Another name was added to the long list of non-violent struggles, which in the past few decades have knocked at the door of every institution of this country for justice and have in turn been humiliated, when 26 years after the Bhopal gas disaster that killed more than 25,000 people besides inducing genetic mutations and deformities among many more with the numbers still on the rise, the Bhopal city court making mockery of all sense of justice passed the shocking judgment on 7 June 2010.
However this time around, the impunity provided to Union Carbide for the worst industrial disaster in human history by the court seems to have evoked strong sentiments among many, with even the media, which for long has been acting as a spokesperson of various corporations, joining the debate. However, while the terms of debate have revolved around higher compensation for the survivors, Anderson’s extradition, location of the plant, or even ‘what would have happened if a similar catastrophe happened in the US’, etc. there has been hardly any focus on questioning the development policy pursued by the Indian State over the past six decades. And herein lies the catch. Despite all the passionate rhetoric that media persons and various political parties have been employing ever since the judgment, the inability to question our ‘development’ policy and why it happened would only lead us to confusing the symptoms with the disease and would be, to quote economist R.S. Rao, “like Union Carbide’s suggestion for treating the gas victims symptomatically”. While these are definitely legitimate questions to be put up before the Indian State but to restrict the debate to only these would be to trivialise the entire disaster.
The disaster in Bhopal rather than an ‘unfortunate accident’ or ‘death due to negligence’, as probably certain sections of the establishment would want us to believe, is intrinsically linked with the developmental model of the Indian State. It is mere fallout of our reliance on pesticide-fertilizer-high yielding variety as a technological alternative to structural change in agrarian relations to raise agricultural production. Though it might seem surprising to many, the central cause to disasters like Bhopal is once again rooted in the question of land. There is an urgent need to understand this specially in the context of massive land grabs by corporations abetted by the various state and the central governments going on in different parts of the country.
Unlike the rich industrialised countries, where agricultural revolution preceded the Industrial Revolution, India has imposed the latter without completing the former. Despite all the rhetoric of ‘all land to the tiller’ and ‘Nehruvian socialism’ in the decades of ’50s and ’60s, the land reform programme in India, comprising of abolition of intermediaries, security on tenancy and ceilings on landholding, remains a largely unfinished business (a fact accepted even by the government in its recent report of the Committee On State Agrarian Relations and Unfinished Task of Land Reforms).
The failure to break the social power of the landlords on the one hand and to enlist the social support of the rural masses on the other has left the bulk of the farmers with neither the means nor the incentive to produce yields leading to large scale impoverishment in the countryside. Even the little surplus that has been produced is largely appropriated by the landlords let alone being reinvested in the agrarian sector to further the diversification of agricultural production and give an impetus to agri-based industries. There are glaring evidences to still show that most of the surplus extracted are being utilised for unproductive purposes. Further the industries that have been set up have become more and more parasitic on the surplus generated in the rural scenario.
To quote Prof. R.S. Rao, “At the economic level the structural change, in addition to increasing agricultural production by utilising unutilised resources, would have created an expanding market for industrial commodities… Given mass participation the needs of the masses would have directed industry, towards items useful for constructing small houses to live in, clothes to wear and food to eat, etc. which would have generated a different product mix for the society, unlike the conspicuous TV type of consumption.” There is an urgent need to revisit the development policy of the Indian State since 1947 which has been heavily reliant on foreign aid and technology that was imported to meet the various ‘core industrial needs.’
The absence of such a structural change and the reliance on technological alternative has made the sell-out to imperialism complete and resulted in the increasing dependence of the state on foreign loans, foreign investment or ‘foreign aid’ from the US to ‘increase productivity’ leading India into a perpetual state of indebtedness.
According to the World Debt Tables, the total external debt of India (long term public and publicly guaranteed, short term debt and the use of IMF credit) rose from $ 19.334.1 million in 1980 to $ 31.777.1 million in 1984. It further spiralled up to $ 71.557 million in 1992. Right now at the end of March 2010 it was placed at US $ 261.4 billion recording an increase of 16.5 per cent over the end-March 2009 level. (Source: World Debt Tables).
This mounting external debt has had serious ramifications. On one hand this has resulted in the farmers being trapped into a vicious cycle of dependence on pesticide-fertilizer-high yielding variety and other expensive farm inputs, while on the other massive tax exemptions have been given to large corporate houses and best fertile lands have been opened up for corporate industrialisation largely for exports. Even on the question of increasing productivity, technological imports (most of which for long have now been considered obsolete in the industrialised West and an alternative to which can be produced locally) have only further exacerbated dependence on imperialist ‘aid’.
With the subsequent adoption of the so-called new economic policy and shift towards more liberalisation, there is an attempt on the part of the ruling elite, irrespective of the party in power, to privatise almost every sector in pursuit of raw materials, new markets and cheap labour. Such a policy that involves massive cost cutting measures that compromise on the safety of the workers and the inhabitants and ensures almost no accountability on the part of the corporations will only lead to many more Bhopal-like disasters. Such ‘structural adjustments’ have had certain important consequences. By giving US and other imperialist countries extensive influence over the Indian economy, a compromise on India’s political independence is the most serious one among them.
Seen in this light, answers to questions such as why Anderson was allowed to move scot-free by the Indian State and even flown out on a government plane; why it took the CBI almost three years to even file a charge-sheet; why were the charges greatly diluted in 1996 by the Justice AM Ahmadi Bench of the Supreme Court and why despite large and sustained protests and campaigns over the past 26 years the Bhopal city court made the judgment in which Union Carbide’s subsidiary in India was fined a partly amount and the guilty was sentenced to a mere two years imprisonment only to get bail within a few hours; why there was not even a single word on Warren Anderson, become clear.
The blame for all this cannot be placed on the usual suspects – corruption, inefficient judiciary, etc. On the contrary, it is directly linked to the logic and survival of the larger economic paradigm of the Indian State. It was imperative for the Indian State to safeguard Anderson, who was just another face of the industrial policies followed by the Indian State since 1947. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s statement that “Bhopals will happen, but the country has to progress” only exemplifies this logic and is simply an indicator of the Indian ruling elite’s inability to take decisions independent of US or for that matter any other imperialist powers’ interests.
Bhopal gas disaster is just a manifestation of the necessities of a larger interest of a compromise with feudalism entrapping India further into the imperialist orbit. But certainly not the only one! Ever since the transfer of power in 1947, the ‘development’ policies followed by the Indian State be it in the form of big dams, a mining policy largely in favour of corporations and big monopoly houses, continuation of colonial policies leading to a sell-out of natural resources, etc. have all contributed to the destruction of millions of livelihoods for super profit for a few.
The tragedy that is unfolding in the forests of Central India in the name of ‘Operation Green hunt’ by the Indian State to bring ‘law and order’ and ‘development’ is a part of the same social process and just another manifestation of the entrenched feudal and imperialist hold over the Indian economy. It will remain a utopian premise to think that it is possible to fight against all this within the coordinates of the existing social order. What we are witnessing today is the consequences of the present social order. Structural change as a way-out of the imperialist orbit, something that would disturb the existing social base of the Indian State, is a historical task confronting all anti-feudal, anti-imperialist forces in the country today. How creative they would prove to this challenge despite great odds against them from both within and outside remains to be seen.