Summary dismissal

It should, perhaps, occasion no surprise. Nevertheless, US district judge J.F.Keenan’s summary dismissal of a class action suit filed in November 1999 by the survivors of the Bhopal gas disaster rankles. The judge clearly found it more expedient to cite the 1989 settlement in which the company agreed to pay $470 million to those affected by the MIC gas leak, rather than take a fresh look at the evidence at hand, some of it new. In the process, his judgement was just what the Union Carbide Corporation (UCC), the parent company of Union Carbide India Limited (UCIL), had wanted — a dismissal of the case through a summary judgement. In the process, justice continued to elude those who survived that disastrous night of December 2-3, 1984, and the relatives of the dead.

Justice Keenan duly noted that the Supreme Court of India had approved and upheld the 1989 settlement and based his judgement on this fact. However, the story had not quite ended there. True, the Supreme Court had quashed all criminal proceedings against the accused but, after a review petition and writ petitions filed subsequently, it had acquiesced to reviving the criminal cases against all the accused. After the criminal cases were revived, the chief judicial magistrate (CJM) of Bhopal made repeated attempts to summon Warren Anderson — chairman of UCC at the time of the disaster, and the first accused in the case — but to no avail. He was declared an absconder and a non-bailable warrant of arrest was issued against him — for the second time. The CJM also ordered the Indian government to seek his extradition. Nothing worked and Anderson, to this day, has not bothered to come before Indian courts, apart from an initial appearance.

If nothing else, this makes a mockery of the 1986 US court decision to accede to UCC’s pleas and send the case for compensation to Indians courts. The UCC may take shelter behind its pathetic “compensation” settlement of $470 million but there is just no denying that its moral culpability remains. It is in this spirit that the present suit, which sought redressal for “crimes against humanity” committed by the Corporation and which specifically named its former chairperson, should have been viewed. There are several points at issue here. For one, it has long been suspected that the safety systems at the ill-fated UCIL plant at Bhopal were not on a par with those installed in the UCC’s pesticide plant in West Virginia. Then there were certain long-term repercussions of the disaster that could not have been anticipated earlier — as, for instance, the contamination of water sources in the area thanks to the toxins in the soil caused by poisonous chemicals still lying in the UCIL plant. The tragedy of Bhopalis that no agency, whether it was the Indian government, the Indian courts, or the US courts, has shown the necessary sensitivity, commitment and moral stature required to compensate a group of people who have had to suffer helljust because they happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.