanted to give up her burkha, she asked her husband. “My husband took permission from his older brother and my parents.” Assent having been given all around, Amida Bi now goes all over the country without her veil, secure in the full support of her extended family.

Her daughters, however, are another matter. Having been married out to other families, they still wear the burkha. But Amida Bi refuses to allow her own two daughters-in-law, over whom she has authority, to wear the veil at all. “I don't think the burkha is bad,” she says. “But you can do a lot of shameful things while wearing a burkha.” Half of the Muslim women still attending the rallies have folded up their burkhas for ever.

Sajida Bano's Story

Sajida Bano never had to use a veil until her husband died. He was the first victim of the Carbide plant: In 1981, three years before the night of the gas, Ashraf was working in the factory when a valve malfunctioned and he was splashed with liquid phosgene. He was dead within 72 hours. After that, Sajida was forced to move with her two infant sons to a bad neighborhood, where if she went out without the burkha she was harrassed. When she put it on, she felt shapeless, faceless, anonymous: she could be anyone's mother, anyone's sister.

In 1984, Sajiba took a trip to her mother's house in Kanpur, and happened to come back to Bhopal on the night of the gas. Her four-year-old son died in the waiting room of the train station, while his little brother held on to him. Sajiba had passed out while looking for a taxi outside. The factory had killed the second of the three people Sajiba loved most. She is left with her surviving son, now 14, who is sick in body and mind. For a long time, whenever he heard a train whistle, he would run outside, thinking his brother was on that train. Sajiba Bano asked if I would carry a letter for her to “those Carbide people,” whoever they are. She wrote it all in one night, without revision. She wants to eliminate distance, the food chain of

activists, journalists, lawyers, and governments between her and the people in Danbury. Here, with her permission, are excerpts that I translated:

Sir,

Big people like you have snatched the peace and happiness of us poor people. You are living it up in big palaces and mansions. Moving around in cars. Have you ever thought that you have wiped away the marriage marks from our foreheads, emptied our laps of children, bathed us in poison, and we are sobbing, but death doesn't come. Like a living, walking corpse you have left us. At least tell us what our crime was, for which such a punishment has been given. If with the strength of your money you had shot us all at once with bullets, then we wouldn't have to die such miserable sobbing deaths. You put your hand on your heart and think, if you are a human being: if this happened to you, how would your wife and children feel? Only this one sentence must have caused you pain.

If this vampire Union Carbide factory would be quiet after eating my husband, if heartless people like you would have your eyes opened, then probably I would not have lost my child after the death of my husband. After my husband's death my son would have been my support. But before he could grow you uprooted him. I don't know myself why you have this enmity against me. Why have you played with my life so much?What was I, a poor helpless woman, spoiling of yours that even after taking my husband you weren't content. You ate my child too. If you are a human being and have a human heart then tell me yourself what should be done with you people and with me. I am asking you only, tell me, what should I do?

Negative-Positive

The gas changed people's lives in ways big and small. Harishankar Magician used to be in the negative-positive business. It was a good business. He would sit on the pavement, hold up a small glass vial, and shout, “Negative to positive!” Then, hollering all the while, he would demonstrate. “It's very easy to put negative on paper. Take this chemical, take any negative, put it on any paper, rub it with this chemical, then put it in the sun for only 10 minutes. This is a process to make a positive from a negative.” By this time a crowd would have gathered to watch the miraculous transformation of a plain film negative onto an image on a postcard. In an hour and a half, Harishankar Magician could easily earn 50, 60 rupees ($2) in this business. Then the gas came.

It killed his son and destroyed his lungs and his left leg. In the negative-positive business, he had to sit for hours. He couldn't do that now with his game leg, and he couldn't shout with his withered lungs. So Harishankar Magician looked for another business that didn't require standing and shouting. Now he wanders the city, pushing a bicycle that bears a box with a hand-painted sign: 

“ASTROLOGY BY ELECTRONICE MINI COMPUTER MACHIN.”

Passersby, seeing the mysterious box, gather spontaneously to ask what it is. He invites them to put on the Stethoscope, which is a pair of big padded headphones attached to the Machin. Then the front panel of the Machin comes alive with flashing Disco Lights, rows of red and yellow and green colored bulbs. The Machin, Harishankar Magician tells his customers, monitors their blood pressure, then tells their fortune through the Stethoscope. The fee is two rupees (six cents). Harishankar doesn't

like this business; with this, unlike his previous trade, he thinks he is peddling a fraud. Besides, he can only do it for an hour and a half a day, and clears only about 15 rupees (43 cents).

Harishankar Magician is sad. He yearns for the negative-positive business. Once the activist Sathyu took a picture of Harishankar's son, who was born six days before the gas came. He died three years later. Harishankar and his wife have no photographs of their dead boy in their possession, and they ask Sathyu if he can find the negative of the photo he took. Then they will use the small vial of chemical to make of positive of their boy's negative, with only 10 minutes of sunlight.

From “Bhopal Lives” By Suketu Mehta

Published in: The Village Voice - 1991

(Photograph above : A Pre 1984 advertisement of Union Carbide)

The Business Of Gas

Jahar Lal doesn’t remember the night of the Bhopal gas tragedy, but he can’t forget it either. He was born on the side of a road, as his mother fled from the poisonous gases that swept through old Bhopal. When she finally reached a hospital with her newborn son, the doctors there christened him Jahar, or poison. The name stuck. He doesn’t like his name much. He has often thought of changing it but, he says, “It’s the name I’m famous by.” It draws 10-15 people every month to his small jhuggi in the mud-spattered lanes of Oriya basti.

More has been written on the Bhopal gas tragedy than any other disaster in India. In the 25 years that have elapsed, activists and government officials have surveyed the affected areas numerous times; curious tourists have wandered through the bastis in search of survivors’ tales; and journalists from around the world have scoured Bhopal for stories.The intense attention has, in its wake, created a network of attractions and occupations that survive on the memories, sites and effects of the disaster.

“There’s a whole chapter on me in Dominique Lapierre’s book,” says Gangaram, a gnarled old man, as we walk through the Oriya basti in search of Jahar Lal. He was also affected by the disaster and now survives on a few part-time jobs.He volunteers in a small community school in the Oriya basti, does the odd painting job, and spends his remaining time working as a guide for curious visitors.
“Everyone who comes to this part of Bhopal comes to me,” he says matter-of-factly. When we get to him, Jahar Lal is playing cards with a few friends. His clothes are threadbare, his sandals broken and he’s thin as a stick. He might be an attraction, but it hasn’t brought him much money. He works as a construction labourer for the 10-12 days he manages to get work.
But, he complains, he gets tired easily, suffers from a chronic cough and can’t put on any weight. The people of the basti are used to visitors, but a gaggle of kids still collects around us. Has the attention he’s got made a difference to his life? “People have been coming to see me for 10 years now, but nothing has happened,” he says. Someday, he hopes, someone will read one of the articles and give him a job. As we leave, Jahar Lal comes up to us and asks if we can spare Rs100 for “some medicines”.

A few kilometres away, Sanjay Verma is taking a foreign television crew through Arif Nagar, a shanty sprawl that sits by what used to be the solar evaporation pond of Union Carbide. He is their translator-cum-guide. Sanjay lost seven members of his family in the tragedy, and grew up in an orphanage in Bhopal.
He has taught himself fluent English, and now shows visitors the sites associated with Union Carbide. He is pursuing a degree in business economics, but has been guiding people for nearly four years now. On average, he takes 100 visitors around every year. It’s a good source of income for him.
His charges are Rs700 per day, but often “people give me much more than that”. His English has also improved significantly in the process. It was initially very difficult for him to return to the sites associated with his personal tragedy, but now he has gotten used to it.
“I feel that information on Bhopal needs to be passed on,” he says. Most media crews he takes to the factory, he adds, are horrified that the factory remains the way it was 25 years after the disaster.

But not everyone in this small network suffered in the tragedy. For every person that did suffer, there is another for whom this is a quick business opportunity. Mac is a resident of Bhopal who refuses to give me his real name. When we spot him, he is tearing down the dirt road in front of Jaiprakash Nagar with Miguel Legault, a photojournalist, perched precariously on his two-wheeler.


More pictures here

He claims to work in the pharmaceutical industry. He’s shown six people, including a Korean tourist, around affected areas such as Annu Nagar and Blue Moon Colony this year. “More often than not,” he says, “I’m the driver, guide and translator. I even get them a bottle of beer when they ask for it.”
In return he gets “some kind of gifts”. His motives, he claims, are not monetary. He wants to break the stranglehold that a few non-governmental organizations have on tragedy-related work. “Most of them get a lot of money through donations but promote a few people like Rashida Bee (profiled in Monday’s Mint story),” he says. “But this was a tragedy for everyone in Bhopal, not just a few people.”
His endeavour, he says, is to show people the neglected aspects of the tragedy. Mac seems to have forgotten that I’d seen him and Miguel briefly at Rashida Bee’s the previous day.
How do people find him? “You come to Bhopal and tell anyone that you want to see the Union Carbide factory, and you’ll find Mac,” he says cryptically.

Travel agencies in Bhopal also seem to have caught on to the opportunity. When I called him up, Rakesh Chopra of Radiant Travels Pvt. Ltd, one of the larger travel agencies in the city, said that he could easily arrange a guide for these areas. “We’ve shown many tourists these sights,” he says.
A guide would cost Rs1,750 per day. The biggest gains of this “industry”, however, have gone to the hundreds of dubious doctors, jhola chaap doctors as they are known in local parlance, who’ve set up shop along Chhola Road, a stone’s throw away from the factory. Every third establishment on the road is a clinic.
They sit cheek by jowl with tea shops, butchers and grocery stores. The garishly lit, matchbox rooms that they work from are crowded with a steady stream of patients. A bewildering number of them have degrees in Ayurveda.
Anil Tiwari claims that he is the only qualified doctor among the 85 who practise on this 2km stretch of road. “Doctors here get Ayurveda degrees since they’re easy to get, but all of them prescribe allopathic medicines,” he says. The majority of patients at the clinics seem to have a similar roster of problems— breathlessness, body aches, skin rashes and eye problems. They say that their problems started after the gas tragedy, but a number also blame severe groundwater contamination. “These quacks earn Rs1-2 lakh per month,” says Dr Tiwari, “and they pump patients full of steroids.”
P.D. Israni of Israni Dawakhana, was giving a woman an injection when I walked in. He claims to have a bachelor in Ayurvedic medicine and surgery (BAMS) and tells me that he only prescribes medicines according to his qualifications.
His charges per patient are Rs10-20. When I ask him about the injection he was giving, he turns defensive. “What can I do if the patient asks?” A hundred metres down the road, outside the Singhai Clinic, which advertises the services of Dr Singhai, BSc, BAMS, Ayur-Ratan, a patient is complaining.
He shows me a prescription that consists of a series of codes that only the in-house chemist understands. The medicines he takes out of a small plastic packet are allopathic, but none has a name. A similar story is repeated at every clinic in the area.
Patients who are entitled to free treatment at government hospitals don’t go there since the wait can often be long and the paperwork complicated. Some of them have also misplaced their “gas cards” and haven’t been able to get new ones made. They’re left with no alternative but to go to these clinics, they say.
K.K. Dubey, director of the Kamala Nehru Hospital, a government hospital for the gas-affected, confirms that such clinics are scattered across the affected wards. “The government has done nothing to control them,” he says.

The Bhopal gas tragedy seems to be becoming a small business. And as the 25th anniversary of disaster comes up, the profits are looking good.

-Akshai Jain @livemint.com

1000 Bhopal

What changed the future of the many lives in the city of Bhopal on December 3 has left an indelible stain on the minds of the people till date. To commomerate the 24th Anniversary of one of India's worst industrial disasters, a group of youth had organised a concert titled No More Bhopals back in December 2008, kick-starting a series called Justice Rocks, exposing the youth to issues of social justice through different genres of music.

The success and the reach has now made the group who call themselves Youth for Social Change, to organise a second concert in the series titled 1000 Bhopals, a fund-raiser programme, that will be held on Februrary 7 and 8 at the YMCA ground at Nandanam, Chennai. The proceeds are being handed over the victims of the gas tragedy, who will present for the concerts.

The 1000 Bhopal concert is aimed to take the issue of the Bhopal tragedy, one step forward, by putting forth the message that Bhopal is not just one city where such a dire incident had altered the life of the people of Bhopal forever, but there are also other places including Cuddalore and Mettur that are toxic hotspots, where industries poison the people and the environment in the name of industrial development but can end up being another Bhopal. The concert will also celebrate those struggles waged by these pollution-impacted communities for justice.

The two-day concert will see the 15 of the best college and schools bands perform, besides two popular professional bands — Rainbow Bridge, Yodhaka and Karnatriix. Bringing together a range of genres that include jazz, rock, classical, fusion, Tamil folk and many more, the evenings will also entertain the youth with punctuated street plays and other small performances like road plays that can pass the message of the evening in few seconds

Bhopal - 24 years later

First it was an acidic smell, then a slight itching of the throat, a burning sensation as I sucked in the air. This was Bhopal, and history had come to visit.

I was looking for an innocuous pipe, one of a maze that juts out from Bhopal's plant. The leaking pipe still stands, 24 years after it spewed toxic gas into nearby slums, killing at least 8,000 people in one of the world's worst industrial disasters.

In search of that pipe, I had strolled through this plant just outside the city with a government permit in hand, accompanied by a bored-looking policeman and my guide, Sanjay.

By an old rusty tank near one of the plants, I suddenly smelt something acidic, what survivors had told me hit them as clouds of gas drifted over their homes before they started choking, panicking, and going blind.

"It smells like benzene," said the policeman, as if that piece of wisdom would reassure me.

I was later told the odour could be from a chemical used to make Sevin, the pesticide then manufactured at the plant by U.S.-based Union Carbide Corporation.

If ever there was evidence of bureaucratic inertia, legal squabbling, and corporate wrangling, it was that nearly a quarter of a century after the tragedy the smell of untreated chemicals still lingered.

Around midnight on Dec 3, 1984, some other chemicals used to make Sevin accidentally mixed with water and sparked a chain reaction that led to half a million people being poisoned by gas.

Aside from the cobwebs and rust, the plant is much the same as it was in 1984. More than 300 tonnes of waste, left lying around in drums, were only stored in a warehouse in the complex three years ago.

AN ORPHAN
Sanjay guided me. He had survived the tragedy when he was a baby. His parents and five brothers and sisters died. He grew up in an orphanage, and in a story of a life against the odds, has now applied to take a master's business degree.

"The first time I came here I was so scared," he said as we strolled along a dirt path between plant buildings.

"This was the factory that killed thousands of people, my parents. Now I don't mind, I'm used to it."

I didn't believe him. He spoke often that day of his family, his brothers and sisters, a mum and dad who must have nursed him, played with him for just six months.

Two of his siblings survived the disaster. A sister is married and a brother committed suicide a few years ago.

As we walked, I imagined a 6-month-old baby, probably crying, perhaps left under a blanket by the mother, alone in a slum in one of the world's toughest places to live. And now he spoke fluent English, had girlfriends and ambitions.

We strolled on outside. It was a spring day. I could hear birds singing and kids laughing, somewhere by the compound wall.

Inside, though, the complex is the kind of place you imagine after a biological attack, where everything is suddenly abandoned.

Bottles of chemicals covered in cobwebs still lie in laboratories. Plant safety warning signs still hang from walls. Abandoned tables remain in place. A beehive has found a home in the roof of one plant building.

But if time stood still, pollution may not have.

Environmental campaigners say thousands of tonnes of waste lie underneath, seeping into ground water of nearby slums and causing clusters of diseases, from cancer to birth deformities.

The government says the plant's toxic residues have almost disappeared, washed away after years of monsoon rains.

We entered the control room, treading carefully to avoid broken glass and cow pats where technicians once stood. Outside were patches of ground where grass still failed to grow after 24 years.

We arrived at the tanks where the killer chemical was stored just before the disaster. The tanks lie in undergrowth, looking like a disused locomotive.

As we walked outside the compound, by a slum near a railway track, residents complained about lung diseases, deformities in children, strange rashes. Mothers complained about the stunted growth of children.

Many poor migrants arrived here 24 years ago because the land was so cheap after the disaster.

Here, the government has even painted water pumps red, saying they are not safe. Most locals do refuse to drink it, but still use the pumps for bathing. Young children play in the water.

Next to the slum is the factory's evaporation pond, where toxic waste was once dumped. The liquid was left to evaporate, leaving a sludge. It still overflows in monsoons. Sanjay said he saw kids wash their bottoms in it after defecating.

The trouble is there so far is no smoking gun, no long-term health study that can tell 100 percent why these people are ill.

So everyone here lives in doubt, wondering if something invisible is quietly killing, deforming their children.

"I am scared for my children," said Anees Ahmad Nawab, a carpenter. "I don't know what is lying within that factory."

-By Alistair Scrutton

In Solidarity

Why I am joining the Bhopalis in their fast for justice
By Indra Sinha

On July 26 2006, my friend Sathyu Sarangi called me in tears from Bhopal to tell me that our mutual friend, Sunil Kumar, had taken his life. Sathyu said that when they lifted Sunil down from the ceiling fan from which he had hanged himself, he was wearing a T-shirt that said, “No More Bhopals”.

Sunil was an orphan of the Union Carbide mass-gassing of Bhopal, losing his parents and three siblings on that night of terror. Aged 12, he began doing two jobs a day to bring up his surviving sister and baby brother Sanjay. He became a leader of the survivors’ struggle for justice and was one of the people I loved most in Bhopal.

The BBC reported, wrongly, that Sunil was the inspiration for Animal in my novel Animal’s People, but Animal certainly benefited from Sunil’s courage, sense of humour and ability to live on 4 rupees (£0.05) a day. Like Animal, Sunil heard voices in his head, and suffered nightmarish visions. You can read his story here.

On the day that Sunil died, Dow Chemical’s CEO Andrew Liveris visited the UN to deliver a much-publicised speech. Fireboats hired by Dow’s public relations agency jetted huge sprays aloft over the Hudson River as Liveris told the assembled diplomats “Lack of clean water is the single largest cause of disease in the world and more than 4,500 children die each day because of it … We are determined to win a victory over the problem of access to clean water for every person on earth … we need to bring to the fight the kinds of things companies like Dow do best.”

Stirring words. But when asked if he would clean up Bhopal, where the drinking wells of 20,000 people have been poisoned by chemicals abandoned by Dow’s subsidiary Union Carbide, causing an epidemic of cancers and hundreds of children to be born malformed and with brain damage, Liveris replied, “We don’t feel this is our responsibility”.

Liveris couldn’t be more wrong. Under the “polluter pays” principle enshrined in both Indian and US law, Union Carbide is responsible for cleaning up the contamination and compensating the thousands whose lives have been ruined. In buying Union Carbide’s assets, Dow also acquired its liabilities. Dow set aside $2.3bn to settle Union Carbide’s US asbestos liabilities. How then can it refuse to accept Union Carbide’s Indian liabilities?

The hard answer is that Indians are not quite as human as Americans. Dow paid $10m to settle out-of-court with an American child damaged by Dursban, a pesticide so dangerous that it has been banned for domestic use in the US. But Dow employees were found to have bribed Indian Ministry of Agriculture officials to license Dursban as safe for home use in India. If an Indian child dies I doubt if there’ll be $10m or even $10,000. As a Dow public affairs chief famously remarked of the paltry compensation paid to Union Carbide’s victims, “$500 is plenty good for an Indian”.

Why doesn’t the Indian government force Dow to clean up Bhopal? The Indian law ministry has advised Prime Minister Manmohan Singh that Dow is indeed liable for Union Carbide’s misdeeds in Bhopal. It’s exactly what he doesn’t wish to hear. He and his ministers are in contortions to appease Dow, which has offered to invest $1bn in India if freed from its Bhopal liabilities. When news broke of this sordid backroom hustling, 280 legal professionals, among them retired judges and eminent lawyers, said the attempts to exculpate Dow were unconstitutional and illegal.

Earlier this year, 50 Bhopali survivors, many old and sick, walked 500 miles to Delhi to ask the prime minister for safe drinking water and to make Dow clean the factory. For two months Manmohan Singh left them camped on a sweltering pavement without a reply. When Bhopali women brought their damaged children to his house and chained themselves to his railings, he had them arrested. The policewomen who led them away wept.

When India’s prime minister finally gave a reply, it was all prevarication, no substance. The Bhopalis then declared that they would launch an indefinite hunger strike until their demand for justice was met.

On the eve of the fast, police beat up women and children as young as six years old who had gone to protest outside the prime minister’s office. The police said they’d been told to get tough. Many of us around the world rang to protest and I asked a Mr Muthukumaran of the prime minister’s office if Manmohan Singh had ordered the beatings. “Are you joking?” he replied. On the contrary, I had rarely been more serious.

As I write this the Bhopalis are still in jail, and we hear that Dow Chemical is sponsoring an exhibition called The Gallery of Good at the Cannes advertising festival. Next Monday, Dow will present The Chemistry of Socially Responsible Marketing, which is presumably the exquisite but staggeringly meaningless advertising campaign on which it has lavished upwards of $100m. Telling lies beautifully does not make them true. Wouldn’t it have been more socially responsible to use the money for cleaning up Bhopal?

See Paul Phare’s counter-campaign, A Glimpse Behind The Mask of Dow and please spread it far and wide.

I have spent much of the last five years writing a novel in which victims of a chemical disaster caused by a rogue corporation are sold out by their own politicians, triggering a desperate hunger strike. Animal’s People is set in the fictional city of Khaufpur, but whatever success it has had, it owes to the inspiring courage and spirit of the Bhopalis, and the descriptions of the hunger strike were drawn directly from the experiences of my friends.

Sunil is dead, but on their small stretch of pavement in Delhi, now battered by monsoon rain, nine others have sat down to begin an indefinite fast for justice. Among them are my old friend Sathyu and – grown up into a fine young man – Sunil’s baby brother, Sanjay.

How can I not join them? How can we all not support them?

• To join the fast for a period, or to register your support, please visit www.bhopal.net.
• Donations for medical care in Bhopal may be made at www.bhopal.org/donations
Various YouTube responses to Dow’s bid to buy itself some humanity