Why the Bhopal disaster still matters, 35 years later
Long before Extinction Rebellion, there was activism in the face of an environmental emergency in the heart of India.
The early hours of December 3rd will mark 35 years since the release of toxic gases from the Union Carbide pesticide plant in the city of Bhopal, India — now known as one of the world’s worst industrial disasters.
Satinath (Sathyu) Sarangi heard about the accident on the radio. He was in the final stages of a PhD in metallurgical engineering, stationed with an NGO in a village some 100km away. “I decided to come here for a week,” he tells me.
That week stretched to decades, and Sarangi is now one of the most prominent campaigners for victims of the disaster — featured on the BBC, The Frontline Club and Amnesty International, among others. Over the years he published scientific articles and commentaries. He also founded activist groups and the Sambhavna Trust, a clinic for gas-affected patients he continues to manage with partner Rachna Dhingra, a fellow activist and a politician.
In 2017, I sat with Sarangi at Sambhavna to hear about what he witnessed in those early days of the disaster and how the incident matters beyond Bhopal — for any industrial society, especially where citizens have little political power.
There was a touch of wariness in the air. Many journalists have come and gone before me, I thought. And still, Bhopal gets a few headlines at every anniversary, not much more airtime than that. But the door was open.
I first asked Sarangi what drew him to Bhopal as news of the accident broke in 1984.
“It was almost unthinking, my response. I just thought — I’ve read science, I’m interested in health issues, maybe I can do something. I didn’t know that I was going to stay, that it was going to change my life.”
“But what made me continue was that in the first month I saw several things… One was how great was the need for a person like me, with the science background, with the English background, with contact among powerful people, and with willingness to work and stay.”
“And second is that I saw the true grit — of how extraordinarily powerful ordinary people could be. And that attracted me. After a month, electricians had rigged up from high-tension wires some contraptions to get power. Women were reading out poetry of grief and protest and sorrow. All night all day, for 7 days.
We had no money, no infrastructure, no workers — nothing. People were managing to feed themselves. This is in really bad times — they hadn’t had any work for the last one month — and still one family was making rotis for 4 other families and sharing. All of that made me decide that I’m going to stay.”
After these vignettes from the early days of the gas leak came a long conversation that was, in fact, a brief history of the fight to gather evidence, to document health effects and contamination, to get authorities to act.
The aftermath of exposure to the gas leak in Bhopal was deadly, and remains controversial. Thousands lost their lives, though the numbers have been contested for years; hundreds of thousands more were injured; and although proof is elusive, studies continue to document effects on health over the long-term.
The site remains contaminated. Union Carbide — now owned by Dow Chemical Company — denied responsibility, setting the stage for years of legal wrangling over consequences and care for people affected by exposure to the toxic gas.
Fast-forward by three decades or so. The Sambhavna clinic is something of an urban oasis. It sits in the midst of slums surrounding the chemical plant that’s still standing just 400 km away, abandoned. The clinic offers care to victims of gas exposure — the health consequences continue — with conventional treatments and what we, outside India, call alternative medicine.
Sarangi’s words paint a picture of institutions evading responsibility that he calls criminal. So much has been written about this over the years that it’s difficult to choose one link (ok, here’s a taster). It’s literally a textbook case — it featured in my university coursework — of mishandled environmental hazards in industrial societies.
But I wanted to know if Sarangi thought we can still learn something from what happened back then.
Where ordinary people can no longer rely on the state to protect them, he said, they need to take evidence into their own hands: to learn backyard chemistry, lay epidemiology, barefoot science — what’s more commonly called citizen science.
“In a highly chemicalised world we are facing today, the most powerless are the most serious environmental victims. What is happening routinely is slow and silent Bhopals, in industrial society.”
But his views on citizen action against polluters — not published in detail here — are much more political than that.
“The generation and upholding of truth itself for us was a serious and subversive act. Because truth was so openly, blatantly, routinely and systematically being suppressed.”
This resonates with the climate change battle lines being drawn on the world stage now, even though the two are emergencies of a different nature. Extinction Rebellion and the youth movement inspired by Greta Thunberg have snowballed in the face of sluggish progress on implementing the Paris Accord, despite dire warnings about climate change risks. And there’s a parallel with corporate responsibility. A recent Guardian investigation has revealed how major companies have knowingly fuelled the climate crisis, while ExxonMobil is under fire for misleading the public and its investors.
Greenhouse gases have hit a new high, we’re on course for a sharp rise in global temperatures, and many parts of the world are already feeling the heat. Even scientists, normally eager to stay neutral, are joining the climate protest movement to urge countries and businesses to act.
That’s what happens when survival is at stake.
“In today’s world, as it gets more and more and more polluted, ordinary people can no longer rely on the state.”
There was no sign of a climate protest movement back in 2017, when I heard those words in Bhopal.
