INDIA 2024 IS BHOPAL 1984++
Pankaj Sekhsaria
For reasons I cannot quite explain, there are two things I remember distinctly about 1984 even though I was only in my early teens then. The first is a visit to my grandmother’s in Calcutta (now Kolkata) for our annual Diwali sojourn. The annual, sometimes biannual, train journey across the breadth of the country from home in Poona (now Pune) to the city of a grandmother, many uncles and aunts, and even more cousins was fun for many reasons.
There was the Birla Science Museum in Ballygunge, the ice-skating rink close by, one mandatory trip to Victoria Memorial, many trips to the neighbourhood parks, and many rounds of phuchka and zhal muri. This was true of almost all my visits to Kolkata, but 1984 stands out for October 31, a few days after Diwali.
I was out somewhere in the city with my cousin when a sudden but muted frenzy took over the streets. He quickly found a taxi and we headed home where we learnt that Indira Gandhi had been shot. I don’t think I really understood the magnitude of the event and what it entailed, but I do remember vividly that taxi journey back home and some of the frenzy of the days that followed.
The other thing I remember from 1984—and this is perhaps less because of the energy/excitement/dread like of the earlier moment and more because of what we read and reread and learnt and chose to unlearn over the years and decades—is Bhopal.
It is striking that we don’t need to say precisely what happened in Bhopal in 1984 and yet, we all know. And therein hangs this tale.
The editor’s brief, for instance, to write a piece for this 40th anniversary issue of Frontline had a list of broad suggestions: “How the topic (of the environment) has evolved in India since 1984, how were we talking about environment issues at that time compared to how we are doing so now. The lessons learnt, the lessons stubbornly not learnt. The unethical compromises made. Big industry’s role. The animals saved. The hard-fought laws passed. A few positives in a sea of negatives I guess?”
And then a specific, very specific, and pointed reference: “Remember also—1984, the year we launched, was the year of Bhopal.”
Yes, we all remember, because Bhopal 1984 is etched in our collective memory in a way that nothing else is. And yet we don’t because this is an etching that has been dissolved by a concoction of apathy, greed, ignorance, and arrogance more potent than the most concentrated chemical one might find anywhere. And therein hangs this tale as well.
A gas chamber called Delhi
What better evidence than to encounter a full-page story (“Is Delhi becoming an uninhabitable city?”, The Hindu) almost four decades to the date on November 22, 2024 (exactly as I write this piece), which tells us that the capital of India has seen only two days of healthy air per year for the past seven years.
An air quality index (AQI) value of 300 and above is considered hazardous in India; for Delhi it has been above 300 for most of November and even touched 1,000 on some days. The cleanest day in the city in a long time, India Today reported recently, was on November 24 when Delhi’s air quality improved and was recorded as “very poor”! What a state of affairs that “very poor” should actually be “very good”!
Bhopal was chilling because the city was gassed from the inside—slowly, silently, stealthily, in the middle of a cold still night when no one knew what was happening. Forty years later, another city is being gassed from all sides in broad daylight, and we, it seems, couldn’t care less.
The capital of a nation that is in constant chest-thumping mode and in the habit of making aggressive claims to a seat at the high table is unable to ensure for itself the most essential element of life! An elite that cannot take care of itself—what care will it take of the rest? Delhi may not be India, but who can deny that we are becoming (if we have not already become) a nation that is gassing itself away? This is a country at war with itself, and our genius lies in the weapon we have created for fighting this war. We have weaponised the very air we breathe; indeed we’ve become the weapons ourselves. India has become Bhopal as much as Bhopal has become India.
This is the environment story of India, whichever way one might want to see it. We can circumnavigate the circumference, traverse a squiggly chord, or cut across the heart along a diameter, the destination appears to be just the same: this is a country that has come full circle and more in 40 years. This is a country constantly at war with itself.
Let me take just a couple of other quick examples, and I’ll rest my case.
The Great Nicobar Island
Cut to Great Nicobar Island, to the morning of December 26, 2004—exactly the halfway mark between today and Frontline’s birth (and the Bhopal tragedy) in 1984. An earthquake measuring 9.3 on the Richter scale off the coast of Sumatra first sank the coast of Great Nicobar by nearly 15 feet and then smashed the coastline with tsunami waves of unprecedented destructive power. Thousands died as the Andaman and Nicobar Islands experienced devastation never seen before.
Less than two decades later, on the eve of the 20th anniversary of that massive disaster, everything has been forgotten in a mad push for a Rs.80,000 crore infrastructure project and a transshipment port on exactly that coastline. It does not seem to matter that these islands are located in the world’s most tectonically active and vulnerable zones and experience one earthquake a week on average. It does not matter either that 30 million trees and a priceless, biodiversity-rich forest will be cut for this project, that the indigenous Nicobarese and the Shompen will be wiped out, that dinosaur-age sea turtles will lose their most important nesting beaches, that 3.5 lakh outsiders will be brought in and put knowingly in harm’s way.
And rubbing salt into these collective wounds is the brand new, just released (exactly as I write this) logo of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands administration. There is no place in it for the island’s indigenous people or their ancient forest.
What has been prominently included, however, is the transshipment port that still only exists as a proposal, might never be built in fact, and will destroy everything that these islands are known for if it does indeed get constructed. What a monumental folly—both the project and the logo! What hubris!
The journey along the diameter does indeed take us right back to where we began.
The great Indian bustard
The third and final story is a little more convoluted even if it heads in the same direction. This is the story of one of India’s most misunderstood and misused, even abused, ecosystems and a bird that is one of its finest icons. We are talking here of grasslands and arid systems (known now as open natural ecosystems, or ONE) and the majestic great Indian bustard that is slipping away slowly but steadily to oblivion.
Like the grasslands it inhabits, the great Indian bustard was once spread across large parts of this country: right from Rajasthan down to Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Karnataka, and Andhra Pradesh. There is, in fact, no recorded breeding site of this bird from anywhere outside the boundaries of India. Nothing gets more Indian than this, and nothing could be more tragic.
The fate of the great Indian bustard is intricately linked to the health and fate of the open natural ecosystems that it depends on entirely. In the picture, a bustard flies high near wind turbines and power lines in Pokhran, Rajasthan. | Photo Credit: Devesh Gadhavi
There were about 1,500 great Indian bustards in India around the time Bhopal happened. Four decades later, it awaits extinction as it stands wiped out from almost its entire range, down by 90 per cent to just about 150 birds today. Rajasthan today has about a 100 birds; in all the other States the count is down to a handful: 10 in Karnataka, 6 or 7 in Gujarat, 3 or 4 in Andhra Pradesh, 2 or 3 in Maharashtra, and zero in Madhya Pradesh.
This is a bird that once almost became the country’s national bird. Imagine what a humiliation we (unknowingly) saved ourselves from when in 1963 we chose the peacock and not the great Indian bustard as the national bird. We would have had a national emblem that we would push out of existence. The great Indian bustard’s trajectory would not have been different if it had been chosen as the national bird because the problem lies deeply embedded in the larger choices we have made as a country.
The fate of the great Indian bustard is intricately linked to the health and fate of the open natural ecosystems that it depends on entirely. Large swathes of these ecosystems—in Rajasthan, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, and Karnataka—are being signed away for wind and solar energy farms. Territory that the birds need to roam and feed and breed on is being taken away in what many have called a massive land grab at a time when we celebrate the hatching of great Indian bustard eggs in artificial settings as a conservation measure. One such “success” in an artificial breeding centre in the deserts of Jaisalmer made national and even international headlines. Ironically, the so-called green and clean energy from the wind and sun has become a millstone around the great Indian bustard’s neck. And ours.
Remember that the recent $265 million bribery indictment of the Adani Group is linked to deals for buying and selling solar power. Green and clean has taken on a completely new meaning. What was supposed to have liberated us is precisely what is chaining and drowning and destroying us. We are fighting not one but many wars with ourselves. With an arsenal that is us. The routes might be different, but Great Nicobar, Delhi, the great Indian bustard, and the magnificent grasslands of India have all become Bhopal.
India 2024 is many Bhopals 1984. It is also many different kinds of Bhopal.
Pankaj Sekhsaria is editor/curator most recently of The Great Nicobar Betrayal published by Frontline in 2024.