40 Years After Massive Bhopal Disaster, Bay Area Art Project Seeks Justice

Four decades since the world’s worst industrial disaster killed thousands of people in the city of Bhopal, India, a group of Bay Area artists and community organizers are still pushing for justice.

The Bhopal disaster struck on Dec. 3, 1984, when over 40 tons of gas leaked from a pesticide plant, immediately killing at least 3,800 people. Half a million people were exposed, and at least 25,000 have died in the years since. Thousands more still suffer from disorders caused by the ongoing contamination — resulting in kidney and liver disorders, cancers, respiratory diseases and gynecological issues.

On Sunday, about 30 people gathered outside the Indian Consulate in San Francisco to paint a mural on the street commemorating the 40th anniversary of the disaster and calling attention to the decadeslong campaign to hold the U.S.-based factory owner accountable.

“There’s a big skull and crossbones over the Dow Chemical logo,” said Oakland artist Alizarin Menninga-Fong, who spent nine months after high school living in Bhopal and working with the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal in 2009. “I hope that’s how everybody sees that logo whenever they encounter it out in the world.”

Dow Chemical Co. bought the American company that ran the Bhopal plant, Union Carbide Corp., in 2001. But it has refused to clean up the site, saying responsibility for environmental remediation lies with the state government in India.

The San Francisco mural also includes the slogan “Justice for Bhopal” and shows two women with raised fists against a backdrop of grey smoke.

“Storytelling and art is really important in both community building and to show the importance of a campaign,” said Kamardip Singh, an artist and organizer who created the mural design. “I really like that aspect of everyone being able to paint together.”

Attendees painted together and listened to a short program of speeches with background and context on the history of the Bhopal disaster.

“We are here in solidarity with the people of Bhopal asking for Dow Chemical to pay for what they’ve done, to do right by the people of Bhopal,” said Vivek Kembaiyan, an organizer with Hindus for Human Rights and the Alliance of South Asians Taking Action.

“The Indian government also needs to do right by the people in Bhopal,” he added. “There still hasn’t been adequate environmental remediation, health care. And Dow Chemical has been hiding behind its status as a U.S. company.”

Union Carbide shut down the site without cleaning it up, and in 1989, it settled with the Indian government, agreeing to pay $470 million in compensation to the victims. A study in 2002 found mercury, lead and organochlorines in the breast milk of women living near the plant.

Dr. D.K. Satapathy, a pathologist and former head of a state institute that investigated the Bhopal deaths, recalled the immediate aftermath in an Amnesty International report.

“I saw thousands of people lying there,” he said. “Some were wailing, some were gasping, some were crying.”

Satapathy and his medical colleagues contacted Union Carbide hoping to find out more about how to treat patients, and the response they received was that the accident was “not a serious matter” and to “put a wet cloth on their mouth[s] and they will get well,” he said.

Sunday’s mural painting comes after a September event at an Oakland ballroom where audience members heard directly from survivors, connecting corporate accountability and environmental destruction in Bhopal to environmental concerns in the Bay Area — in Hunter’s Point and Treasure Island.

“We need to be working together with international solidarity because all of our freedom, our health, our safety is tied together,” Kembaiyan said.

Demands from Bhopal survivors include legal accountability from Union Carbide and Dow Chemical; compensation and remedy for survivors; and environmental remedy for the contaminated site.

A bill naming Dec. 3 as National Chemical Disaster Awareness Day is expected to be introduced to the U.S. House and Senate this week.