Still Seeking Justice: 40 years after the Bhopal Disaster
By Gary Cohen
On December 3, 1984, a Union Carbide pesticide factory exploded in Bhopal, India, sending a deadly cloud over a sleeping city, exposing half a million people to the toxic fumes. Thousands tragically lost their lives in the immediate aftermath, and now, forty years later, the death toll has climbed to over 20,000, with countless others enduring chronic health issues from the exposure. Known as the ‘Hiroshima of the petrochemical industry,’ Bhopal remains a stark reminder of the devastating human cost of industrial negligence — one that continues to unfold as toxic pollution persists around the world.
In the United States, the Bhopal disaster ignited a fledgling grassroots movement to expose and address the toxic chemicals in our water, air, and neighborhoods. Americans have since learned of thousands of toxic waste sites across the country contaminating communities with chemicals linked to cancer, birth defects, neurological damage, and other severe health impacts. Just two years after Bhopal, this growing awareness led Congress to pass the first National Right to Know Act, signed into law by President Reagan.
But in India, Bhopal victims continued to struggle for justice. In the Spring of 1989, survivors flew to Houston to attend a Union Carbide annual shareholders meeting. They planned to tell the company the compensation settlement it had struck with the Indian government inadequately covered the devastation, trauma, and health impacts the company’s negligence had caused them. Instead of hearing from the survivors, Union Carbide had them arrested before they could enter the meeting.
Bhopal advocates then tried to tell Union Carbide their now-abandoned chemical factory was leaking toxic chemicals into the neighborhoods surrounding the facility complex. By this time, evidence was mounting that children born to Bhopal survivors had birth defects and other devastating health impacts. The company claimed they had settled their liabilities, and this was now the Indian government’s problem. The settlement awarded a mere $500 to each Bhopal victim, which “is plenty good for an Indian,” as a spokesperson for the company once stated.
In 2001, Dow Chemical bought Union Carbide, absorbing its assets and creating more distance between itself and the Bhopal disaster. Nevertheless, the Bhopal survivors never stopped fighting for accountability. They opened a free clinic to treat the intergenerational health effects caused by the disaster. They marched 500 miles from Bhopal to New Delhi and staged hunger fasts that lasted 18 days. They erected their own memorials to the disaster and established a museum that ensures that the horrors of their collective past are not forgotten.
The survivors also continued to pursue the company in the Indian and US courts. They even won an extradition order for Union Carbide’s former CEO, Warren Anderson, to appear in an Indian court to face potential criminal liability. But the U.S. government never acted on the multiple extradition requests. Dow and other American companies were seeking to expand their production in India, so the U.S. government did not want to jeopardize business relations between the two countries.
Forty years later, the former Union Carbide factory in Bhopal continues to leak poison into surrounding neighborhoods.
In the decades since the Bhopal disaster, we have learned a dark truth: the same kinds of chemicals that flow through the veins of the Bhopal survivors also flow through ours. The chemicals produced by Dow Chemical and other companies have invaded our bodies. The petrochemical industry has brought us together in a perverse solidarity, having chemically trespassed into every being on the planet.
Dow Chemical has tried to put Bhopal behind them. They would like the name of Union Carbide to disappear forever into the dust heap of history, and along with it, all responsibility for the holocaust it created in Bhopal so many years ago.
For Bhopal victims, the disaster is not past; it continues to shape their present. And a similar disaster could occur in the future — even here, in the United States. Just last year a rail tanker filled with vinyl chloride derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, forcing the evacuation of two thousand residents. And this is not a one-off event: according to the Coalition to Prevent Chemical Disasters, there were 218 chemical leaks, fires, and explosions in the US in the last year alone.
The stakes for our health have only increased in the last forty years. Since then, we have learned nearly all people in the United States carry PFAS, a toxic chemical linked to cancer, liver and kidney disease, and immune dysfunction in our bodies,. We have learned that the continued burning of fossil fuels is killing millions of people each year around the world through deadly air pollution and irreversible climate change. It is now evident that the petrochemical and fossil fuel companies can only survive if they continue to avoid the enormous liability they face for the destruction of our health and the planet’s ecosystems.
Bhopal has not been forgotten. The fierce commitment to health and justice that has propelled the Bhopal survivors for four decades has now sparked a global movement, uniting environmental health and justice advocates across continents. Organizations like the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal and hundreds of allied groups work tirelessly to hold corporations accountable and prevent future tragedies. Together, they have built a coalition that spans from the streets of Bhopal to communities worldwide facing similar toxic threats, representing millions who demand a world free from industrial poisons. This growing global alliance — the largest movement for environmental health and justice in history — is fighting for a future in which everyone has the right to live in a healthy environment. It is a movement that unites us all, because in many ways, we all live in Bhopal now.
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Gary Cohen is the President and Co-Founder of Health Care Without Harm and Practice Greenhealth, both organizations working to transform the health sector to address the climate crisis as a strategic imperative. Cohen received the Champion of Change Award from the White House and also a MacArthur Award.
