AGE: 30
OCCUPATION: Tutor, community advocate
BIRTHPLACE: Bhopal, India
INTERVIEWED IN: Berkeley, California
In December 1984, a pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, operated by the American company Union Carbide, began leaking the toxic gas methyl isocyanate, a chemical used in pesticides. The leak killed over two thousand Bhopal residents on first exposure. In the days and months afterward, thousands more perished from acute damage to their pulmonary and nervous systems. In all, nearly six hundred thousand were affected by the leak, with many developing lifelong chronic health problems. The Bhopal leak rivals the Chernobyl meltdown as the worst industrial accident in history.1
Sanjay Verma was just an infant when the gas leak occurred, but the accident has shaped nearly every aspect of his life since. His parents and five of his seven siblings were killed that night. He grew up in an orphanage and then with his two remaining siblings, and he was inspired from an early age by his older brother Sunil’s activism related to the health and economic consequences of the gas leak. Not only have thousands of survivors suffered long term health consequences such as vision and respiratory problems, the groundwater in Bhopal has been found to contain other contaminants from the factory such as arsenic, mercury, organochlorides, and numerous other chemicals produced in the factory.
Sanjay, who still lives in Bhopal, agrees to our initial interview while visiting the United States in 2011. He’s come to testify as an expert witness at a West Virginia hearing about the safety of a Bayer CropScience chemical plant that produces methyl isocyanate. When the hearing concludes, Sanjay flies to the West Coast to help promote a new documentary on the disaster in Bhopal. We speak over the phone, and in a canorous voice, he talks about the family he’s lost to the disaster, his path to activism, and the ways the disaster continues to be felt in Bhopal.
“SANJAY, THERE WAS A TRAGEDY”
I grew up in an orphanage in Bhopal.2
The orphanage was part of a chain of orphanages around the world called SOS Children’s Villages.3 I was there with my sister Mamta, who is about nine years older than me, for around ten years. The one we were in had twelve big houses that looked like cottages. Every house had a “foster mother” and ten or eleven orphaned children. And every cottage had around four bedrooms and one living room. One was the baby bedroom, one was the foster mother’s bedroom, one was the boys’ room, and then one was the girls’ room. I was in the boys’ room with three other boys. My sister was always in the same house with me, but she was in the girls’ room.
We lived in the orphanage and went to primary school nearby. One day when I was about five years old, we had a parents’ meeting at school, and many of my classmates came in with their parents. But I didn’t have anyone there that night. So then I realized, I don’t have parents with me. I thought, I should ask my sister about this. I knew that she was my biological sister and my foster mother was the person who took care of me, but I didn’t understand how things came to be the way they were. So, I said to my sister, “My classmates came with their parents to the meeting, but there was no one with me. Our foster mother—she’s my mother, right? So who is my father? And how come they didn’t go with me?”
And so my sister told me about what had happened. She said, “Sanjay, there was a tragedy, a disaster, in 1984. We were four brothers and four sisters and two parents. But both our parents, three sisters, and two brothers died that same night.” And that’s all she said. When she told me that, to be honest, I don’t even remember how I felt. I knew that she had answered some pretty big questions, but I still had many more.
But living in the orphanage was pretty fun. I liked the competition with the other children my age. You are studying in the same school and you get higher marks than them and it’s a good feeling. The orphanage used to send children who were doing well to other orphanages for a vacation; it was a way to encourage you to study more. Once I got really high marks and they sent me to an orphanage in the old country in Varanasi.4 I was there for a few days and then I came back to Bhopal. I was so happy.
At this time, our surviving older brother Sunil was still living by himself in the old house where we had lived before the disaster. He was just a young teenager when the disaster occurred, about thirteen, but he was allowed to live by himself rather than come to the orphanage, because he could take care of himself. I think the government was paying him and other victims living on their own about 200 rupees a month at the time.5 My sister and I weren’t awarded any compensation other than money paid to SOS Children’s Villages for our support.
Sunil came to see us once a year during a festival we have in India called Raksha Bandhan.6 And then when I was ten, we moved out from the orphanage and back into the house with Sunil. Soon after that, in the mid-nineties, we were given a new apartment by the government. Over 2,500 new homes were constructed by the Indian government for families who had lost loved ones who had supported them. The houses were built all in one big neighborhood that people called the Gas Widows Colony.7
When we started living with our brother I began finding out more about the tragedy. We found pictures of my other siblings who had died that night, and then once in a while my brother would talk a bit about it. He would say, “One day, we were four brothers and four sisters,” and he would list their names. And then he would tell us about who our siblings had married or were going to marry, what sort of work they were going to do, everything about their lives that he could remember. He told us that our father was a carpenter in Bhopal and our mother was a simple Indian lady; she was a housewife. He wanted us to feel like we knew something about the family we’d lost.
NOT ENOUGH SPACE IN THE CEMETERIES
I came to find out more about the night of the accident as well. It was my sister who took me when I was a baby and ran with me when gas started to fill the air. My brother and sister said the gas made it hard to breathe and burned people’s skin. Everyone was running. My brother Sunil had started to run, too, but he had to go pee, so he stopped in the street on the way. There were so many people running in the streets, and he got separated from us. Then, later, he fainted.
The next day when people started collecting bodies, they found my brother, and he was still unconscious. They thought he was dead. Because there was not enough firewood to cremate the bodies and not enough space in the cemeteries, they were dumping the bodies into the rivers. So they put him in the back of a truck and they were going to throw him in the river. All of a sudden my brother woke up, right before they were about to throw him in. That he woke up at that very moment was the reason that he survived—otherwise he’d have been thrown in the river and drowned.
My sister and I managed to stay together in the days after the tragedy. We were taken to one hospital and my brother was in a different hospital. After his stay in the hospital he came back to our family’s house out by the factory. And right then some of our relatives from Lucknow had arrived in Bhopal to help search for our other family members.8
Sunil found out about what happened to our family from those relatives who came to search for us. One of my sisters who we lost had been married to a cop in Lucknow in March 1984, but she had come home to visit just before the disaster occurred. After the accident, her new husband came with my uncle who also lived in Lucknow to Bhopal when they heard about the disaster on the radio. They started looking for us at the family house, and they quickly learned that so many members of the family had died. And then when Sunil came home from the hospital, they had to break the news to him. They all set out to find me and my sister, since we were still unaccounted for. And after they found us at the hospital, they decided to take us back to Lucknow. They took all of us survivors—me, my brother Sunil, and my sister Mamta—to their home.
After a few months of living with our relatives, we moved back to our old house in Bhopal. My brother realized that we were kind of a burden on my uncle’s family. After we lived by ourselves for a short time, government workers found us and sent me and Mamta to an orphanage.
I hadn’t known much about the tragedy or my family before leaving the orphanage, so living with my brother again really opened my eyes. My brother was very active in fighting for victims’ rights, so I began learning more and more, not just about what happened that night but also the struggle to bring the town back afterward.
A HOUSE OF GHOSTS
My brother was active in the movement to get justice for the victims of the Bhopal disaster. Even at just thirteen, he had become involved in activism immediately after we returned to Bhopal and my sister and I were settled in the orphanage. He started an organization called Children against Carbide and protested with other young survivors of the disaster. He never went back to school—he dedicated his time to fighting for victim compensation.
After I moved in with him, I learned that in 1989, there was a settlement between the Indian government and Union Carbide for 470 million U.S. dollars. As part of the settlement, Union Carbide was to provide money to build a hospital for the Bhopal gas victims, and the government would provide the land. The hospital is still there. It’s the biggest hospital in Bhopal.9
The government also distributed some of the $470 million settlement directly to victims of the disaster.10 Survivors were given $500 each for long-term injuries and about $2,000 for each family member who had died. Me, my brother, my sister, and the husband of my sister who died that night, we all received compensation money for our lost family members.
My brother kept my part in the bank. We were getting interest from the bank every month, and he was paying my school fees from the interest. I started studying in an English school, and in India English schools are quite a bit more expensive than Hindi schools. We could use only the interest from my share of the compensation money for my education, because the law stated that the principal could not be accessed since I was a minor. The interest money helped, but it wasn’t enough to fully cover fees.
A couple of organizations came forward and started helping us. One of those organizations was AID India.11 There was a retired state government official named Harsh Mander who found out about my brother and my family, and he started donating money for my studies. He would give a certain amount of money for my studies once every three months. He was very interested in keeping the story of the Bhopal disaster alive. He went on to write for newspapers, and he even wrote a book about the Bhopal disaster called Unheard Voices—the very first story in the book is about my brother and my family.
My brother and I were very close. Our sister Mamta got married in 1997, a few years after we all moved in together, so after that it was just my brother and I living together. We were very close, but things could be difficult sometimes. Every time my brother talked about our family, he would get depressed, and you could see the depression in him for days. Sometimes he tried to hurt himself. Once, he tried to set himself on fire. I was not in Bhopal when he did it. I was visiting my sister in Lucknow, where she had moved after her marriage. One of my neighbors came to the door of our house just in time to save my brother. We found out my brother was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. Later, he tried to kill himself with rat poison, too, but he survived. All this started around 1997, when I was thirteen. From that point on my brother and I were sort of taking care of each other.
Around 2001, when I was sixteen and he was around thirty, I asked Sunil to buy me a motorbike. I kept asking him, and finally he bought me one, but he said, “I’m not going to give you extra money or cash, you know, after the motorbike. So make sure you don’t ask me for money for gasoline.”
I said, “Don’t worry, I’ll start working.”
So, I started tutoring. I did that for a few years to help provide an income, and then I also started working for some media people doing stories on Bhopal. It was 2004, I think, when I first did work for a journalist. He was a photojournalist from Italy and I was doing translations for him. He liked to tell stories through his pictures. And he was doing a piece on the disaster—on almost everything about Bhopal, really. He was the one who first took me to the ruins of the Union Carbide factory.
I wanted to see all of it. I always wanted to see how the factory had run. So I walked around with the Italian photojournalist and I saw different rooms and spaces, the old signs hanging on the walls. There used to be many separate buildings and structures on the factory grounds. Throughout the years many fell down, but the two main structures are still there. From the outside, though, it looked like they might fall down at any minute. And, well, I was kind of shocked because I hadn’t seen big abandoned plants like that one, and it was kind of scary. Like a house of ghosts.
And it smelled so bad. The factory smelled of many different things, but mostly it smelled like DDT,12 a harsh chemical smell. I had to put a handkerchief over my face as I toured the buildings. But it was also so green inside. There were trees and flowers inside the factory; things had started growing there again.
But you know another thing that was scary? The safety gloves and helmets of the former employees. In 2004 there were so many gloves still lying around on the floor of the factory. And I thought, These were the hands of people who died. These are the hands of the workers who were the first to die.
PEOPLE WERE GETTING SICK
In the 2000s, many of the people I met in Bhopal had health problems, especially the people who were in their thirties and forties and fifties. Most of them were suffering from breathlessness, and they got tired after walking for even five minutes. Before the disaster most of the people in town worked as laborers. They would carry wheat, or they would sell vegetables on a handcart in the streets, or they would work as masons. They lost their working ability because they inhaled poisonous gases the night of the gas leak, and many are still easily fatigued and so cannot do hard work.
I didn’t have any effects from the disaster until 2005. That year, when I was twenty years old, I had a stroke. Half my body was paralyzed for about twenty minutes, and I was in an intensive care unit in the hospital for about three days. Then I had to go through some tests in a bigger hospital, and the doctors found out that my carotid artery had narrowed, and that’s what caused the stroke. I’m not sure why it happened, whether the stroke was because of the disaster or not, but there were a lot of hard-to-explain illnesses in town.
Not only were people still sick, they were still getting sick from drinking water that was contaminated from the disaster. Those of us who were active in the movement for victims’ rights worked hard to fix the problem.
I visited Delhi in March 2006 as part of a victims’ rights campaign organized by the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal.13 Our city was still contaminated twenty years after the disaster, our drinking water was unsafe, and nobody had ever really been held accountable for the accident. We wanted to make Dow liable for contamination cleanup, since they had bought out Union Carbide in 2001. We thought they should compensate all the people who had drunk contaminated water for twenty years and also help clean up the site. We also wanted Warren Anderson to face trial.14
Around seventy people from Bhopal went to Delhi to rally and demand to see the prime minister—we walked, even though it was over five hundred miles. It took us thirty-six days. The prime minister wasn’t willing to meet us, so a few of us went on a hunger strike. I was one of the fasters, along with seven or eight others. I fasted for six days. The prime minister didn’t come, but he called us, and then three or four of our representatives went to meet him to list our demands: to set up a commission to monitor and treat the long-term health effects of contaminated air and water from the disaster; to force Dow Chemical, which had bought Union Carbide, to dismantle and clean up the old factory site; and to ensure a supply of clean drinking water to affected communities. The prime minister listened to our demands, but we didn’t get anything out of the meeting except for vague promises.
While I was in Delhi, I got a call from an activist from Bhopal who worked with my brother. She told me that Sunil had tried to kill himself again, that he had eaten rat poison and was in the hospital. I thought, He’ll be fine. I thought this because the first time he’d eaten rat poison he’d survived. Still, I took the first train home from Delhi, and my sister and her family were also on their way from Lucknow.
I arrived in Bhopal first, and it was only then that I found out my brother was dead. He hadn’t eaten poison; he’d hanged himself in our apartment. I went to see his body during the post mortem. I was so shocked. I couldn’t stop crying. And then, after a while, I was not even crying. I was just looking at him, in disbelief that I wouldn’t see him alive again.
When my sister and her family arrived, my sister actually kind of fainted. And then she was crying terribly. Then her children—she had a son and a daughter by then—when they saw her, even they started crying.
After my brother died it was quite hard for me to live by myself in the apartment we’d shared, so in 2007 I decided to move to Delhi. I thought I would go study there, and I enrolled in a crash course in business management.
In the meantime I decided to rent out our apartment. So a family moved into my home for the year and a half I was in Delhi. And then when I was ready to move back to Bhopal, I told the family in my apartment, “Either you can share the space with me, or you will have to vacate because I need a place to stay.” They agreed and were happy to live with me. I still live with them—they are really nice people.
I’m damn sure that my brother’s depression was because of the tragedy and the gas that he inhaled that night. He used to say things like, “Someday soon I’ll be dead.” And, “Sanjay, move to Lucknow so that you can live. Our sister, she will look after you. Or better, you should move to a big city like Delhi or Mumbai because I don’t think Bhopal is a safe place to live.” He used to talk like that. Perhaps he did not want me to live around the tragedy. Maybe he knew that his life was ruined because of the past, and that the tragedy was something he could never escape.
I didn’t want to abandon Bhopal. I moved home and dedicated my time to the campaign for victims’ rights. I wanted to be as strong as my brother had been.
I WOULD DREAM ABOUT FOOD WHEN I SLEPT
We decided to build off our 2006 campaign in Delhi and rallied again the next year, and again in 2008. In 2008 we walked again from Bhopal to Delhi and went for an indefinite hunger strike there. I again fasted, this time for weeks. Fasting was hard because I would dream about food when I slept. There were so many dishes that I used to eat every night when I was sleeping. All these dishes like spicy chickpeas and stuffed tomatoes. I missed soup the most. Tomato soup. I even missed fried rice. So every morning I woke up, I would say to my co-fasters, the people who were fasting with me, “Oh, I ate this and this and this.”
And they would kind of go, “What? We’re on fast, why did you eat?”
“No, it was in my dream!” I’d tell them. And every night before I went to bed I would say to them, “Okay, so this is what I’m going to eat tonight in my dream.” Pretty soon nobody wanted to hear about it from me anymore! Then, twenty-one days into the fast, the government finally agreed to meet with us about our demands and asked us to call off the hunger strike.
After the hunger strike the prime minister of India called for clean water to be piped in to areas that had been served by contaminated water sources. We’d finally have clean water, which was one of our central demands. He also suggested a thirty-year plan for the cleanup, rehabilitation, and decontamination of the Union Carbide site and the surrounding land.
Still, we have all been affected by the disaster and continue to be affected. If we don’t pressure the government, we will be forgotten. We’re making progress, though. In June 2010, eight former senior employees of Union Carbide India were finally convicted. They were sentenced to two years in jail and a fine of $2,000. They got bailed out the next day and now have an appeal in higher courts. But because of this lenient verdict there was a big media outrage. The prime minister felt pressure, and ultimately we received more compensation money for the people who had lost their family members and a commitment to clean up the Union Carbide site. Still, not much has actually improved since then—though people in areas with contaminated water have clean water pumped in now, it’s available only for a short time every day, or every other day. Much more still needs to be done.
I HOPE THAT PEOPLE WILL FIND OUT MORE ABOUT BHOPAL
For the last few years, I’ve been heavily involved with a documentary about the situation in Bhopal called Bhopali, directed by an American named Max Carlson.15 At first I worked as a translator for him as he interviewed victims of the disaster, but in time I became a subject of the film. Right now I’ve come to the U.S. to educate others about the Bhopal disaster. I’m helping to promote the documentary, and I’ve testified in court on behalf of plaintiffs in a case against a chemical manufacturer.
I arrived in the States on March 13, 2011. My first engagement was in Charleston, West Virginia. I was called to testify as an expert witness on the long-term effects of methyl isocyanate—MIC—in a case that was filed against Bayer CropScience—it’s a German company that has a plant in West Virginia. There was a risk of MIC leakage following an explosion in 2008. So a group of sixteen or seventeen area residents filed a case against Bayer, since a leakage of MIC could have resulted in another Bhopal. I was called in to testify about the devastation I’d seen in my hometown. The day I was in court, Bayer agreed they would no longer be producing MIC at the factory. So they backed down. It was actually a big victory for all of us fighting against the manufacture of MIC.
Here in California, we’ve had four screenings of Bhopali. The screening that we had in Los Angeles and last night in Berkeley were well attended, and people had lots of questions.
I hope that people will find out more about Bhopal. There are still many people who just do not know about the accident, so this documentary is important because it’s not just about what happened that night; it’s also about what is happening in Bhopal now. We need to keep telling our story. It is not just history. We are still here, and we still need help.
Today, cleanup is yet to be done, the factory still stands abandoned. What I hope for Bhopal is justice—clean and abundant water, adequate health care, land free of contamination, adequate compensation for all victims, and I want Dow, who bought Union Carbide, to take responsibility and pay for the cleanup. The people of Bhopal have fought for almost twenty-nine years, and I strongly believe that we’ll get justice one day even if we have to fight for another twenty-nine years.
1 For more on Bhopal and the Union Carbide disaster, see Appendix III, page 361.
2 Bhopal is a city of over three million and the capital of the state of Madhya Pradesh in central India.
3 SOS Children’s Villages is an NGO headquartered in Austria that provides family services, including orphan care, in over 130 countries.
4 Varanasi, a city of about 1.5 million people on the banks of the Ganges River in the state of Uttar Pradesh, is the holiest of cities in Hinduism, as well as one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world.
5 200 rupees = approximately US$3.
6 Raksha Bandhan is a festival that celebrates the relationship between brothers and sisters.
7 Around 2,500 housing units for widows and other survivors of the Bhopal disaster were built on the northern end of Bhopal from 1989 to 1994.
8 Lucknow, the capital of the state of Uttar Pradesh, is a city of nearly 2.2 million located four hundred miles northeast of Bhopal.
9 Sanjay is referring to the Bhopal Memorial Hospital and Research Center. For more information on the Indian government’s settlement with Union Carbide, as well as on the history of legal action against the company and against Dow Chemical (which bought Union Carbide in 2001), see Appendix III, page 361.
10 The Union Carbide settlement under the Indian Supreme Court in 1989 for $470 million was distributed among five hundred thousand claimants affected by the disaster. As a condition of the settlement, Union Carbide executives were immunized from further criminal and civil action. For more information on the Union Carbide disaster and legal aftermath, see Appendix III, page 361.
11 Association for India’s Development (AID India) is a U.S.-based NGO that promotes various social justice and human rights causes in India.
12 India is the world’s only country still manufacturing dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT), and is the world’s largest consumer of it. Popular as a insecticide in the mid-twentieth century, DDT was banned in most of the world after it was found to cause numerous human health problems, including cancer, birth defects, and the disruption of endocrine systems.
13 The International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal (ICJB) is an international coalition of non-profits and Bhopal survivor groups, including Children against Dow-Carbide, which Sanjay’s brother Sunil helped to form. For more on the ICJB, visit bhopal.net.
14 Warren Anderson was the CEO of Union Carbide at the time of the Bhopal disaster. He was charged with manslaughter by an Indian court in 1991, but the U.S. government has never agreed to extradition. For more information on the Bhopal disaster, see Appendix III, page 361.
15 Bhopali is a 2011 documentary by Van Maximilian Carlson that covers the Bhopal disaster and the efforts of survivors to bring Union Carbide officials to justice. More information is available at www.bhopalithemovie.com.