“CM, PM kaun hain? Dow ke dalal hain!
Dow ke dalalon ko! Joothe maro salon ko!”

“CM, PM who are they? Dow Chemical’s fixers!
What do we do with Dow’s fixers? Beat the scoundrels with shoes.”
– Bhopal slogan, 2006 onwards

On December 7, 1984, the government of India assisted the man who presided over the corporation responsible for the Bhopal gas disaster to leave Bhopal and escape to New York. Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was said to have facilitated the exit of Union Carbide CEO, Warren Anderson, from Bhopal by a state aircraft at the behest of US President Ronald Reagan. One suspects it would not have made much difference had Atal Behari Vajpayee been the Indian prime minister, and Barack Obama the American president. Or if instead of Anderson, Carbide and Bhopal gas disaster, some other CEO and multinational corporation were accused of a different disaster at another place.

After all, it was not Anderson, the individual, but Anderson, the CEO of a multinational corporation, being saved. The Bhopal disaster exposed how governments, heads of states and judiciaries in India and the US protected the corporation and betrayed the victims. That made one thing clear to early Bhopal activists – that the real target of their struggle should be the corporation, and not the government or the judiciary. The Bhopal disaster and subsequent campaigns waged by its survivors signalled the beginning of anti-corporate activism.

Different ethos

The anti-corporate ethic spawned by Bhopal was distinct from former campaigns targeting corporations. The showdown against Dow Chemical and Monsanto during the Vietnam War protested against the monstrosity of the products manufactured by the company, and was part of the larger anti-war movement. The non-violent campaigns of the 1960s led by the iconic Cesar Chavez and the United Farmworkers against the grape-growing companies of California or the struggles of the Chhattisgarh Mines Shramik Sangh’s (Mineworkers Association) targeting the Indian government-owned Bhilai Steel plant were for fair wages and decent working conditions for workers.

Despite their radicality, the mineworkers’ and farmworkers’ struggles were reformist campaigns that fought against massive odds to get a better deal for indigent workers, and a better share for them in the benefits ensuing from corporate activity.

The anti-corporate ethos of the Bhopal struggle was different. It challenged the corporation being as something that is antithetical to democracy and public welfare. The disaster demonstrated the massive harm that can arise from corporate pursuit of profits, and highlighted the absolute impunity with which corporations and their officials can preside over such tragedies owing to their power and fugitive transnational status. The cultivated image of corporations as benevolent job providers, and at worst occasional polluters, changed forever.

Sustained campaign

From the start, Bhopal activists made it clear that they intended to hurt not just Union Carbide, but the very concept of corporations. Shortly after the disaster, activists in India took Carbide and its brands to the cleaners. A boycott of Eveready batteries, most aggressively pursued by the Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad, prompted the company to divest all its consumer brands by 1986-87.

Union Carbide’s dream that its acquisition by Dow Chemical in 2001 would throw the Bhopal survivors off its trail turned out to be Dow’s nightmare. Today, 13 years after the Dow-Carbide merger, Dow’s business plans to use India as a manufacturing springboard for Asian markets have gone nowhere. A joint venture manufacturing facility it proposed with a Gujarat state public sector undertaking was stillborn. A research-and-development facility near Pune was shut down after intense protests. Dow’s deal with Indian Oil Corporation for supply of technology fizzled out after Bhopal activists threatened protests at Indian Oil petrol stations. At Indian Institute of Technology campuses across the country, Dow’s efforts to sponsor shows or recruit students were thwarted by survivors, solidarity workers, and angry students and teachers.

Bhopali women transformed the humble Indian jhadoo (broom) into a weapon to deliver corporal punishment to this errant corporation with their “Jhadoo maro Dow ko” (Beat Dow with a Broom) campaign.

Anyone who touched Dow was singed. Ask Ratan Tata, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Mukesh Ambani, Dr Manmohan Singh, P Chidambaram, Kamal Nath and Abhishek Manu Singhvi. When they tried to intervene to help Dow wriggle out of its environmental liabilities in Bhopal, Bhopalis awarded each of them with a spoof Mir Zafar award. Named after the legendary turncoat who betrayed Siraj-ud-Daulah to the East India Company and paved the way for British dominion over India, the awards and citations were specially worded to reflect each of the above-named’s contribution to Dow’s welfare. Dr Manmohan Singh won the “Best Friend of Big Business” award while Ratan Tata was recognised for “Dynastic Loyalty to the Empire”.

Corporate adversary

The Bhopal struggle was never just about Bhopal. Slogans such as “No More Bhopals” and the 19th anniversary campaign call for a Global Day of Action Against Corporate Crime suggested that the mission was also about the pursuit of corporate crime and the emasculation of corporate power as a means to a just and equitable society. The strategy was to expose the real nature of the corporation – as a lifeless entity, a legal artefact incapable of feeling or expressing remorse and capable of accumulating unimaginable wealth and power by putting shareholders, consumers, workers, environment and communities at risk.

It was an invitation to dismantle the corporate edifice through grassroots globalisation. In subsequent years, many accepted the invitation. Corporations, rather than governments, became the key targets of many community struggles against forcible takeover of lands or pollution of water. Like the corporations, the campaigns too were transnational.

The potency of the campaigns was magnified by their ability to bring together socially responsible investors, labour organisations, food rights groups, environmental health advocates, indigenous and people-of-colour organisations fighting against environmental racism and anti-globalisation activists. The campaign against Posco in Odisha, Coca Cola in Plachimada, Kerala, Vedanta Resources’ bauxite mining in Niyamagiri, Odisha, Tata’s Nano factory in Singur, Hindustan Lever’s mercury pollution in Kodaikanal or Monsanto’s GM crops indicate how struggles are now known by the name of the corporate adversary.

Conceptual victory

Learning from the Bhopal experience where Union Carbide not just escaped punishment but returned to India to do business through Dow, global civil society began pushing for a legally binding mechanism to hold transnational companies accountable. A draft Code of Conduct of Transnational Corporations, championed by civil society, made it through several hoops in the United Nations. But corporate lobbyists succeeded in replacing the proposal for a legally enforceable Code of Conduct with the voluntary United Nations Guiding Principles of human rights standards. The compromised Guiding Principles may have been welcomed by the likes of Coca Cola and General Electric, but it still represented a conceptual victory for the activists.

From seeing human rights violations solely as acts of the state and its protection as the sole responsibility of the state, activists were able prevail upon the United Nations to concede that crimes against humanity and human rights violations are increasingly committed by and the behest of non-state actors, notably corporations. Even the compromised Guiding Principles concede that corporations have a responsibility, though voluntary at this point, to protect and respect human rights.

At 30 years, the campaign for justice in Bhopal sees itself as in its prime. Many of those who began the struggle are now dead. Others are ageing. But with groups such as the eight-year old Children Against Dow Carbide taking on the baton, the attempts by the governments and Dow-Carbide to give Bhopal a quiet burial are unlikely to succeed.