Government deal with Union Carbide delayed trial: activists

NEW DELHI - A 1989 pact between the central government and Union Carbide, absolving the company of all criminal and civil liabilities of the December 1984 Bhopal gas tragedy, added to the delay in the trial in the case, said activists Monday.

Over 25 years after the the world’s worst industrial disaster, a city court here Monday convicted all the eight Indian accused, including former Union Carbide chairman Keshub Mahindra, for the instant deaths of over 3,500 people from the leakage of deadly methyl-iso-cyanate (MIC) gas from the company’s plant here on the intervening night of Dec 2-3, 1984.

Activists and lawyers associated with the litigation over the tragedy pointed out that in the initial years after the disaster, tne government rather than pursuing the criminal charges against Union Carbide and its American parent company Union Carbide Corp, entered into a zero-liability pact with it.

The tragedy claimed over 15,000 lives in Madhya Pradesh’s capital city and left tens of thousands others injured and maimed. In the years that followed, people exposed to the gas kept dying. The toll is believed to have climbed to about 25,000.

Sashinanth Sarangi of the Bhopal Gas Tragedy Victims’ Association said the pact, inked Feb 14-15, 1989, absolved the Union Carbide and its officials, both in India and abroad, of all civil and criminal liabilities, arising out of the disaster, for a payment of $470 million.

Sarangi said besidess dropping all criminal cases, the pact also said that the Indian government would protect the Union Carbide and its officials against any liability, civil or criminal, arising out of the disaster in future, due to factors like defective birth etc.

The pact was partially set aside in October 1991 by the Supreme Court, which said that payment of financial damages would only partly offset its civil liabilities but it cannot nullify the criminal cases against the Union Carbide.

It was only after this verdict of the apex court that the trial in criminal case in the disaster began in November 1991 before a chief judicial magistrate.

The trial court eventually in 1993, after examining initial evidence, charged eight Indian officials, including Mahindra, under provisions dealing with culpable homicide not amounting to murder. The offence carried a maximum punishment of 10 years in jail.

The eight accused moved the Madhya Pradesh High Court’s Jabalpur bench, challenging the lower court’s decision to try them for a graver offence of culpable homicide. They said they could at most be tried for committing a milder offence of causing death due to rash and negligent act, which entails a sentence of two years.

As the high court rejected their contentions, they approached the Supreme Court, which in turn acceded to their plea and dropped the charge of culpable homicide not amounting to murder.

The apex court verdict on this aspect came in 1996 after which the Bhopal’s lower court again resumed the trial.

Add to this, said another activist Syed M. Irfan, the Central Bureau of Investigation’s (CBI) usual dilatory tactics in pursuing the case. The delay in the trial and the subsequent verdict was inevitable, he said.

As the Bhopal lower court resumed the trial, it had the task of examining 178 prosecution witnesses and eight defence witnesses, while the CBI hardly helped the court in ensuring that all the witnesses are examined expeditiously and all the evidence is scrutinized at the earliest, Irfan added.