It's all GAS out there

Were they unaware? Did they not receive hundreds of petitions, did they not hear their pleas in first person, even inside the prime minister's office?
Amit Sengupta Delhi

The wise good men in the empowered group of ministers (sorry, not one woman in this sanctum sanctorum) have so suddenly discovered a politically correct stance and a shining conscience, that it almost seems impossible that they were sleepwalking for 25 long years. It's a long time, 25 years, and several Congress and other regimes after, there are babies who are still born deformed or blind or disabled in the dilapidated, dingy and sick interiors of old Bhopal. Their mothers and fathers often have devastated intestines and lungs, fingers forever trembling, throats choked, eyes blinded by methylisocynate, the killer gas which killed 15,000 plus and damaged almost 400,000 people, for many generations to come. 

There are infinite narratives of slow suffering, solidified and infinite, relentless and ruthless, inside poor homes of this old town, with toxics having polluted the air and the drinking water, the skin and the eyes, the hair and the bodies. They carry on with the stoic resilience and tenacity of human beings who have been completely ravaged for no fault of theirs, their only hope lying in a democracy of a free country which has totally and cold-bloodedly betrayed them, left them to their ill-fated destiny to die everyday, to be condemned and exiled lock, stock and barrel. 

Surely, the sensitive, intelligent minds of the good wise men of our current and past governments in the largest democracy, and the contemporary good wise men of the UPA GoM, can see this amazing dark narrative in the mirror of their shining conscience. Surely, out there, it's not all that gas as it was on that fated night and day of December 2-3, 1984, when the biggest industrial disaster in the history of the world, man-made and purely due to abject, criminal inefficiency, unprofessionalism and indifference, spread the poison of death across the old town of Bhopal.

Since then much toxic waters have flowed inside the gutters and inside the intestines of the people of Bhopal. Indeed, for the establishment, between sewage gutters and human intestines, there seemed no tangible difference. If we have witnessed a truth, for 25 years, there has been nothing but this tangible, inhuman, hasty, long and brutish indifference.

So why is their conscience troubled suddenly after a lower court judgment? Will they now get a doddering old Anderson and put him in Tihar jail, even while the killers of the Gujarat carnage or Maliyana massacre of Delhi killings roam about free, even holding powerful positions? Would they have moved if 50,000 people had died instead of 15,000? Did they really move when tens of thousands suffered malnourishment, joblessness, big personal tragedies and severe medical crisis for these two decades plus? 

Did that mass suffering and tragedy move their shining conscience? Did they become wiser and humane during this long process when citizens of India were treated worse than animals awaiting slaughter?

And why this obsession with Anderson when the judiciary, the state and Centre, chose, consciously, to betray the people of Bhopal? Were they unaware? Did they not receive hundreds of petitions, did they not hear their pleas in first person, even inside the prime minister's office and the chief minister's office, did they not see them on the barricades protesting, did they not see them walk 800 kilometers on foot, not once but twice, all the way from Bhopal, rotting on the streets of Delhi in the open, on the pavement near the toilet at Jantar Mantar - democracy's magnificent showpiece of grievance redressal? 

Worse, they even squandered the 470 million dollars they got as compensation from the Union Carbide.