Sunday, March 30, 2003		Books

Man-made disaster with warlike consequences
Roopinder Singh

Exposure: Portrait of a Corporate Crime
by Raghu Rai. Introduction by Anil Sharma. Greenpeace International, Amsterdam. Price not stated.

AT a time when "impressive" images of war are beamed to billions of television sets the world over, a reality check is in order. War does bring destruction, death and disrupts the social order whenever it takes place. War is bad, and it has horrible consequences. It is interesting that the organisation that has published Exposure is also at the forefront of aggressively opposing war. In fact, Greenpeace has sponsored a "Coalition of the UNwilling," and is supporting various anti-war protests the world over.

While people are prepared for war and its consequences in a manner of speaking, at times war-like disasters are unleashed upon unprepared public. These could be natural or man-made, and among the latter, the worst kind are those which result in thousands of deaths and millions of scars.

Such was the scale of the destruction that took place on the night of December 2/3, 1984. A pesticide factory in Bhopal, owned by the multinational Union Carbide Corporation, spewed out as much as 40 tonnes of methyl isocyanate (MIC) on the unsuspecting residents of the town.

"People just did not know what had hit them. There was no warning. Before anyone could realise the full impact of the disaster, an area of about 10 square kilometres was engulfed in dense clouds of poison. People got up coughing, gasping for breath, their eyes burning. Many fell dead as they ran. Others succumbed at the hospitals where doctors were overwhelmed by the numbers and lacked information on the nature of the poisoning. By the end of the third day, more than an estimated 8,000 people had died from direct exposure to the gases and another 5,00,000 were injured. Today, the number of deaths stand at 20,000," says a Bhopal-based journalist, Anil Sharma, in his introduction.

Raghu Rai, needs no introduction and his work has been acclaimed internationally. His pictures are often worth more than thousand words. He was particularly moved by the tragedy and has been documenting the lives of those affected by the gas since. As we go through the un-numbered pages of the book, we see the iconic photographic "Burial of an unknown child" and children lying in lime-covered graves and survivors with hopelessness writ large on their faces. There are disturbing, stark black-and-white images of misshapen, aborted foetuses, of bags full of skulls, of incongruously well-printed placards held aloft by protesters seeking that Dow, with which Union Carbide merged in February 2001, accept the liability of the Bhopal disaster, of demonstrators saying: "You want Osama, give us Anderson," referring to the then Union Carbide chairman, who is a proclaimed offender in India, but has managed to evade arrest, even though there is an Interpol warrant against him.

There is the picture of litigants and lawyers conferring in an endless struggle to get some legal relief. Dr Satpathy, a forensic expert at the state government’s Hamidia Hospital holds aloft a huge collage of the photographs of the over 20,000 gas-effected persons on whose bodies he has performed autopsies.

Produced to accompany a touring exhibition of Raghu Rai’s photographs last year, this is no coffee table book. It is a disturbing chronicle of how ordinary lives are impacted when things go hugely wrong. The images are stark and continue to haunt you even after you put the book down. They are meant to. This book came into one’s hands even as one was watching the antiseptic images of the US military action in Iraq and one could not help wondering what was being hidden behind those images`85perhaps Raghu Rai should be in Iraq to provide us with a reality check.