India fury over US 'double standards' on BP and Bhopal

Indians have reacted with fury to President Barack Obama's tough stance against BP, accusing the US of double standards over industrial accidents after the failure to convict Americans involved in the Bhopal disaster of 1984 or to obtain what many view as adequate compensation for victims. The anger goes beyond that of campaigners or activists with some of India's best-known writers and journalists weighing in. "It looks like Indian children's lives are cheaper than [those of] fish," Chetan Bhagat, the country's best-selling writer, said. "Obama should bang his fist on the table. If he can do that for fish, how about our kids? Or are they only Indians?" The Pioneer and Hindustan newspapers ran headlines last week repeating the charge that the US reaction to the Gulf Coast disaster, which has killed 11 people, and to Bhopal, where at least 15,000 died as a result of exposure to toxic gases leaking from a US-owned pesticide plant, was evidence of double standards. "Everything that Obama has said about BP and the spill was what the US should have said about Bhopal," said Suhasini Haider, one of India's best-known TV journalists who chaired a prime-time discussion comparing reactions to the two disasters. "There is the question of compensation, the way Obama has gone after senior executives personally. This is the exact opposite of what happened with Bhopal." One reason for the anger lies in the timing of the Obama's address to the American nation on the oil spill, which came a week after the first verdicts in a criminal trial related to the Bhopal disaster. Seven Indian managers at the plant were sentenced to two years in prison and immediately bailed by a court in India. Warren Anderson, the then chief executive of Union Carbide, the American firm which owned the plant through an Indian subsidiary, has never faced trial and attempts by Indian governments to extradite him from the US have failed. "It seems ridiculous that there are such small punishments for [Bhopal] and at the same time we are watching the US getting so agitated about the spill," Haider said. Attention in India has focused on continuing investigations by campaigners into the identity of the senior figure who ordered the release of Anderson, arrested when he returned to Bhopal immediately after the disaster. Opposition politicians have sought to blame senior figures in the Congress party, who lead a coalition government in India. There is also a fierce domestic debate about who was responsible for the downgrading of charges against officials investigated after the disaster, the failure to clear the site of the plant of toxic waste and the level of compensation, which has reached only a fraction of the victims. "It's the Indian government that must answer why it allowed the US those actions," Haider said. Local news reports have claimed that senior American politicians put pressure on the Indian government not to pursue claims for further compensation against Union Carbide, which was eventually bought by another US firm, Dow Chemicals in 2001. Bhagat told the Guardian that "nothing [in the US] compared to what had happened in India" where "politicians and industries are much too close".