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20 Years After Bhopal, Women Survivors Globalize Fight for Justice
Commentary
By Sandip Roy, Pacific News Service
At midnight on the night of Dec. 2, 1984, a gas leak at the Union
Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, killed several thousand. Today, a
generation of Indian housewives and mothers has taken around the world
the fight for justice for survivors of the tragedy.
November 30, 2004 - Twenty years down the road, if anything good has
come from the terrible gas leak in Bhopal, India, it is the birthing of
a new generation of unlikely heroes.
Until 27 tons of methyl isocyanate leaked out on that cold December
night in 1984, Rashida Bee and Champa Devi Shukla had never even heard
of Union Carbide. They'd never gone more than a few miles from their
homes in Bhopal. Now, two decades later, Bee can't sleep at night and
has lost six family members to cancer. For days after the leak she
scoured the city morgues trying to find her missing family members.
Shukla has lost her husband and still suffers from panic disorders. Her
granddaughter was born with a deformity.
The tragedy brought about an amazing transformation of a generation of
women who just wanted to go about their ordinary lives raising families
and cooking dinner. Instead, they found many of their husbands were dead
or crippled from the gas leak, unable to perform the back-breaking
manual labor they used to do before the accident. So it was the women,
many of whom never learned to read or write, who became both the
breadwinners and chief activists in Bhopal. They kept the fire under
Union Carbide, and when its new owner Dow Chemical tried to evade them,
they went after Dow as well.
The legacy of Bhopal is alive in these women -- literally. They carry
the shadow of that environmental disaster in their wombs and their
breast milk. Children are still being born in Bhopal with deformities
that activists say are linked to the disaster.
Long before outsourcing and globalization were buzzwords, Bhopal was the
poster child of how both could be done irresponsibly. And these women
are showing up as far away from Bhopal as the board meeting of Dow
Chemical in Midland, Mich., to press their case. As Bee said, "When
women find they can't feed their children, they actually get angry and
want to fight."
And they have done it in a way that only women could. Like the Jharoo
Maro Dow Ko campaign, where Dow executives as far afield as Israel and
Italy found themselves presented with brooms. A humble household object
became a political tool that sent a message: the same broom used to
clean homes could in effect sweep Dow out of business in a gust of bad
public relations. The globalization that brought Union Carbide to India
is turning full circle, bringing these activists to Dow's corporate
headquarters and American courts. There, they demand release of company
documents and more funds for the cleanup of contaminated groundwater. As
political theater, it's on par with Mahatma Gandhi making salt from the
ocean in defiance of British salt taxes.
These new women activists are not people I would have ever met when I
lived in India. Women like Bee and Shukla led and still lead a
hand-to-mouth existence as laborers in a stationery factory in Bhopal.
They speak no English. I might have seen them on a local train or bus,
but I would not have sat and conversed with them. Class would have kept
us apart.
This year we were still separated from each other. This time, however,
they were receiving the 2004 Goldman prize, or the Environmental Nobels,
in San Francisco. And I was just one of the many journalists and
admirers clamoring for their attention. It was a humbling experience.
Company bosses who once boasted to their shareholders that the Bhopal
disaster had cost Union Carbide just 43 cents a share would do well to
not dismiss these activists as illiterate housewives tilting at
windmills with broomsticks. None other than Winston Churchill once
snottily dismissed the absurdity of a "seditious, half-naked fakir" like
Gandhi taking on the British empire in his loincloth. The price of that
condescension proved costly.
In an age where multinational corporations are the new empires, Rashida
Bee, Champa Devi Shukla and their sisters might very well be the true
inheritors of Gandhi's legacy.
And Gandhi, who died trying to preserve peace between Hindus and
Muslims, would have approved of his unlikely heirs. Shukla is Hindu and
Bee is Muslim. "It doesn't matter whether you are Hindu or Muslim,"
Shukla says. "Poor people like us suffer equally."
PNS contributor Sandip Roy hosts "UpFront," New California Media's
radio show on KALW-FM 91.7 in San Francisco. |
