BehanVox: The Bhopal Gas Tragedy Lives On
This week in BehanVox: a feminist internet, SC offers relief measures for booth level officers, and more
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Hello and welcome to BehanVox!
In this week’s edition, we bring you the first of our stories of how Bhopal’s women collectivised to deal with the aftermath of the catastrophic gas leak 41 years ago. And an interview on what a feminist internet would look like.
Story So Far
The toxic gas that killed and sickened thousands of people in Bhopal never really left their bodies. And 41 years later, its aftermath has not stopped blighting their lives. It is hard to find the right words to describe the miscarriage of justice that the survivors continue to suffer – the abysmal compensation, the loss of livelihood and the utter callousness with which the state treated their medical needs. Above all, they have to watch as the perpetrators not only go unpunished but also spread their tentacles elsewhere.
As is always the case with such catastrophes, it is the women of Bhopal who were left to shoulder the terrible consequences. From working class, marginalised homes, many of them had little education, job skills or mobility. But with family breadwinners either dead, bedridden or very sick, they had no option but to step up and radically transform their lives and hold up their loved ones.
BehanBox is marking the 41st year of the catastrophe with reports on the long, hard battle that is being waged by the survivors. In the first of these, published this week, we look at how the crisis did not end the morning after the gas leak but continues to affect multiple generations of those affected.
Leela Bai remembers everything about the night of December 2, 1984. She was a young mother, asleep in her mud-walled home, her husband and in-laws nearby. Her one-year-old daughter woke up crying; then came the burning sensation as though chilies were being rubbed into their eyes.
Leela ran barefoot into the darkness with her baby, the air white with thick smoke. “People were screaming, collapsing, vomiting. We ran over bodies. The whole mohalla was empty and full of death,” she recalls. “Every time we tell this story, we live it again.” But it was not as if the deaths and disasters ended that night. The gas seeped into their lungs, into their drinking water, into their pregnancies, and into the bodies of their children and grandchildren.
Vishnu Bai never really recovered. She has high blood pressure and breathing problems. Her husband, who was heavily exposed the night of the leak, died 20 years later from lung complications related to tuberculosis. One of her sons, born after the disaster, developed severe anxiety and died by suicide. We found several such stories.
The Union Carbide factory still stands at the same location, pipes rusted and twisted. But perhaps most disturbing is the toxic waste that still seeps into the soil and the groundwater. For decades, large quantities of hazardous waste abandoned at the site have been swept by rainwater into the groundwater in the neighbourhood. In certain neighbourhoods in a 5km radius of the abandoned factory, contamination is still ongoing. It is so severe that some soil samples near the factory taken in the past contained mercury levels up to 6 millions of times above permissible levels. Gas exposure was the first disaster; groundwater contamination has become the second.
An academic study was carried out in 1996 on the consequences of the gas leak for women’s reproductive health. It found significantly higher rates of pregnancy loss and neonatal deaths and persistent gynecological disorders among exposed women.
It was not the state-run ‘gas relief hospitals’ that helped patch up broken lives. It was the tireless work of trusts like Sambhavana and Chingari and women like Rashida Bee and Champa Devi Shukla, who put their own grief aside, and stepped up to provide help to women and children in distress. In the second part of the series, we profile their tremendous work.
Read our story here.
Can there be such a thing as a feminist internet or feminist regulation of AI? Yes, argues Smita, who works on gender, sexuality, and internet rights at the Association for Progressive Communications. And it is not just about gender but also freedom, access and equity.
“At the core of it, a feminist internet is a space that offers meaningful access – not just accessibility for persons with disability but also access in terms of language, for people with different degrees of digital literacy and familiarity with technology. It is access to information that is not programmed but has multiple viewpoints and dimensions to it,” says Smita.
Today, it might sound like a fantastical idea but in 2014-15, the Association for Progressive Communication did consultations with 50 activists from across movements such as feminism, digital rights, and child rights and came up with what was called the feminist principles of the internet. Beyond everything else, Smita argues for the internet as a place of fun.
“An internet will only be feminist if it’s not just equal but also equitable. We need a space where there are provisions made to ensure the internet works for people who are at the absolute margins, who are not included in conversations,” argues Smita. This also means that people are not coerced by governments into being online to access the most basic of public services, as is the case today.
But ultimately, a feminist internet is an internet for fun, “to meet people and have community,” says Smita. This unfortunately is rarely the case today.
Read Saumya Kalia’s interview here.
Talking Point
BLO Deaths: State governments are responsible for the working conditions and mental health of booth level officers, declared a Supreme Court bench led by Chief Justice Surya Kant, asking that the workload of the officials be reduced. States have also been told to consider the requests of those seeking exemption from SIR duty, particularly if they are ill or incapacitated for other reasons. There are no definite numbers on the deaths of BLOs involved in SIR but some estimates put this at 33, including stress-related heart attacks and suicides. Times of India has reported that “digital uploads, lack of sleep and fear of suspension” have led to suicides or threatened suicides among BLOs. Such deaths have been reported from across Kerala, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, and West Bengal.
Violence at Work: Over years, the Kenyan government ignored complaints of sexual abuse against Robinson Juma Twanga, the country’s labour attaché in Saudi Arabia, as per a New York Times investigation. Kenya has been pushing its labour exports, especially to the kingdom and women are the most vulnerable in this group of workers. There are harrowing stories of how the women, already survivors of sexual assault at the hands of their employees, sought Twanga’s help only to be subject to more abuse.
Data Drop
For survivors still haunted by and battling the aftermath of the Bhopal Gas Leak in 1984, accountability is not just about themselves, but also for their future generations. As the Indian government invests heavily in chemical industries, there is every fear that what happened in Bhopal could happen again. Survivors’ organisations have demanded:
Criminal action against Dow Chemical
Expedited prosecutions of Union Carbide’s Indian subsidiary
Clean up of the toxic waste and clean drinking water for affected neighbourhoods
Fair compensation of Rs 5 lakh for lifetime injuries to gas-exposed families
Adequate pensions for widows
Guaranteed, free and specialised healthcare for gas victims
Research on generational impacts, including on women and reproductive health
Despite all the challenges, Bhopal’s women continue to fight, through illness, grief, poverty and exhaustion. They have become leaders of one of India’s longest-running struggles for justice – tirelessly collecting data and marching from Bhopal to Delhi and Mumbai.
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Kerala’s MeToo Moment: On December 8, an eight-year-long wait for justice will draw to a close as a court delivers the verdict on the 2017 Kerala actor assault case. A good time to revisit this story from last year: Nidhi Suresh meticulously reports on the allegations against superstar Dileep, and the feminist revolution it triggered predating the global MeToo movement. You can also watch this recap.
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