Bhopal:
It has now been 25 years since the Bhopal gas tragedy claimed thousands of lives. But a quarter of a century later, it is not about memories alone. The event that changed the face of a city, is an ongoing tragedy.
On Ground Zero, a political-corporate cover-up game has become the biggest obstacle in bringing justice.
The Bhopal gas tragedy is part of school text books now, but this generation is unlikely to know that behind the many deaths lies a conspiracy of silence, both by Union Carbide and the government. Real justice has been elusive despite substantial evidence of political cover-ups and criminal negligence.
In 1981, after his friend Ashraf, a Union Carbide employee died from deadly Phosgene gas exposure, Keswani, a journalist, wrote a series of articles warning of severe security lapses within the Carbide plant. His final article "Bhopal sitting on top of a volcano" was published in Jan Satta just six months before the tragedy occurred.
Around the same time, in March 1983, Shahnawaz Khan, an advocate, served a legal notice to the Union Carbide plant, pointing out lapses.
Finally, Keswani wrote to then Chief Minister Arjun Singh: "I have been warning and nobody is being bothered. Please if you don't even trust me or my writings...kindly launch an investigation into this affair on your own and find out if I am telling the truth." But even that did not happen.
At midnight on December 2, water entered a tank containing 600 tons of methyl isocyanate (MIC) gas, triggering a deadly chain reaction. None of the security systems worked. Keswani, along with thousands, was caught in the killer clouds.
Twenty-five years later, Arjun Singh is unavailable for comment.
Congress leader Digvijay Singh, who was the state irrigation minister, is quick to dismiss the evidence. Asked if there was a sense of moral responsibility in the ruling party of that time when there had been adequate warning about lapses, Singh said: "I am not privy to the record at the moment that what kind of warnings were given, who gave those warnings. I don't think any serious warning came to light before that. I can't say at the moment and fixing responsibility and accountability is just not possible. '
A commission set up four days after the gas leak to find the causes of the disaster, headed by NK Singh, a judge of the MP High Court was abruptly wound up even before it could complete its inquiry.
Why the unease with the commission? Perhaps because its findings would give official sanction to public knowledge - of the proximity of Union Carbide to the ruling government of that time. Meanwhile, 25 years later, Bhopal is still waiting for real justice.