ONE thing you can say about Congressmen: they all lie through their teeth without the slightest sense of shame. It has perhaps become their second nature.
But lying is not the main element in their character. The basic ingredient in their DNA is their criminality. I shall not go so far as to assert that all Congressmen are criminals. But they have raised criminality to an art and to a point it comes naturally to them.
Take the Bhopal gas tragedy, which is a Congress show, from beginning to end. But it is nothing compared with their other crimes, which is why they don’t even think it is a crime. The biggest crime committed by Congressmen, including Nehru and others, is the partition of India. Bhopal is nothing compared to the partition. The partition led to the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Hindus, a crime unparalleled in the annals of modern India. In Bhopal, tragic as it was, the number killed and maimed was only a fraction of that. That doesn’t make Bhopal any the less tragic, but it only shows what Congressmen are capable of and how callous they can be when it comes to killing innocent people.
Warren Anderson of Union Carbide should have been caught and sent to gallows a long time ago. But he is not the main and certainly not the only criminal. It was his company’s deadly gases that killed off so many Indians men, women and children. But the Chief Minister at the time was none other than Arjun Singh, a master of the dark arts of politics, whose acolytes escorted the main killer to Delhi and put him on a plane to America and to safety, and all for the sake of a few thousand rupees that he is said to have paid Arjun Singh’s family trust. Which means Anderson literally bribed his way out of Bhopal, and out of India, as most foreigners do, including a man called Quattrocchi, whose links go far higher than Anderson’s and whose pay-off was therefore much bigger.
Arjun Singh & Co is as complicit in the crime as Anderson and others because Singh was Chief Minister at the time and must have been receiving regular reports from his factory inspectors about the derelict state of the Bhopal gas factory. But neither Arjun Singh nor any of his ministers took any action. It was common knowledge in Bhopal long before the plant blew up that it could explode anytime and Arjun Singh’s government was warned about it. But the lazy Chief Minister and his government took no action until it blew up in his face. The only step he took was to smuggle Anderson out of the state and put him on a plane to Delhi. Congressmen are very solicitous about foreigners because they pay more. How much did Anderson pay in the end? Only the Swiss banks can tell.
Was Singh acting on his own, or were others involved in the smuggling racket, smuggling Anderson out of India, that is? The man in charge at the Delhi end was none other than Rajiv Gandhi, for you couldn’t get a man out of India without the Indian government knowing about it. The affair involves both the Home Ministry as well as the External Affairs Ministry, apart from, of course, the Prime Minister. Arjun Singh could not have done what he did-that is, getting Anderson off the hook-without the blessings of the Gandhi in power.
Arjun Singh was the man on the spot, the man who did the dirty work, but the man pulling the strings from behind was someone else. Why did he do it? Pranab Mukherjee, another expert in the dark arts of politics says that Anderson was smuggled out because he could have been lynched. Why is Mukherjee so full of sympathy for Anderson? Heavens would not have fallen if Anderson had indeed been lynched. Pranab & Co seem to care even now for Anderson, a rich white foreigner full of dollars, than the thousands of poor brown Indians who died like flies inside and outside Anderson’s Bhopal estate. Congressmen are not only criminals they are also cowards, who cringe before foreigners like Mountbatten as they did at the time of independence.
The multinational company of Union Carbide did in Bhopal what other multinational corporations do elsewhere. British Petroleum, a British company, has lots of killings on its hands. The latest happened two months ago when its drilling platform blew up in the Gulf of Mexico, killing a dozen people and spewing thousands of barrels of crude oil into the waters of the Gulf, destroying its environment for good. The company is at its wits’ end trying to control the spill, but without any result. It is now in the same position as Union Carbide was after the disaster in Bhopal and waiting for bankruptcy.
I have no sympathy whatsoever for these people though the hearts of our so-called economic experts like Manmohan Singh and Montek Singh Ahluwalia bleed for them. I would have much greater respect for these people if they did not cringe so much before foreigners and multinationals, and, for that matter, everything foreign. Multinational companies are all over the place in India now, robbing us of valuable national resources like ores on which they grow fat.
They are busy in Orissa and elsewhere, mining ore and putting up smelting plants, and in the process, driving poor adivasis to the wall, which is why some of them have taken to arms.
And who is helping the multinationals? Local politicians and their partners in Delhi, just as they helped Union Carbide 26 years ago. They are the same politicians, from the same family, right from Nehru downwards, who are bleeding India white in the name of development. It was Bhopal yesterday, it could be Kalahandi tomorrow-the slaughter continues in one name or another, along with the Andersons and the Quattrocchi, and behind them, the Arjun Singhs, the Praneb Mukherjees and the Manmohan Singhs singing their praises, while Indians are driven off their lands, just as they were driven off their homes and killed one by one in Bhopal, all in the name of economic progress and development.
