Read Five Past Midnight in Bhopal Online
Authors: Javier Moro
Five Past Midnight in Bhopal
Copyright © 2002 by Pressinter S.A. and Sesamat Worldwide Rights S.A.
All rights reserved.
WARNER BOOKS
Hachette Book Group
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First eBook Edition: April 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-56124-2
Contents
Part One: A NEW STAR IN THE INDIAN SKY
1 Firecrackers That Kill, Cows That Die, Insects That Murder
2 The Planetary Holocaust Wrought by Armies of Ravaging Insects
3 A Neighborhood Called Orya Bustee
4 A Visionary Billionaire to the Rescue of Humanity’s Food
5 Three Zealots on the Banks of the Hudson
6 The Daily Heroism of the People of the Bustees
7 An American Valley That Ruled the World
8 A Little Mouse under the Seats of Bhopal’s Trains
9 A Poison That Smelled Like Boiled Cabbage
10 They Deserved the Mercy of God
12 A Promised Land on the Ruins of a Legendary Kingdom
13 A Continent of Three Hundred Million Peasants and Six Hundred Languages
15 A Plant as “Inoffensive as a Chocolate Factory”
16 A New Star in the Indian Sky
17 “They’ll Never Dare Send in Their Bulldozers”
18 Wages of Fear on the Roads of Maharashtra
20 “Carbide Has Poisoned Our Water!”
21 The First Deadly Drops from the “Beautiful Plant”
22 Three Tanks Dressed up for a Carnival
23 “Half a Million Hours of Work and Not a Day Lost”
24 Everlasting Roots in the Black Earth of the Kali Grounds
Part Two A NIGHT BLESSED BY THE STARS
25 A Gas That Makes You Laugh Before It Kills You
26 “You Will Be Reduced to Dust”
27 Ali Baba’s Treasure for the Heroes of the Kali Grounds
28 The Sudden Arrival of a Cost-Cutting Gentleman
29 “My Beautiful Plant Was Losing Its Soul”
30 The Fiancés of the Orya Bustee
31 The End of a Young Indian’s Dream
32 The Vengeance of the People of the Kali Grounds
33 Festivities That Set Hearts Ablaze
35 A Night Blessed by the Stars
Part Three THREE SARCOPHAGI UNDER THE MOON
36 Three Sarcophagi under the Moon
37 “What if the Stars Were to Go on Strike?”
39 Lungs Bursting in the Heart of the Night
40 “Something Beyond All Comprehension”
41 “All Hell Has Broken Loose Here!”
42 A Half-Naked Holy Man in the Heart of a Deadly Cloud
43 The Dancing Girl Was Not Dead
44 “Death to the Killer Anderson!”
45 “Carbide Has Made Us the Center of the World”
“All That Is Not Given Is Lost”
Other books by
Dominique Lapierre and Javier Moro
Dominique Lapierre
A Thousand Suns
Beyond Love
The City of Joy
Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins
The Fifth Horseman
Freedom at Midnight
O Jerusalem
… Or I’ll Dress You in Mourning
Is Paris Burning?
Javier Moro
The Mountains of the Buddha
The Jaipur Foot
Los Senderos de la Libertad
To the heroes of the Orya Bustee,
of Chola and of Jai Prakash Nagar.
F
irst and foremost we would like to express our immense gratitude to our wives, Dominique and Sita, who shared every moment
of our long and difficult research and who were our irreplaceable helpers in the preparation of this work.
Heartfelt appreciation to Colette Modiano, Paul and Manuela Andreota, Pascaline Bressan, Michel Gourtay, Mari Carmen Doñate,
Eugenio Suarez and Antonio Ubach, who spent long hours correcting our manuscript and gave us their encouragement.
A very special thank you to Antoine Caro for his exceptional assistance with the preparation of this book, as well as to Pierre
Amado for his valuable advice on India.
This book is the fruit of patient research both in the United States and in India. In the United States we would like particularly
to thank engineer Warren Woomer and his wife Betty who made us welcome in their charming house in South Charleston, enabling
us to reconstruct the happy years when Warren was in charge of the Bhopal factory. Similarly we would like to thank engineer
Eduardo Muñoz for our innumerable meetings in San Francisco and at his villa in Sausalito, in the course of which we were
able to reconstruct, almost day by day, the adventure of establishing a high-tech pesticide plant in the heartland of India,
and Muñoz’s fight to limit its size and the dangers involved.
Again in the United States, we would like to thank Halcott P. Foss and engineers Jean-Luc Lemaire and William K. Frampton,
for having opened wide the doors to the Institute 2 factory, the Bhopal plant’s elder sister, where Sevin is still produced
from deadly methyl isocyanate. Additional thanks go to Jean-Luc Lemaire and to René Crochard for the illuminating explanations
that facilitated the writing of the technical parts of our book. We include in this American tribute Ward Morehouse and David
Dembo who, from their small East River office in New York, conduct an unrelenting struggle to make the truth about the Bhopal
disaster known and who generously gave us access to their precious archives. And we would like to express our gratitude to
Kathy Kramer for having placed at our disposal documentation concerning the Boyce Thompson Institute in Yonkers where the
Sevin, which was to wipe out insects ravaging the harvests of peasants throughout the world, was invented.
Among all the Indian engineers who took part in the adventure of Bhopal’s “beautiful plant,” our gratitude is due primarily
to Kamal Pareek for the entire days we spent together, reconstructing in every little detail the extraordinary hope that the
Bhopal factory had brought with it, the subsequent slow agony and the eventual catastrophe. Grateful thanks also go to engineers
Umesh Nanda and John Luke Couvaras who patiently shared their memories and entrusted numerous unpublished documents to us.
We would similarly like to express out gratitude to Jagannathan Mukund who was the factory’s last managing director and who
allowed us to bombard him with questions for three days on his Conoor property in the mountains of the Nilgiris in southern
India.
Naturally a very large part of our research was conducted in Bhopal itself, where the assistance of Satinath Sarangi and his
team of record keepers from the Sambhavna Trust was indispensable to us, as were the generous help and hospitality of Farah
Khan and her mother Niloufar Khan, Begum Rachid, Bano and Yadar Raachid Uzzafar Khan, Sonia and Nader Raachid Uzzafar Khan,
as well as Mr. and Mrs. Balthazar de Bourbon, Enamia, Kamlesh Jamaini, the chronicler Nasser Kamal, Manish Mishra and Dr.
Zahir ul-Islam who helped us uncover the secrets of the culture and legendary past of their beautiful city.
We wish to thank also his excellency Mr. Digvijay Singh, the chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, for his warm reception, and
all those who so generously helped us in the various aspects of our research. By alphabetical order: M.M. Shyam Babu, K.D.
Ballal in Bangalore, Dr. Bambhal, Sudeep Banerjee, Sajda Bano, Ahmed Bassi, Dr. Bhandari, Praful Bidwai, N.M. Buch, Father
Dennis Carneiro, Amar Chand, Dr. Heeresh Chandra, T.R. Chouhan, S.P. Chowdhary, Mr. Chughtai, Deena Dayalan and the staff
of
The Other Media
, Mr. Diwedi, Dr. Banu Dubey, R.K. Dutta, Dr. Deepak Gandhe, Brigadier Garg, Subashe Godane, V.P. Gokhale from Eveready, Ahsan
Hussain, Santosh Katiyar, Rehman Khan, Colonel Gurcharan Singh Khanuja, Rajkumar Keswani, Dr. Loya, Dr. N.P. Mishra, Dr. Nagu,
Shekil Qureshi, Ganga and Dalima Ram, Dr. Rajanarayan, Salar, Dr. Sarkar, Dr. Satpathy, Arvind Shrivastava, V.N. Singh, Commissioner
Ranjit Singh, S.K. Trehan, Dr. Trivedi, Dr. Varadajan, Mohan Lal Varma, Rev. Timothy Wankhede.
Union Carbide’s management in India and the United States failed to respond to our requests for interviews and information.
By contrast, we are grateful to the Rhône-Poulenc division of Aventis, which took over the proprietorship of the Institute
2 factory in the United States, and to its director for agro-international public relations, Georges Santini, for having generously
received us both in Institute 2 and at the research department in Lyon. We include in our appreciation Christine Giulani,
in charge of public relations for Dow Agro Sciences, for the warm welcome provided at the Letcombe Regis laboratories in Great
Britain.
We want to thank also our friends who made our travels and stays in India so productive and pleasant: M.M. Sanjay Basu and
all the staff at
Far Horizon
, Ranvir Bhandari, Audrey Daver, Bharat Dhruv, Madan Kak and the whole staff of TCI, Sanjiv Malhotra, Sunil Mukherjee, Gilbert
Soulaine and Gilles Renard.
We address our special gratitude to those who help us so generously in our humanitarian work: their excellencies the ambassadors
Bernard de Montferrand and Kanwal Sibal, Mary Allizon, Rina and Takis Anoussis, David Backler and the Foundation Marcelle
and Jean Coutu, Otto Barghezi, Jamshed Bhabha, Drs. Françoise Baylet-Vincent, Angela Bertoli, Henri-Jean Philippe and their
benevolent friends of the organizations Gynécologie sans Frontières and Pathologie, Cytologie et Développement, Lon and Dick
Behr, Nicolas Borsinger and the Foundation ProVictimis, Pierre Ceyrac, Kathryn and John Coo, Gaston Dayanand, Peter and Richard
Dreyfus, Behram and Mani Dumasia, Catherine and David Graham, Priti Jain, Mohammed Kamruddin and the whole team of UBA, Adi
and Jeroo Katgara, Ashwini and Renu Kumar, François Laborde and the whole team of HSP, Ila Lumba, Michèle Migone and all the
Friends of Italy, Christina Mondadori and the Foundation Benedetta d’Intino, Aman Nath, Aloka Pal, Sabitri Pal, Shirin Paul,
Mohammed Abdul Wohab and the whole staff of SHIS, Gaston Roberge, June and Paul Shorr, James Stevens and the whole team of
Udayan, Sukhesi Didi and the whole staff of Belari, Ratan Tata, chairman of the Tata Group, Suzanne and Alexander Van Meerwijk,
Francis Wacziarg, Harriet and Larry Weiss and all those who prefer to remain anonymous.
We could not have written this book without the enthusiastic faith of our publishers. Our warm thanks to Leonello Brandolini,
Nicole Lattès and Antoine Caro in Paris; Carlos Reves and Berta Noy in Barcelona; Shekhar and Poonam Malhotra in Delhi; Helen
Gummer and Katharine Young in London; Gianni Ferrari, Massimo Turchetta and Joy Terekiev in Milan; Larry Kirshbaum and Jessica
Papin in New York; and finally to our friend and translator Kathryn Spink, herself the author of remarkable works on Mother
Teresa, Brother Roger of Taizé, Little Sister Magdeleine of Jesus and Jean Vanier.
O
ne day I met a tall Indian in his forties, with a red bandanna around his head and hair knotted in a braid at the back of
his neck. The brightness of his smile and the warmth of his expression made me realize immediately that this was a man with
compassion for the poor. Having heard that my second
City of Joy
dispensary boat had just been launched in the Ganges Delta to bring medical aid to the inhabitants of the fifty-four islands,
he wanted to ask for my help.
Right after he got the news of a deadly chemical accident in the city of Bhopal, Satinath Sarangi, “Sathyu” as he is called,
rushed to the rescue of the survivors of the worst industrial disaster in history. On the night of the second of December
1984, a massive leak of toxic gases killed between sixteen and thirty thousand people and injured around five hundred thousand
others. Sathyu decided to dedicate his whole life to the victims. Since 1995, he has been running a nongovernmental, nonpolitical
and nonreligious organization, which tirelessly cares for the poorest and most neglected men, women and children affected
by the gas.
Sathyu wanted to ask me to finance the creation and equipment of a gynecological clinic to treat underprivileged women who,
sixteen years after the tragedy, were still suffering from its dreadful effects.
I had a vague recollection of the tragedy but, in all my fifty years of roving about India, I had never visited the magnificent
capital of Madhya Pradesh.
I went to Bhopal. What I found there gave me what was probably one of the strongest shocks of my life. With the help of my
book royalties and the generosity of readers of
The City of Joy, Beyond Love
and
A Thousand Suns
, we were able to open the gynecological clinic. Today it takes in, treats and cures hundreds of women whom the town’s hospitals
had abandoned to their fate.