A candlelight vigil and protest was organized at Harvard Square, Cambridge on 3 December to commemorate the 29th anniversary of the disaster. The hunger strike seeks to draw attention to key survivor demands: clean-up of the contaminated site, medical relief and economic rehabilitation of all survivors, and prosecution of Dow Chemical, whose subsidiary Union Carbide's pesticide factory was the site of the 1984 disaster.
"We believe that this is a case of mass murder many times the scale of any other disaster in India and yet we as a country have forgotten in, while the disaster lives on in Bhopal. We need to reignite the debate hence this fast," Shashank Shukla of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government told TOI. During the night of 2-3 December 1984, 40 tons of lethal gases leaked from a pesticide plant owned by the Union Carbide Corporation, in Bhopal, India affecting hundreds of thousands of sleeping residents of the city.
Along with the casualties that occurred at the time, over the past 29 years an estimated 20,000 people have died and the number of those suffering disabilities has reached a staggering 500,000. In 1989, the Supreme Court had approved a settlement between the government and Union Carbide that gave Rs.713 crore ($470 million at the time) as compensation to victims estimated at 3000 dead and over 100,000 injured. Other surviving families have been struggling to get justice since then.
In 2001, Union Carbide was acquired by Dow Chemical Company, a US based chemicals behemoth, which has since refused to acknowledge any responsibility for the actions of its subsidiary. Sunday's candlelight vigil and the relay fast was organized by students from the Harvard Kennedy School in coordination with the Association for India's Development (AID) and the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal (ICJB). Explaining the 365-day fast, Shukla, who has earlier worked with the Supreme Court Commissioners in India, said that every day people will fast and upload their pictures on the campaign page with the tag "I fasted today for Bhopal".
People can fast from their homes or wherever they are as long as they upload their pictures at the end of the day. "On an average, we will have 4-5 students fasting every day for the next 365 days. These include people from across the world which is what makes this effort special. The different Harvard school students involved are Kennedy School, Business School, Law School, Design School, Education School and Public Health," he said.
Leonid Chindelevitch, an ICJB volunteer said that Dow's irresponsibility is setting a dangerous precedent for the future behavior of transnational corporations in India by showing that they can escape from being liable for social and environmental harm caused by their actions. While the situation on the ground in Bhopal is grim, Nitin Gujaran, an AID volunteer and a software engineer working in the area is hopeful that the 30th anniversary year will energize a global movement for justice in Bhopal as well as increase awareness about other such disasters.
"Bhopal teaches us about what happens in a toxic industrial society which prioritizes profits above all else", he said "It is a reminder that in some ways we all live in Bhopal".
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