Reflections on the Bhopal gas tragedy’s anniversaries have become ambivalent events today. Either they verge on the bureaucratically minimal, as a reluctant acknowledgement of a historical event, or they explode to the level of the carnivalesque, enacting the power of myth and folktale. Anniversaries tend to be, in that sense, deeply demanding. They're not just an enactment of a performance. They demand that the memory triggers the present into a deeply activist role.

On the morning of December 2, I was waiting patiently for the newspapers. I was trying to understand how India would react to one of the worst industrial disasters it has ever seen. I was stunned—there was minimal response to it. There was hardly any reference to the nature of the event or Bhopal itself. But what required mention was a proposed museum, a memorial for Bhopal. This is something deeply problematic that needs to be discussed in democratic forums.

The question of memorial and memory has today become theoretically problematic. Memory, in information theory, is now crowded out by the question of noise, by the event of silence. Memory needs a different articulation. It had the power of storytelling, of agency, of a poetic invocation within oral memory. But written memory is more documented. It acquires a certain shadow of silence. What one has to do when confronting Bhopal is to see that we are confronting not memory, but a variety of erasures. 

One has to begin with the sheer indifference. One then confronts the fact that many of the events around the tragedy have been completely erased. Who remembers today that when the army cleaned up the streets of Bhopal, hundreds of dead bodies were thrown into the river in numbers that hardly constituted a part of the death toll?

One has to also recollect that obsolescence has become a part of Bhopal's memory. In a deep and fundamental way, Bhopal, in a way, inaugurates the age of triage in Indian policy. Triage is a rational elimination. It's a recognition of the systematic dispensability of people. So how does an act of triage get commemorated? How do we look at the question of museums, memorials, and memory in the Bhopal gas tragedy?

One way is by recollecting the various events and highlights of the tragedy. One of the first stories I remember is that of the Union Carbide plant manager J Mukund. When told that gas was leaking from his plant, he turned around and said, “The leak can’t be from my plant. The plant is shut down. Our technology just can’t go wrong. It is failsafe.” It was then that someone asked him to look out the window. Faith in technology is something Bhopal began to challenge.

The second story was told by the political scientist Manu Mohanty. During one of his visits to Bhopal to report on the tragedy, Mohanty visited an Odiya slum close to the railway line. One of the old men there suddenly turned and pointed to his son, who showed him a newborn baby. The family had named the child Gasmati. It captured the irony of life almost completely.

The third thing I want to emphasise is that the deadly gas—identified as methyl isocyanate—was not identified by Indian scientists, but by German biochemist Max Daunderer. It's interesting that the then government of India put the biochemist on the next plane to Germany after the revelation. 

In contrast, remember the story of Satish Dhawan, chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation. He had invited hundreds of people to an open seminar on Bhopal at the Indian Institute of Science, where he was director, and 150 top scientists participated. It is this openness that the memorial has to capture, and the memory has to canonise. This requires a deep sense of the oral nature of the Bhopal tragedy. Documents do not capture anything beyond legality. The language of pain and suffering still needs orality.

The fourth point is that Bhopal reflected what to the government was a law-and-order problem. This is because civil society challenged the government as a knowledge system. It came through groups like the Medico Friend Circle around scientist Anil Sadgopal, which contested the government's very interpretation of the tragedy—from its science and agriculture to the way it conceptualised suffering.

The tragedy has to be captured through a variety of perspectives. The question is: can a straightforward memorial or a simplistic set of statues or diagrams capture the nature of the vast tragedy? Two unforgettable photographs by Pablo Bartholomew and Raghu Rai challenged the indifference—both of a blinded baby in dust. The way they conveyed the poignancy of death as waste, as disposal, as dispensability captured the eloquence of Bhopal as an event. One must thank the two photographers for providing a poetry that Bhopal otherwise lacks. The photos became a demographic event, a census. In contrast, the impoverished science of counting victims hardly catered to the meaning of the tragedy or its suffering.

So how do we create a memorial that captures the various angles? It can't be portrayed linearly. It can't be understood mechanically. This demands that, first, we answer a question that was raised at the time: what if Mother Teresa had gone to Bhopal? Would the government have then acquired the language of compassion? Would Bhopal then have acquired a silence that was much more comforting rather than questioning? We have to ask this repeatedly.

One of the things Bhopal triggers in modern science policy is the necessity of a major centre for ethics—not for individual research, but to confront collective death. The genocidal impetus of science policy, of industrialism, of the very obsolescence endemic to the act of technology has to be understood. Bhopal needs a new language of suffering, a new set of concepts around compassion. It is this that the museum has to reconstruct. A new set of sentimental props of rhetorical devices will not capture it. One has to talk about the survivor, the witness, the activist, and about Union Carbide.

I think the irony of Bhopal is best captured in the fact that Union Carbide eventually had to pay a sum that was entirely covered by its insurance. Bhopal became an act of indifference to the company. It felt little sense of responsibility. Legality, by emphasising mere compensation, does not provide for justice. And it is this absence of justice and memory that the memorial has to provide for.

This story is reported by Shiv Visvanathan of The New Indian Express.