Justice for Bhopal victims as elusive as India's Olympic golds

The Independent’s splashy headline “London Olympics in crisis as India threatens boycott” was just manufacturing news. There was never any real question of India boycotting the Olympics because of Dow Chemical Company’s £7 million sponsorship deal to wrap the Olympic Stadium. Even if it did, as The Economist snickered “Few will notice (India won only one gold and two bronze medals at the Beijing Olympics).” But The Economist got it wrong when it said this is not about a boycott but just “a good time to embarrass Dow.” The  call for boycott was not really about the Dow Chemical Company or the London Olympics. It was all about the Indian government. “We feel that it will be against the basic principles of the Olympics charter to partner with Dow Chemical, which is responsible for the ongoing disaster in Bhopal,” the athletes wrote in a petition to the Indian government. [caption id=“attachment_143423” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“The  call for boycott was not really about the Dow Chemical Company or the London Olympics. It was all about the Indian government. Getty Images”]  [/caption] This was just the last card played by a dogged movement that has struggled for almost three decades now to bring some semblance of economic justice to the victims of that horrific 3 December gas leak. The sit-ins at Dow shareholder meetings, the environmental Nobels for victims’ rights champions, the Rail Rokos (there’s one scheduled for this 3 December) have not stirred the moral conscience of the government into being a more forceful champion of the gas leak victims. If you read the ten point list of demands on the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal’s website there is a weary feeling of déjà vu. Nothing seems to have moved other than the death toll, the cancer statistics, the birth defects, inching up, now into the third generation of victims. And with each passing year it becomes harder to make that direct link between a tumour and a birth defect to the gas that leaked in 1984. As one survivor said, “I’ve met people who say they would have been lucky to have died that night, at least they’re not dying every day.” The call for the  2012 Olympics boycott was simply a last ditch attempt to embarrass the government on the international stage, a forlorn hope that a public shaming in videsh would do what rail rokos in desh cannot. If it was a desperate bid to force the government’s hand, it worked. In the most clear way possible. “There is no question of India boycotting the London Olympics,” said Vijay Malhotra, acting president of the IOA. “We are meeting next week but it’s not about boycotting the Games.” Our government doesn’t appear to be interested in even making a token face-saving measure calling on the London Olympics to drop the Dow sponsorship. [caption id=“attachment_143447” align=“alignright” width=“380” caption=“The underground three-flanged stainless steel tank (lower left foreground) at Union Carbide’s Bhopal factory from which poison gas leaked. Reuters”]  [/caption] As the victims’ rights associations well know, the government cannot get on a moral high horse without drawing attention to its own hypocrisy, the accusations that it sold out its own citizens. Even Shivraj Singh Chauhan, the chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, who is urging the Indian government to boycott the Olympics, is just indulging in empty political grandstanding because he knows there’s no chance of it happening. Outrage is cheap. Compensation is not. In fact, his state government itself has not presented proper data to the Supreme Court for the current Curative Petition, according to the  Bhopal Gas Peedit Mahila Purush Sangharsh Morcha.  “The government submits figures like 5,000 dead when their own figures and those from the Indian Council of Medical Research show that at least 16,000 people had died so far,” said Nawab Khan of the Morcha to Tehelka. It’s also claiming that 5,30,000 people who suffered severe disabilities and health conditions have miraculously made a full recovery. The government might make some vague noises about Bhopal still being an unsettled issue. But everyone knows it has, for all practical purposes, moved on. Dow Chemical and Union Carbide have closed their books on the tragedy after the $470 million payout in 1991. So did our government. The real tragedy is not that a Dow Chemical Company will be splashed all over the Olympic stadium. Or that the Indian team will march under its benign gaze. It’s that we have become a nation where the only way to stir our moral conscience seems to be to threaten to embarrass us abroad. And in this case, even that was not leverage enough. On 3 December there will be candlelight vigils and an attempt to stop the trains. But what the activists don’t realise is that their efforts are pointless, even as a matter of symbolism. In India today we just want the trains to run on time. And come Olympics time, we’ll be too busy praying for a medal, any medal, to care about the moral weight of  the shrink wrap around the stadium.