The Endless Struggle: Bhopal Settlement Violated in the Labyrinth of Law

The victims of “the largest peacetime industrial disaster” have not only been deprived of full compensation, but face additional threats and new insecurities. The callous indifference of the bureaucracy and politicians has made matters worse

- Prof Upendra Baxi

DECEMBER 2-3 marked the 36th Bhopal catastrophe anniversary. But only for valiant survivors and victims of successive Bhopal catastrophes1 , not for Madhya Pradesh or the Union government. And by the time this article is published, India would have again celebrated International Human Rights Day on December 10.

Anniversaries come and go, so do chief ministers and prime ministers, but the plight of the Bhopal survivors remains the same. Theirs is the estate of suffering and struggle, but increasingly, Generation X and beyond have no meaning or use for them. For them, the event occurred a long time ago, before they were born, school and college curricula have no mention of them and the booming, buzzing chaos that is social media has no time or inclination to engage and sustain old struggles. At any rate, moving on means coping with the struggles of the day. They are concerned with new injustices, and recalling old sorrows does not quite help. Let the bygones perish because they already have; what matters is the near and median future.

While there is much going for this kind of presentism, there is also much to be learned from the immediate and distant past. Society is doomed to oblivion when it obliterates from human memory the injustices of the recent past. In fact, injustices at least defined as evils that could have been avoided or ameliorated can never be past; they need to be tackled in the present and future. Not in vain did Czech novelist Milan Kundera declare that the struggle of men (and I add women) for justice is the struggle of memory over forgetfulness. And following Kundera, as I said at the first anniversary of the Bhopal catastrophe, contrary to the public adage public memory is not short; the truth is that it is made short by forces of domination and imperialism.