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1. Bhopal: A Report from the Future
I
It was soon after the 1990 elections that Rajiv Gandhi reorganized the
Planning Commission. The Prime Minister realized that two groups
had nearly cost him his victory, forcing the Congress into a wafer-thin
majority. The first of the guilty groups was the old party dons who
insisted on speaking the medieval language of caste and vote banks
with acronymic names like Kshatriya-Harijan-Adivasi-Muslim
(KHAM) or Ahir-Jat-Gujar-Rajput (AJGAR). The second bunch was
the old intellectuals in the bureaucracies who still talked of poverty
and commitment to the bottom 40%. He felt both groups were tied
umbilically to the primordialism of the Garibi Hatao period.
The new Indian Market Research Bureau/Operations Research
Group (IMRB/ORG) reports had shown that India was becoming a
genuine mass society, with a huge middle class demographically the
size of several Europes. The role models of these groups came from
the world of management and the media. The government had
surveys to show that children of the new class could not relate to
National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT)
history books on India’s freedom movement, especially to figures like
Tilak or Patel. The survey especially noted that it was not that
nationalism was passe, it was merely that Indians now modelled
themselves on successful NRIs. It was in response to this
technocratically tough section that the Prime Minister reconstituted
the Planning Commission.
The first meeting of the new Planning Commission was held in
April 1990. Mr. Sam Pitroda was formally nominated Chairman. The
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2. other members included the Director of The Indian Council of
Medical Research (ICMR) and the head of the Apollo Hospitals chain,
Dr. Ashok Ganguli of Hindustan Levers, Ajit Kerkar, the Executive
Director of Indian Hotels and Dr. V. Kurien of the Institute of Rural
Management at Anand.
The absence of familiar names from the list was also noticed. The
older generation of scientists from the Indira Gandhi stablesthe
Menons and the Swaminathans with their discreet FRSes (Fellow of
Royal Society) were no longer present. There were also no economists
from Oxbridge or London School of Economics. In fact the first
meeting of the Commission began with a minute’s silence for the late
Mr. H.K., a collective moment of relief that the last Laski-ite in India
was dead.
The Commission, while surveying the range of its expertise, felt
that there was a gap in its membership. It was as if an old club chair
was empty. There was a need for a social scientist, but the older
generation talking to poverty and caste bored them. Pitroda tried out
his old friends at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies but
all they talked about was decentralization and survival in a moralistic
jargon that made Nirad C. Chaudhary sound futuristic. It was at this
time that Pitroda’s assistant sent him a cutting of Moss Kanter’s
review of a new book Risk and Public Policy by Arun Bhide.
Bhide was a political philosopher, a consultant to several think
tanks. A graduate from Berkeley, he had worked with Aaron
Wildavsky on the Sage project on “Risk Cultures”. Bhide had never
been to India but like all NRIs had a secret plan to redeem it. Pitroda
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3. assigned him to the new policy group on disasters, with an emphasis
on Bhopal.
The Bhide Report, a collection of unbureaucratic scenarios on
disaster management was never published but became a part of the
tacit policy of later governments. The Report makes fascinating
reading. There was little or nothing about the actual facts of the gas
leak. In fact Bhide never went to Bhopal. All he asked for were the
Green Files of the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), the
confiscated reports of the Bhopal Group for Information and Action
(BGIA), the legal petitions filed by the Morcha and the publications of
the Medico-Friends Circle (MFC), the three video films made on
shoe-string budgets and the secret army report on Bhopal.
He spent all his time in Delhi attending meetings at the Law
Institute and the lawns of the Boat Club. He also investigated the
Oleum leak at the Delhi Cloth Mills (DCM) plant in Delhi, delighted
that it had been used as a pretext for closing down the factory and
converting it into a marvellous piece of real estate.
We reproduce below Bhide’s academic but eloquent introduction
to his report minimizing the array of footnotes. It is strangely
reminiscent of an old classic The Report from Iron Mountain. We
must also caution the reader that a few paragraphs might be
occasionally missing, accounting for the slight jerkiness in style.
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4. II
THE BHIDE REPORT
Introduction
This report is the result of a preliminary study on the Bhopal Gas
Disaster of 1984 and is devoted not to an analysis of the causes of the
disaster but to the responses to it. The work is predicated on the belief
that disasters like other collective representations are subject to
philosophical analysis, which then provide scenarios for social
forecasting. The basic technique employed is textual analysis of the
literature on Bhopal with special reference to the rhetoric of disasters.
The report believes that the Bhopal Gas disaster is unique but has
unfortunately been plagued by cliches.
The literature on the disaster comprising of over a thousand
articles and several substantial books divides itself into two different
but complementary approachesa managerial-technological one and a
journalist-activist approach. The categories underlying the two are
surprisingly similar in their commitment to machine technology as a
way of life. The general feeling in these analyses is as if some big
machine had broken down and the discussion then centres around
the causes of the breakdown or the possibilities of repairing it. It is in
this context that one is reminded of Ernest Becker’s observation that
“Our belief in the efficacy of the machine control of nature has in
itself elements of magic and ritual trust. Machines are supposed to
work infallibly, since we have put our trust in them. And so when they
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5. fail to work, our whole worldview begins to crumble just as the
primitives’ worldview did when they found their rituals not working
in the face of western culture and weaponry. I am thinking about how
anxious we are to find the exact cause of an air-crash, or how eager
we are to attribute the crash to ‘human error’ and not a machine
failure.”
This preoccupation with the machine or mechanical failure that
we witness in Bhopal operates at two levels. The first is the search for
the causes of the disaster and the other is the attempt to repair the
damage. There is a sense of action and activity at two levels, cause
and effect and stimulus and response. But the machine as symbol, as
meaning has not been understood. As a result we always end up
looking at what happened in Bhopal or what we can do in Bhopal but
not at what Bhopal is saying about our society. In fact Bhopal is a
disaster haunted by cliches of radicalism, applied science and social
work. The literature on Bhopal follows a standard script where the
response to a disaster is inevitably a disaster institute.
This preoccupation with the machine is echoed by newspaper
reports. Journalism only recreates the same discourse in a more
humanized way. The machine becomes a backdrop for individuals
moving into action. The sense of purposive action conveyed by all the
actors is fascinating, giving one a feeling of control, of movement, of
knowledge, of command and of normalcy. In fact, the triviality of
these action-events almost escapes us, so gripping is the narrative.
The best example of this Time-Readers’ Digest Style is the otherwise
competent and compassionate book by Sanjoy Hazarika.
Hazarika uses a clutter of details to humanize the event. Consider
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6. his descriptions of Warren Anderson, the Union Carbide Chairman.
We are told that Anderson was the son of a Swedish carpenter, that he
won scholarships to college in football and math, started as a lowly
salesman and rose steadily up the corporate ladder, earned a million
dollars in salary and perks and that he had a cold the day before the
disaster.
One is reminded of Jacques Ellul’s devastating comments on
William Shirer’s, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
“Shirer operated consistently from inside the news as he found it
in the archives and did prodigious work in unravelling eventsto arrive
at precisely nothing. . . Limited by his concern with news, he
remained at the superficial level. In reality, he understood nothing of
Hitler’s revolution, its economic components or its nature. All we
learn from it is that on June 16, 1938, at 21 hrs 2 minutes, Hitler
wearing a pair of grey trousers said such and such. And the book was
a bestseller.”
The efforts of the managers and activists remind one of Karl
Mannheim’s observation about the different ways in which American
and European sociologists approach a problem. The American on
hearing the word problem immediately reaches for his toolbox,
unfurling in the process a whole array of applied sciences. The word
problem has a more metaphysical flavour to a European who unravels
it again and again like a philosophical Penelope’s cloak. India of the
late eighties is essentially American, naive both in its faith in
technology and political action. As a result what is missing is a notion
of evil, of violence, the sense that the gas leak was an unprecedented
attack on the human body. The ideas of governmental corruption or
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7. the economic power of the multinationals seem inadequate to capture
this. The textual analysis of literature reveals that a new model of a
disposable society is being inaugurated. We must state that the above
model is emerging not as an epistemic break or a geological fault in
the system but by creeping through the slits of the system, aided by
acts of omission and indifference.
The Report thus will deal with a societal trend not generally
within the purview of such exercisesevil. The report is unique in that
it systematically and neutrally considers evil as a policy tool. The
previous attempts of Herman Kahn (1984), Aaron Wildavsky and
Mary Douglas (1982), and the allegedly anonymous Report from Iron
Mountain (1968), all move elliptically away from the concept by using
such technically neutral terms or acronyms like triage, Risk or MAD
(mutually assured destruction). The most important context for the
understanding of evil both in modern and anti-modern luddite
archives has been the city.
Sociology and Social Policy can be read as a series of
elaborate footnotes on the modern city. The city has not only been a
site for the drama of modernity but a metaphor for speculating about
it. Infact, one of the most fascinating exercises that remains to be
performed is a philosophical dictionary of the city, where each city
would become the equivalent of a philosophical term. Such an
anthology could well become a thesaurus of modern life, a city as key
words. Yet, so kaleidoscopic is the city that a dozen classic essays on
each city could still not capture all its meanings. Not all the efforts of
Kipling, N.K. Bose, Geoffrey Morehouse, Gunter Grass, Pritish
Nandy, Sukanta De and Aparna Sen have exhausted the polysemic
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8. power of Calcutta, its repeated attempts to mediate between hope and
despair, good and evil. The city keeps rewriting itself, constantly
producing new variations that need to be grasped. It is in this context
that the Report asks what is it that the idea of the gas leak in Bhopal
has added to the city as a mode of thought. In this, we must
emphasize that in looking at tragedies, we generally look for evil in
the bigness of structures: the gigantism of the state, bureaucracy or
the multi-national. Yet evil slips through the everydayness of
disasters. In fact it is through the everyday slips and slides, that
imperceptibly, Bhopal is becoming a new paradigm, where disasters
are being brought into the boundaries of the system and absorbed.
The process can be systematized into a list of steps. The next section
of the Report shall restrict itself to a chronicle of such strategies.
* * *
Scenario One
Anthropology and anthropologists of development, in particular, have
recognized that tradition provides one of the major forms of
resistance to power. The stuff of tradition is memory and memory
expresses itself in narratives. The story teller, like the fool, threatens
power. One of the first tactics in the move towards the disposable city
is a compression of time and history. It is observed that Bhopal as a
city lacks the polysemic power of Calcutta or Benares. But even then
the reader is surprised that books on the gas leak compress the
thousand year history of Bhopal into a few lines or a footnote. This act
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9. of compression is further facilitated by the fact that the Bhopal
disaster unlike Minamata, Hiroshima or the Thalidomide scandal has
no place in the iconography of industrial disasters. It lacks an
identifiable symbol that feeds both memory and resistance.
The next move towards distorting time is through the
juxtaposition of two histories, such that they become a linear series
which makes disasters appear as an inevitable part of industry. It is
ironic to note that some of the more sensitive accounts also fall prey
to this. In fact several of them begin with a description of Bhopal as a
bucolic town “which retains much of its pre-twentieth century
character” with cows and goats roaming the city and where goods are
hauled by oxcarts on dusty roadsa typical Hollywood set of a pre-
industrial city.
This picture of an almost historyless non-developed Bhopal
is immediately counterposed to the future industrial Bhopal which
Union Carbide embodies with its “marketing, transportation and
communication network, criss-crossing the globe”using 1000
kilowatts of energy a day when many houses in Bhopal have none,
possessing a large staff of scientists when 72% of Bhopal is illiterate.
One is unwittingly forced to conclude that the real history of Bhopal is
the history of its industrial development. The literature unconsciously
suggests that Bhopal enters into modern history with the
establishment of the UCIL plant. That act is read as doubly
significant. Firstly, the plant produces pesticides and thus makes
Bhopal part of the great modern scenario of the green revolution.
Secondly, the symbolic presence of the 7th largest chemical multi-
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10. national of the United States gives Bhopal membership, a Diner’s
Club Card, to modernity.
The next major array of displacements facilitates the
transition from populism to triage through the idea of the slum. The
slum is a combination of hope and fear about the city that the middle
class and its adjunct, the bureaucracy, cannot understand. It is
precisely this middle class incomprehension that has to be played on
to set the stage for the disposable city. Probably, the only way to
capture it is through a symbol, a bill-board, one of our investigators
saw. It was a giant hoarding in yellow and black visible from a flyover.
It demands that one live life kingsize. On the top like a subtext sat a
dozen vultures. Almost all the writings on Bhopal provide the same
standardized picture of the slum. The rhetoric of the slum has to have
three essential ingredients in the middle class eye, a demographic
push by the poor, an illegal encroachment on land and a corrupt
politician who legitimizes this.
The next step towards the disposable city is the
simultaneous delegitimation of the slum and the politician, as part of
the old package of populist development. The linkage between
development and democracy is evident in the early models of the
slum. The slum is a symbol of hope, a claim to the possibilities of the
city, a vote bank, a hall-mark of populism and of corruption but with
a human face.
Virtually all the writings on Bhopal provide this middle
class-centred scenario of the slum. We reproduce below a quotation
from Hazarika. It could easily be substituted by Srivastava, Everest,
etc.
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11. As Bhopal developed into a capital city in the sixties, “pressure
grew on land and encorachments began on government property. The
neighbourhood was increasingly composed of new migrants from the
countryside who flocked in search of jobs.”
“And there were jobs availablenew roads, buildings and
sewerlines to be built, plus all the ancillary jobs a growing city
spawns. A host of ramshackle colonies sprang up along the roads
leading up to the plant. . .”
“The government did nothing about the encroachments.
This was because the new migrants were seen by the politicians as
vote banks. This is why Arjun Singh, the Madhya Pradesh Chief
Minister, with an eye to the general elections later in the year
presented pattas in April 1984 to the inhabitants of Jaya Prakash
Nagar and other jhuggi-jhopri dwellers. Singh acknowledges the
motivation was political although he defends the decision. It is easy to
find fault with the decision and say we shouldn’t have done it but
anyone who knows the condition of the slum dwellers in India knows
they live virtually subhuman lives. . . It was not meant to be a final
solution (sic) of the problem.” But that was to come.
What most activist writings in their fear of corruption fail to
understand is that the political party boss is absolutely intrinsic to
populist as opposed to technocratic development. To label him as
corrupt fails to understand him. We must refer in this context to the
studies of the party machine in America by Robert Merton. The
modern city is virtually a maze of bureaucratic rules. Not only is the
city bureaucracy inefficient, it cannot provide the leadership required
to take decisions and run the city. Secondly, the bureaucracy is
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12. impersonal and the new entrant to the city cannot cope with the
demands of literacy it makes on him. It is here that the politician
enters in providing the decisional impetus, the human response, a
community requires and thereby fulfils the needs a bureaucratic
structure cannot provide. As Robert Merton remarks “with keen
sociological intuition, the machine recognizes that the voter is a
person living in a specific neighbourhood, with specific personal
problems and wants. Public issues are abstract and remote, private
problems are immediate. It is not through generalized appeal to large
public concerns that the machine operates but through direct quasi-
feudal relationships between local representatives and voters in the
neighbourhood.”
Arjun Singh realized that elections are won in the slums and
legitimized illegal colonies installing even water and electricity lines.
It was precisely this human face of corruption that Bhopal
delegitimized. The movement from populism to triage can be
embodied in intermediate figures of Delhi party dons like H.K.L.
Bhagat. They control city corruption but can also make the transition
to genocidal intent. The now hazy November 1984 riots were
systematic expressions of this. Genocide of “ethnic groups” provided
the transition point to a more generalized and abstract elimination. It
is the transition from Naga and Sikh to the poor that Bhopal helped
achieve by reworking the notion of development.
Modern development needs a monster. It is this basic ideology
that provides the dividing line between the other and us. In the earlier
western evolutionary view, the savage was the other. The savage as
category was domesticated by merely becoming our past. More
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13. problematic than the savage was the monster or missing link, that
organism that was both normal and not normal, subject of curiosity
and object of analysis. The monster with the diacritical marks of
deformitythe dwarf, the bearded woman, the two headed calf, the
Siamese twin, the deformed babywas easily identifiable and
eventually domesticated through the museum and the circus which
turned our fears into fun or scholarship. As the secular world view of
development spread, the monster became that which we could not
assimilate into the homogenized worldview of our time. It focused on
the ethnic group but eventually settled for the recalcitrant victim or
the defeated culture. Bhopal has helped shape this attitude to the
victim. To understand this one must grasp the nature of the Indian
success.
As Indians we have made such a fine art of criticism that we are
slow to realise that despite our corruption, our inefficiency, our Third
Worldliness and other worldliness, we, particularly the middle class,
have internalized all the development slogans. We are the achieving
society that the forgotten behavioral scientists, the McClellands and
the Kunkels, that Ford and Rockfeller imported in the sixties, wanted
us to be. The middle class is proud of its production statistics, its
Asiad villages, its local Disneylands. It is even prouder of its
industrious NRIs and hails every success from Nobel Prizes to
spelling bees. The successful Indian middle-class identifies itself with
the Korean and Japanese miracles and feels a contempt, even horror
of the working poor, especially their lack of demographic restraint
and poor purchasing power. It is in the context of the middle class
commitment to dams, nuclear reactors, industrial estates or tourism,
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14. that modern development finds its monsterthe recalcitrant victim.
What gives this middle class violence a peculiar flavour is a mentality
that is a combination of Victoriana and America of the Eisenhower
years. It is the middle class that provides the legitimating frame for
technocratic triage and one can trace it across two tracks (1) the
debate on the slum and (2) the transformation of the category called
the victim.
The middle class has never approved of the slum which
always smacked of pathology and excess. There was always something
Malthusian about the slum and the metaphors employed to describe
it were always those of uncontrolled growth, of exponential increase,
of an abscess of cancer. There was no doubt that the slum was
transforming the city’s form, economy and politics. By 1984, one
fourth of India lived in the cities175,000,000 and one fourth of
thesesome 45,000,000lived in the slums.
In the early eighties the attitude to the slum was an open-ended
one. The rise of voluntary organizations in the slum, the support of
politicians particularly in states like Maharashtra and Madras, and
the work of urban ecologists like the Unnayan group helped provide a
different picture of the slum, where the slum was part of the city as
commons providing many of the services the middle class so
desperately needed. As a result of political agitation and government
policy, slum occupants were frequently granted legal rights to their
small plots of land. The government occasionally went beyond such
rights of tenure by providing water, sewer and electricity connections.
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15. But the truce was an uneasy one and the slum still faces occasional
eviction by policemen and slumlords.
The 1987 Bombay agitation regarding the removal of slums
around the Tata Theatre at Nariman Point marked a radical change in
attitude. The biologist Garret Hardin would have called it a classic
Tragedy of the Commons. The picture of the Commons generally
applied to pastureland, lakes, seas or forests was now applied to the
city. The classic formulation was to picture a Hobbesian state of
nature where each man tries to maximize his benefits. As long as the
situation is one of plenty, of small populations and bountiful space, a
bit more of waste or pollution leaves one indifferent to the
consequences. But shift to the Malthusian explosion called the city, of
growing populations in constricted spaces and a case for
authoritarianism to control pollution and waste becomes obvious .
One needs tyranny to keep the city of Bombay clean. It is precisely at
this time that the metaphor of the commons which evoked sharing
and community becomes a lifeboat. The city becomes a small space
for the rich and successful people. The question is should the life-boat
city go to help the drowning poor especially when the latter don’t
know how to swim or fish. Should the poor be allowed to sink the life
boat?
The picture of the lifeboat is one of controlled affluence within
and despair beyond. It is this kind of situation which led many of the
tired citizens of Bombay to demand that a cordon sanitaire be thrown
around the city. It is at this time that the cancerous infiltration of the
city through the slum and by terrorists produces the demand for
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16. identity cards for the city. Those who don’t have cards become
vagrants/vagabonds or terrorists. Though the first moves to the life
boat city were stalled the seed had been planted for what is clearly an
irreversible process. The city acquired once again the mentality of the
fort that it sprang from.
There are lessons for policy here. Evil abroad has to be
sanctioned by science as policy. It needed the expertise of socio-
biology, the work of Hardin and the Paddocks to advocate the rational
disposal of defeated societies like Ethiopia. It needed the think tank
expertise of Herman Kahn and the Hudson Institute to convince
America that it could live with a few nuclear wars. Evil abroad needed
the comforting sanction of scientific rhetoric. But in India the middle
class mentality provides sanctions for evil by anticipating such policy
rhetoric. It is this middle class commitment to expertise, office
discipline, and reason that sees the slum as pathology. Policy in India
merely has to formalize and catalyze the process. A Hardin, a Herman
Kahn or a Henry Kissinger would be merely ornamental, a reminder
to the middle class that they are in good company. The notion of the
corseted fortress city by itself would be too simplistic. The Orwellian
dictum that ‘some are more equal than others’ needs a more sinister
combination of the fantastic and the real at the everyday level.
The aftermath of the Oleum Leak case provided entry into the
next move. In his response to the criticisms of the DCM plant,
Siddharth Shriman had pointed out that many industries were
originally located in the barren areas or in cleared jungles. But as a
result of population growth within a few years crowded slums and
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17. housing colonies sprang up around the plant. Shriram pointed the
difficulty of then relocating the plant. The same problem was stated
by Tarachand Niyogi, Minister for Labour in Madhya Pradesh. In
response to earlier complaints about the Carbide plant, Niyogi
commented: “It is not a small stone that can be picked from one place
and put in another. It is a 25 crore investment.”
The civic authorities in all such situations face a standard
problem: (1) either evict the slum, or (2) shift the factory. But “the
some are more equal than others” government found the classic
solution:
a) industries pollute but are necessary;
b) slums pollute but are necessary for the city and industry;
and
c) by juxtaposing them in the same place, certain spaces and
certain categories of people can become disposable.
Disasters rather than being outside the system are absorbed into the
rituals of the industrial state. If a chemical plant leaks, it is merely
dismantled and moved to the next space like a set of filmprops for the
next hit. All policy now has to do is to identify such disposable spaces
and people. The aftermath of Bhopal provided the denouement for
such an exercise.
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18. Let us be clear at the outset that there was little notion of the
community in Bhopal. Beyond the media hype of picnicking
voluntarists what was the community that went to the aid of Bhopal?
Reports indicate that there was no sustained boycott of Carbide
products, no sacrifice of a day’s salary which is a virtual bureaucratic
norm for war and disasters like floods and famines. There were no
changes in the consumption of pesticides or an increase in the
installation of safety devices. Through a strange irony the best reports
on Bhopal were by a leftist journalist in the corporate magazine
Business India. He left broken-hearted when the only response to his
brilliantly consistent reports was one letter to the editor. His reality
was his colleagues who claimed Bhopal does not sell. Whether the
rocket Agni goes up or not is more titillating to the middle class than
Bhopal.
May be it was the gas that understood this better. The report of
the Asia-Pacific People’s Environment Network (APPEN) group
comments on what might be called the moral route of the gas. It
traversed the slums, avoided the rich and professional Area colony,
and as if smelling privilege stopped short of the ministerial
bungalows. The middle class of Area saw it as an outward sign of
inward grace. The disaster was virtually like a carnival, a feast of
fools, violating the middle class notion of order. The fact that this
liminality was not ordained by authority and stretched far too long
became a problem. It was the verdict that restored the middle class
virtues of reason, restraint and expertise and with it, the comfortable
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19. solace of the company town. It is around the time of the verdict that
all the strategies for domesticating the protest of the survivor
dovetailed. It involved a series of compressions and a shifting of signs
signifying a change in the relationship with the victim.
The first was a compression of space. The survivors’ reports of
the route and the impact of the gas was ignored and a new and official
map compressed the area of the disaster. The second was the
reduction of the categories of suffering into a few bureaucratic
manageable slots for which compensation could be easily fixed. The
third was the reduction in the number of victims in each category.
The fourth tactic altered the relationship to the victim through a
shifting of signs. One shall dub this process the moral career of the
Bhopal victim.
During the initial months of the disaster, the afflicted individuals
of the disaster were treated as victims with all the moral signification
that a victim and a sacrifice possesses. The passage of time weakens
the halo of support and the victim becomes a survivor. The survivor
is a more secular figure. He is both witness and residue. He has both
seen death and been left behind by it. As a result, he acquires the
quality of embarrassment as if he is both witness to a scandal and
party to it. Yet he still has some sort of moral field around him. From
the moral to the medical is a quick step as the survivor becomes a
patient.
The sick role is of the most strictly defined of sociological roles.
As Talcott Parsons showed, sickness is deviancy of a particular kind.
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20. The sick role permits the citizen patient to avoid some of the normal
responsibilities of adult citizenship. The best example is from Bhopal
itself where women to avoid household chores, often got themselves
admitted to hospitals for a few days rest. The patient is generally not
regarded as responsible for his ailment. He is not competent to take
care of himself and needs the care of both family and the professional
expert. In fact, in modern societies, the patient is expected to seek the
help of experts and the doctor has to certify both his illness and the
return to normalcy and citizenship. There is thus an objectively
defined period of time within which the sick person must return to
citizenship. Prolonged periods of illness especially when there are
contradictory definitions of the situation by doctor and patient
become problematic and this is precisely what happened in Bhopal.
The defiance of the patient becomes threatening to the expert. In
fact, disasters become liminal periods where the patient bursts out of
his sociologically sanctioned role, threatening both the expert and the
state. What begins as illness soon becomes both sin and crime and is
subject to the simultaneous pressure of all three forces. It is the site of
the slum, that particular hybrid of poverty and pathology, that makes
the Bhopal victim the object of a series of strategies. One is never
clear whether he is poorman, sickman or criminal.
The patient’s right to his interpretation was almost immediately
challenged. The doctors in Bhopal refused to give the victims
certificates that they had suffered from gas poisoning. It was implied
that they were suffering from normal ailments of poverty, especially
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21. Tuberculosis. Professor N.P. Mishra of Gandhi Medical College noted,
“You can’t call these sick people gas cases. Most had such pre-existing
lung diseases like TB anyway.” Giving political imprimatur to this
opinion, Arjun Singh was publicized as opening a TB camp in one of
the gas affected areas soon after the leak and claiming that there was
a necessity to establish a link between the deaths and the MIC
leakage.
In fact the government’s first response was the dole. The Chief
Minister distributed 700,000 new ration cards and a sum of Rs.20
million was spent on free rations for victims and non-victims alike.
The dole model is doubly dangerous not only because it can be
suspended arbitrarily but because it construes the victim as a beggar.
The dole preface the first step to the panopticon. The victim like a
vagrant in the old panopticons is forced into a series of specific
occupations. Claude Alvares observes that “The bureaucrats (mostly
whisky drinkers themselves) have determined that males should not
be given jobs under the relief programmes or cash as they would
fritter away their incomes in drink. Therefore the (first) relief centres
opened by the government are predominantly for females and include
basically sewing centres.” One wonders if the irony of giving victims,
many with eye ailments, sewing jobs, ever struck the bureaucrats. The
picture of the victim as vagabond and vagrant is pushed even further.
The promise of money disrupted the moral economy of the
Bhopal patient. There were shades of unruly millenialism as hordes of
ambulance chasers descended on the city promising untold wealth,
where death and damage became passports to the American dream.
The dreams of the Bhopal victims were publicized like Cargo cults in
21

22. which natives dreamed of aeroplanes landing with refrigerators,
radios, TVs and all the products of the whiteman’s world. Even after
the February 1989 verdict, there was a sense that a group of vagrants
had won a lottery. But the assertion of government control over the
money prevented the middle class fears of a giant carnival of
alcoholism. In fact, the first grants of money to the victim, just before
the elections of 1990, were compared by newspapers to a plane ride of
workers returning from the Gulf. The buying of target goods like
radios, the increase in consumption and debt, the rise in the number
of pawnshipsall served to confirm that the money was wasted. The
real facts of the disaster got submerged in the transformation of
victim into a vagrant. Perhaps the final word belongs to a piece of
science fiction. One can cite Samuel Butler’s description of the
consumptive which captures for us the eventual plight of the Bhopal
victim.
In his Erewhom he describes the trial of a man accused of
pulmonary consumption: “Prisoner at the bar, you have been accused
of the great crime of labouring under pulmonary consumption, and
after an impartial trial before a jury of your countrymen, you have
been found guilty. It pains me much to see one who is yet so young,
and whose prospects in life were otherwise so excellent, brought to
this distressing condition by a constitution which I can only regard as
radically vicious; but yours is no case for compassion. This is not your
first offence you have led a career of crime, and have only profited by
the lenience shown you upon past occasions to offend yet more
seriously against the laws and institutions of your country. You were
convicted of aggravated bronchitis last year; and I find that though
22

23. you are now only twenty three years old, you have been imprisoned
on no less than fourteen occasions for illness of a more or less hateful
character. Had not the capital punishment for consumption been
abolished, I should certainly inflict it now.”
The first scenario of the Bhide report ends at this point.
III
The complete text of the Bhide Report is still not available. Apart
from the above scenario, what we possess are the notes of a meeting
of the Planning Commission to discuss certain proposed initiatives by
voluntary groups concerned with Bhopal. We are informed that the
recommendations were later incorporated into the Report.
The meeting was held on June 11th, 1990. Apart from the official
members and the Chairman, the only other individual present was
Ashok Bahadur, an IAS officer who functioned as Secretary. He was,
as he himself confessed, a generalist, closer to Macaulay than to Alvin
Toffler and it was he who provided the following document and
annotations.
Notes: Confidential Meeting, 11.6.90
The proposal of the voluntary groups had already been xeroxed and
circulated. It sought to establish a Citizens Commission on Bhopal to
monitor the relief and rehabilitation activities of the Government of
India. In pursuit of this it suggested the following:
1) To publish a complete set of all the scientific, medical, legal and
23

24. environmental reports on Bhopal. Each report was to be specifically
annotated by an expert.
2) To establish a secretariat including a small full-time staff to
prepare within six months, a Citizens’ Report on Bhopal to be
followed by a Bhopal Relief Bulletin.
3) To convene a team of doctors to establish a clinic at Bhopal. The
clinic would avail itself of expertise from different medical systems. In
this context, the Hamdard Institute (Delhi), the Arya Vaidya Shala
(Kottakal), the Srinivasamurthi Siddha Institute (Madras) and the
College of Homeopathy (Calcutta) have already been approached.
4) To provide surveys of the victim’s view of the disaster and
especially their description of pain, suffering and cure.
5) To establish a People’s Science Institute to investigate any future
disaster and to provide a circle of expertise outside governmental
control.
6) To establish a museum to commemorate the disaster.
7) To encourage discussion and debate on Bhopal among schools,
colleges and trade unions by sponsoring debates, meetings and essay
competitions. Citizens would also be encouraged to fast once a week
and donate the proceeds to the Commission.
24

25. 8) To raise through public donations a sum of Rs.5 crores to meet
the above objectives.
The initial reaction of the Planning Commission to the above
proposals, particularly given the enthusiastic public response, was
violent. There was even a demand to revive a variant of the Kudal
Commission. The Chairman asked Dr. Bhide whether he had any
specific suggestions in this regard. His initial reply that
‘understanding does not always lead to applied science’ puzzled the
technocrats. But he then elaborated a series of responses which
demonstrated his consummate skills. While the technocrats did not
always understand his vocabulary, they admired his sense of power.
Bhide confessed that he had found the proposals interesting and
observed that they required a more generalized response. There was
in his view, no need to harass all voluntary groups. Their activities
were in any case being monitored by the National Information
Network (NICNET), which possessed the only complete dossier on
them. He then presented his famous note on voluntarism and the list
of recommendations.
“Voluntarism is a middle class urban phenomenon. It arose as a
legitimate activity after the two great acts of repression in an urban
context, the Emergency and the government’s response to Naxalbari.
It recognises a need for some form of generalized ethical concern not
tied to specific ideologies or ‘isms’. The urban middle class needs
some space to reflect on the nature of the city and the responsibilities
25

26. of citizenship. Voluntarism provides a mild case for conscience. It
also provides a sense of community to professionals not totally
comfortable in the old clubs, a sense of conviviality where old and
new ideals can find space to talk. These groups are also part of a
threatened elite and feel they are no match for the new aggressive
nouveau riche and think of themselves as potentially, at least,
downwardly mobile. It is only old family wealth that allow many of
them to maintain current lifestyles.
“The problem before the state is how to harness this creative
dissent, this urge for limited heroics. The Indian state, it must be
observed, has not been perceptive about the Emergency. It never
realized that the Emergency not only broke the heart of the Congress
Party but also that of its double, the Sarvodaya movement under
Vinoba Bhave. Today the Indian state needs such a moral
complement, only in a more professionalized form. Its earlier
stupidity lay in harassing the Voluntary Agencies (VOLAGs) with
enquiries and Commissions and politicizing them by pushing them
into a more antagonistic role, though part of the responsibility for this
no doubt lies with some of the ideologues of the Nehru era, the
kitchen cabinet around Mrs. Gandhi. When they broke with her, they
hijacked voluntarism away from government. This has been the real
role of opposition intellectuals like Romesh Thapar, Raj Krishna and
Rajni Kothari.”
Bhide insisted on explaining to the Chairman the role of
Professor Kothari. He remarked that the scholar’s Politics in India
26

27. was the only systematic political study and legitimation of the
Congress and the Nehru era. The pity was there was no Politics in
India-II. When men like Kothari broke away, they counterposed these
new spaces of voluntarism against the government and this has
blinded the state to the possibilities of voluntarism. Fortunately, with
that generation retiring, the time was ripe for reversal. Bhide quoted
secret government surveys to show that no ecologist under 40 was
respected as an individual, that most of them were seen as careerists
and that not one of them scored half the points for integrity that
Sunderlal Bahuguna, Baba Amte or Sivaram Karanth did.
“There are two further trends which could aid this possibility.
Firstly, dissent in our times is amorphous. Radicalism today has
become a floating signifier, ready to attach itself to any object, any
cause. From poverty to family planning, from dams to the November
riots, it runs through its cycle of attention, obsession and indifference
and moves on; untouched and untarnished. The social function of
coffee houses and art in the earlier years is now met through
radicalismeach disaster providing the city of Delhi with new salons.
There is no greater scandal than a disaster and one can pick from
Roop Kanwar and Bidar to Narmada and the November riots. What
makes this even more obscene is the new advocacy networks,
professional VOLAGs who hire themselves out as consultants to any
cause. These are the new Kissingers of despair.
“There is a second and equally important trend. This relates
to the explosion of talent in social sciences other than economics and
it is these ambitious groups which have entered the domains of
27

28. ecology, feminism and the civil rights movements. These groups have
been constantly searching for their equivalent of Project Camelot, one
act or report that could emphasize the policy validity of their science.
“It is Bhopal that will allow for such giant re-territorializations.
Consider feminism, which by now is tired of its nitpicking protests.
Now from the parochiality of feminism, one can enter the almost
infinite grid of medical policy, with none of the taint of family
planning. Feminism can enter power in a way it never visualized.
“At one end is the historical anchor of Bhopal and at the other,
the floating future, the ever imminent prospect of AIDS. Between the
two lies years of relevant research and activism and the prospect of
the definitive statement on medicine and medical policy in India. This
prospect is even more enchanting as health rather than poverty will
become the metaphor of control of the modern welfare state. Bhopal
and AIDS reflect the internationalization of disasters, and the two
together offer prospects of political control that neither plague nor
tropical medicine could ever provide in the past.”
The Planning Commission was then provided with a series of
socioeconomic-cum-psychological profiles of voluntary groups in
Delhi based on a specially commissioned survey. Dr. Bhide claimed
that it was also representative of Bombay and Bangalore. His analysis
revealed the following partly overlapping strata of groups involved in
Bhopal.
28

29. (a) Retired scientists, U.N. officials and government servants,
particularly IAS officers (Age 60-65);
(b) Feminists (17-35) & (45-50)The latter age group includes
professionals and housewives with older children or intellectual
ambitions;
(c) Ecologists (17-35);
(d) Marxists interacting with (b) and (c) but also looking for a new
constituency (30-40);
(e) Secular groups, especially senior professors, older social
workers, editors of small magazines. These are generally people
whose ideals were formed during the Nehru era (45-70);
(f) Civil rights activists (20-60);
(g) Concerned professionals (doctors, engineers, lawyers,
journalists) generally ambitious but with a need to play up to radicals.
High income with interdisciplinary interests (35-50);
(h) Fringe political groupsNaxals, Trotskyites, small trade union
groups. Generally adolescent and theatrical (20-40);
(i) Students, generally an upwardly mobile category with
undergraduate degrees from Bihar, Orissa, Kerala and Andhra,
planning careers in the civil service. Use involvement in movements
to acquire a cosmopolitan facade (20-25);
29

30. (j) Occasional members of ‘target’ groups, Nagas, Sikhs
or Assamesegenerally present to display solidarity.
The survey also emphasized that groups (a) & (e) generally
provided respectability and the sites for frequent meetings in
South Delhi houses. Virtually all had children working for ‘No
More Bhopal Campaigns’ abroad or doing prolonged Ph.Ds in
social science departments at JNU or Delhi University. The
other interesting fact was the complete absence of one strata,
IIT or commerce graduates with MBA degrees.
Dr. Bhide’s note then outlined a plan for co-opting the
VOLAGs. He noted that the regime had set the basis for the
domestication of these groups through two politically
impeccable steps, the Technology Missions, now numbering a
dozen, and the India Festivals. The VOLAGs, he felt, could be
cut to size between the two ends of this scissors. Reproduced
below are the range of suggestions made. What particularly
impressed experts was the systematic attention he paid to the
universities and research institutes. Bhide argued that three
things had to be reclaimed for the state:
“1) the legitimacy of the state as a form of expertise;
2) the notion of the state as an agency of welfare; and
3) as a provider of creative spaces for the intelligentsia.
What Bhopal threatened is the validity of state expertise in
science, medicine and law and the superiority of modern over
local knowledge. Three events in particular confirmed this. The
30

31. first was the attitude of government doctors in Sodium
Thiosulphate controversy and the ease with which VOLAG
doctors could score points against them. The second was the
nature of the February 1989 verdict and the behaviour of the
judges in the aftermath. It puzzled people that the verdict was a
mere 500 words. Its language displayed what sociologist
Richard Brown has called ‘rhetorical dominance, emphasizing
the relation between language and power rather than language
and content’. The judges behaved like a milkman caught
watering the milk without the latter’s innovative alibis or sense
of humour. Justice Pathak’s appointment to the International
Court of Justice was an attempt to bolster this facade of
expertise.
“The third example is the exercise called Operation Faith.
Designed to detoxify the remaining gas and simultaneously
restore faith in the government’s technical competence,
Operation Faith was a classic ritual with the full paraphernalia
of scientific and technical expertise including helicopters. Yet it
convinced no one. All of Bhopal voted with its feet, choosing to
leave the city during the exercise. Eventually the yagna to
purify the city had greater legitimacy than Operation Faith. The
symbolic power of ghee still matches the chemists equations.
“The first requirement of Bhopal is the restoration of the
confidence of scientists, both in science and government. It is
proposed that a new series of international institutes for
Electronic and the Life Sciences be established and the Raj
Reddy be invited to head the new International Centre for
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32. Robotics. These research institutes should be on the same lines
as the International Agriculture Research Institutes that
triggered and sustained the green revolution. These institutes
will however be under greater third world control. They are to
be established mainly to attract Third World talent in the First
World, which wants to be nationalist but in first world
economic conditions.”
[In a decision which raised eyebrows even in Business
India circles, the overall management of these Institutes was
handed over to Ajit Kerkar, Executive Director of Indian Hotels.
It was argued that these new institutes would be commercially
viable unlike the old and defunct Council for Scientific and
Industrial Research (CSIR) and that franchises of research
institutes would soon be auctioned like those for hotels.]
Bhide also opposed the establishment of a disaster
institute, arguing that it represented too Pavlovian a response
and could even be read as an admission of culpability. What he
recommended instead were two separate institutes, one for the
Risk Sciences and the other Applied Systems Analysis, both
under the Planning Commission.
His third recommendation was to “establish People’s
Science Institutes (PSI) to replace the dormant Regional
Science Laboratories of the CSIR. The PSIs are to be partly
funded by the Statethe balance to be raised from local
contributions. This will give them an austere touch. They are to
32

33. be partly modelled on agricultural extension cells and should be
oriented to allow innovation in local technologies and materials.
Special provisions should be made for recruiting craftsmen and
activists as extension agents. Scientists from Kerala Shastra
Sahitya Parishad (KSSP), ASTRA, CSE could be invited to be
board members.”
His final suggestion, which many thought was a stroke of
genius, was the establishment of the Indian Ecological Service
with separate cadres for forestry, medicine, industry and
agriculture. The old forest service, the country’s biggest
landlord, still reeking of colonialism was to be disbanded. It was
also observed that many of the recently retired scientists of the
Indira Gandhi era, who might feel distanced from power,
should be requested to serve on the recruitment board. It was
also proposed to establish the green commandos, a paramilitary
group of ecology experts to tackle disasters. [Initially an object
of amusement, the behaviour of these squads in evacuating the
villages around the Kalpakkam reactor after a leak, provided
them the required touch of machismo.]
“While absorption of dissent through employment
generation devices is one part of the strategy; the second aspect
is more coercive. It is proposed that the government’s earlier
moves to declare the Naramda Dam area a security zone should
also be extended to all disaster areas. Systematic acts of
repression could be carried out, particularly against fringe eco-
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34. Marxist and small trade union groups. It is also recommended
that the Ranjit Gupta model be applied in this context.”
The former Police Commissioner’s treatment of Naxalites
from higher income brackets in Calcutta had intrigued Dr.
Bhide. After an initial phase of repression, Gupta had
approached the families of each revolutionary with a clear
option: either the son opted for an executive job, a fellowship
abroad or faced extermination. The results were impressive and
former Naxals have virtually been responsible for the high
quality of scholarship in ICSSR institutes. Bhide advocated
similar measures in Doon Valley, Narmada, Singrauli and the
Kaiga areas.
Dr. Bhide was not too enthusiastic about the museum. Such
efforts, in his view, tended to be unimaginative and obscene. He
referred to tourists at the Hiroshima museum watching
documentaries of devastation while consuming hamburgers.
The only exception he would allow was if the artist Nekchand
agreed to build a museum out of factory junk in Bhopal.
34

35. IV
Aftermath
Following Bhide’s suggestions, there were two additional
nominations to the Planning Commission. The first was the
appointment of ‘Alfie’ Gupta, the athletic young Stephanian
who at thirty made Bunker’ Roy look old hat. Gupta had already
been head of five VOLAG groups dealing with mass media,
health and literacy and had served stints at CARITAS and
OXFAM. The other was the appointment of Meenakshi Khanna,
the capital’s latest and most aggressive feminist, with special
responsibility for tackling the issue of child labour. The
Commission was convinced that these two leaders would ensure
that VOLAGS, rather than being radical irritants would become
extensions to the new consumerism. This post-Spock Home-
Science generation had already been successfully used in the
technology missions on literacy and health.
The implementation of the Bhide Report under the
directorship of ‘Alfie’ Gupta broke the spirit of VOLAGS. The
Indian Ecological Service was an enormous success, and scores
of students facing government repression in Narmada, Kaiga,
and Singrauli soon joined these services. The diehard ecologists
moved to organizations like the PUDR, and eventually drifted
back to sluggish roles in the left parties they had abandoned
earlier.
35

36. Bhide on one of his occasional visits to India confessed that
he missed the charming VOLAG meetings at the Triveni Cafe
and the lawns of the Law Institute and the Boat Club. When
India Today asked him for his comments on them, he recited a
modified piece from The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, Mario
Vargas Llosa’s study of a failed revolutionary.
“They got sensualized too soon, they have no solid
convictions. Their morality is worth approximately a plane
ticket to a Congress. That is why the one’s who didn’t sell
themselves to a Yankee scholarship, let themselves be bribed by
Stalinism and became party members.”
36