IT has taken more than a quarter century for a court to pass judgement on the Bhopal gas tragedy and all it has done is to sentence seven former employees, some of whom must be dead by now, to two years in prison (pending appeal) and pay some insignificant fines. During this 25-year period, the world has been turned upside down, with the twin towers crashing in Manhattan, US armies marching into Afghanistan and Iraq, a former Indian Prime Minister assassinated and a Hindu government taking over in New Delhi for the first time in two or three centuries. But in Bhopal, things moved slowly, like a clock that has lost its springs, while the criminals got away or were helped to get away by their criminal friends in Bhopal and Delhi, with everybody looking the other way.
Why does it take so long to pass judgment on such a cut-and-dried case? In other countries, even in such busy societies like the United States, judgement is almost instantaneous. A man called Bernard Madoff cheated thousands of people in New York of billions of dollars through a Ponzi-scheme and was taken into custody two years ago. Within a few months he was tried and sentenced to a hundred years in jail, which means he will never come out. The whole thing happened so quickly that the man is already history, though it was only two years ago that he was busy going around cheating people right under the nose of the New York Police.
The trouble with us Indians is that we don’t take anything seriously. The Bhopal gas holocaust is the biggest disaster of its type not only in India but anywhere in the world. It is not every day that you kill 20,000 people at one go. Bhopal made headlines all over the world for weeks. We should have appointed a special court to deal with what is certainly the biggest crime of the century, and ask it to deliver judgement in a few weeks. But we did nothing. Government after government let things slide and left it to a minor court which normally tries cases of cheating and street accidents, as if the disaster was a minor, run-of-the-mill-affair.
It is not the fault of the judiciary which has too many cases on hand. There is a backlog of close to 30 million cases, with as many as 50,000 cases languishing in the Supreme Court. The backlog is so severe that, according to a calculation, it will take 466 years to work through all the cases. Everybody knows this and every justice minister complains loudly on TV, but they do nothing about it, even when they are or were in power.
Every year in Mumbai, the monsoons play havoc with the city. The very first showers choke the city’s sewers and drains, flooding the streets and bringing down hundreds of buildings, and of course, paralysing the railways. Four years ago, there was so much water that people were marooned for days, roads and railways were jammed and school children were stranded in strange neighbourhoods. Something like this happens every year when the rains come. But neither the politicians nor the bureaucrats do anything about it. They talk grandly of big plans, as we Indians generally do, but decide to do nothing, until the next monsoon. And this goes on year after year, until there is a new government and a new set of politicians to make even grander plans and abandon them.
The principal job of the government is to find solutions to our problems; everything else is secondary. If the government is not up to the job and cannot find solutions, there is no need for governments. This is precisely the reason there are no proper government in Africa, and there is no government in Pakistan either, for the so-called governments in these countries are nothing more than cabals, looking after their own interests, which means the interests of politicians.
In the past, India was an abysmally poor country and simply did not have money to tackle the country’s problems. That is not the case now. India is now a reasonably affluent country with a GDP of 1200 billion dollars, which is larger than many countries in Europe. So lack of funds cannot be an excuse. What we lack is not capacity but will. Our politicians can always be depended upon to look after their own interests, but surely they should also pay attention to the interests of those who have elected them!
Day after day, you see pictures of cities falling apart before your eyes. Go to your municipal office, which is supposed to look after your town, and you will invariably find that the man looking after your work is missing. The offices are dirty and smell of urine. Files are never in place, and often officers are missing too. It is as if nobody is in charge and nobody cares.
In most in western countries, there is invariably a reception officer to welcome you and guide you to the right man or woman. I reached London immediately after the last World War and expected the place to be a mass of rubble and debris of fallen buildings and shattered roads and railways. But the first office I went to in search of the ration book was cleanliness itself. The old lady who welcomed me escorted me to the right officer who made me sign some papers and gave me my ration book, all within a few minutes. They were all elderly people working in the office, as the young men were busy fighting the war and yet to return home, while young women were working in armament factories. But the offices, many of them bombed, were functioning efficiently and normally.
The allies did not take 26 years to bring the Nazi leaders to book, as we did in the case of Union Carbide rascals. They took less than a year to bring them before the Nuremburg Court, and only a few months more to sentence them. At the end of that period, the Nazi leaders were all shot or put behind bars for long periods. We are still not finished with the Bhopal affair and are still cranking out report after report, as if it was one of those endless serials you see on TV that goes on and on with no-end in sight.
Indians, said Hitler, gabble pomposities without any realistic background, and are slow to act. We talk and talk, like that great talker P Chidambaram, and never act. Had something like Bhopal taken place in America, at least a hundred persons would have been promptly sent to prison, and some probably shot for killing so many innocent people. But after a quarter century, the Chidambarams and the Manmohan Singhs are still not sure what to do about those who were responsible for the tragedy – in fact, if anybody was responsible at all, while the Andersons play golf in Florida and ply their yachts in the Caribean.
(The writer can be contacted at 301, Manikanchan Apts, Kanchan Lane, Law College Road, Pune-411 004)
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