A trilogy of national shame Inder Malhotra WITH striking unanimity the media and public-spirited organizations in the country described the 25th anniversary of the Bhopal gas leak tragedy as a "day of national shame".
No fair-minded person can possibly disagree with this.
For, though the country remembers the ghastly catastrophe only once a year, the unbearable pain inflicted on hundreds of thousands of mostly poor people persists.
Nor would it go away any time soon.
Families of many of the victims have not been compensated after even a quarter of a century, and those that have been have received a measly sum of a little over Rs.
What Dominique Lapierrre - whose book Five past Midnight in Bhopal gave a vivid and heart-rending account of what the people living around the Union Carbide factory suffered in 1984 in one of the worst man-made catastrophes - has summed up the ghastly situation as it exists.
The leak of the most poisonous gas from a pesticide plant in the middle of a bustling city, he says, "continues to affect victims even today; children born are malformed; women suffer from cancer including cervical cancer; there are people who cannot breathe; people go blind ." He adds: "The composition of mythyl isocyanate has never been revealed by Carbide but it seems to have the impact akin to nuclear radiation in that it enters the genes of the victims .
Nobody knows how many generations transmission of the affected genes will continue".
This is by no means all.
Nearly 100 tonnes of effluents have been left on the site and have never been cleared.
Consequently, half the water supply to the inhabitants around the site is virtually poisoned.
Why is the site not cleared after so many years? Because Dow Chemicals that have taken over from Union Carbide argue that they are not responsible for what happened in 1984.
And obviously, neither the Congress-led Central government nor the BJP ministry in the state cares.
Indeed, the Madhya Pradesh minister in charge of the subject, who was once chief minister, has been making demonstrably false statements in order to make out that the water supply in the area is not contaminated.
Whether by coincidence or otherwise this year's remembrance of the Bhopal tragedy was accompanied by anger also over the second tragedy of that year occurring barely a month before the gas leak - the reprehensible anti-Sikh riots in the nation's capital following Indira Gandhi's assassination by her Sikh security guards.
The newly elected Akali member of the Lok Sabha, Harsimrat Kaur Badal, who is the wife of Punjab's deputy chief minister, Sukhbir Singh Badal, made a moving speech in the House expressing both anguish and anger over the dismal fact that 25 years after the butchery many of those responsible had not been punished and were unlikely to be brought to book.
She wanted the treasury benches to state whether any action would be taken even at this late stage, but no answer was forthcoming.
With both the grim tragedies under discussion it was perhaps inevitable that comparisons were drawn between the final compensation paid to the victims of the Delhi riots - about Rs.
7 lakhs per family - and the pittance given to the sufferers in Bhopal.
Some have insinuated that this was due to the fact that the victims in Delhi were Sikhs and those killed and maimed in Bhopal were Muslims.
Even if there is a grain of truth in this belief, it is a huge exaggeration.
The reality, as always, is more complex.
Originally, the number of people killed in Delhi and Bhopal was roughly the same, about 3,000 in each case.
But while the casualties in the riots remained stationary, the unending tragedy of Bhopal took a much heavier toll of 20,000 lives.
Moreover, over the succeeding two -and- a- half decades, the number of those suffering from breathlessness and other diseases added up to nearly five lakhs.
The Government of India had sued Union Carbide - while letting its guilty honchos escape scot-free, - for $ 3.3 billion.
But for reasons unknown, it settled with the killers for just $ 470 million that had to be distributed to nearly half a million sufferers.
A week before the 25th anniversary of the Bhopal outrage was the first anniversary of another infamy - the terrorist attack on Mumbai from the Pakistani soil on November 26, 2009.
Instead of observing it with due solemnity and dignity, this country acted in a way that was shameful.
Instead of mourning those who were felled by Pakistani terrorists, honouring the security personnel that fought the invaders valiantly, and demanding of Pakistan to punish the perpetrators of the horrifying attack and its masterminds, Indian parliament turned itself into an arena most unbecoming acrimony.
There was a particularly angry exchange between Pranab Mukherjee, leader of the Lok Sabha and the second most important man in the Manmohan Singh government, and the outgoing leader of the Opposition, L.
Once again the bone of contention was inadequate and tardy payment of compensation to bereaved families.
Of the more than 4,000 sufferers only a fourth had been given compensation so far, alleged Mr.
Mukherjee lost his temper.
As if this was not enough nearly 30 MPs disgraced themselves and exposed the House to ridicule by putting down questions on the day's order of business and absenting themselves from the House.
The question hour had to be dispensed with.
Later, it transpired that the number of members who habitually stayed away from the meetings of standing committees of which they were members had risen embarrassingly.
In the city of Mumbai things were no better because two factions of its police force, one of them led by the commissioner of police at the time of the attack when the force was found wanting, embarked on a war of words.
Nor could anyone in the state government explain why important recommendations of the R.
Pradhan Committee of inquiry had been willfully suppressed and its recommendations were not being implemented.
The third item in the trilogy of national shame is the indifference, nay callousness, of the ruling establishment towards the cruelly soaring food prices that are causing enormous hardship to the bulk of the Indian people.
The irony is that the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance pays goes on paying lip service to aam aadmi.
In my worst nightmares I had never expected that daal, the poor man's protein, would cost Rs 100 a kilo.
A very large number of lower middle-class families can no longer afford either lentils or vegetables but the well -fed minority is not bothered.
Doubtless there is a shortage of lentils and food grains in the world market.
But the wide world also knows that hoarding and profiteering also plays havoc with prices.
Has any action been taken anywhere in the country against hoarders and profiteers as used to happen in the much decried past? Can anything be more shameful than that?