Solidarity after Bhopal: Building a Transnational Environmental Justice Movement

Introduction

In 1984, due to a combination of unsafe design and cost-cutting measures, 40 tons of the highly toxic chemical, methyl isocyanate (MIC), leaked from the Union Carbide Corporation's pesticide factory in Bhopal, India. ¹ This resulted in an estimated 7,000 to 10,000 deaths within the first three days, ² and over 25,000 have died to date. ³ Between 120,000 and 150,000 people continue to experience chronic health issues as a result of their exposure. ⁴ Toxic wastes remain in and around the site, leading to soil and groundwater contamination, ⁵ and there is a rise in developmental disabilities and birth defects. ⁶ In Bhopal, the immediate aftermath of the gas disaster saw the emergence of a number of activist groups that demanded adequate compensation, medical care, and justice. This marked the beginnings of the local campaign for justice, a new social movement, which was quickly acknowledged as a crucial participant in the environmental justice (EJ) movement.

The events in Bhopal gave the necessary gravitas to local EJ groups in the United States, in their struggles to regulate the production and storage of toxic chemicals in their communities. Responding directly to the disaster, the U.S. Congress passed the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act (EPCRA) and the Toxics Release Inventory, and the disaster continues to serve as a point of reference for toxics-impacted communities. These landmark amendments to environmental law have become stepping stones for community members and decision makers to prepare for emergencies and track the presence and management of toxic chemicals.

In response to the disaster, a vibrant transnational campaign for justice emerged in 1984 and continues to this day (see Table 1), but in this article, we focus on the more formally structured movement since the Dow Chemical Company purchased Union Carbide in 2001. ⁷ Specifically, we look at the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal (ICJB), a coalition of environmental and social justice groups, led by Bhopali survivor and support groups. Based on interviews with key campaigners in the United States, and leading survivors and activists in Bhopal, we curate ICJB's history and evolution in the United States. We also examine the campaign's evolving focus from available public documents disseminated by the campaign. In mapping this history, we draw out the modes by which former and current activists in the U.S. solidarity campaign participate in what some scholars have named the “boomerang effect,” or the power of transnational alliances to exert pressure on national governments to effect social change. ⁸ Through the transnational networks it has formed over the last 13 years, the campaign has been especially successful in winning small victories from the Government of India (GOI) and in countering and, in many cases, thwarting, Dow's artful attempts at greenwashing.

ICJB Beginnings and Audience

After Dow's 2001 acquisition of Union Carbide, transnational activism became necessary for two primary reasons. The first was the difficulty in enforcing Union Carbide's appearance in the Indian courts, as the Supreme Court of India had allowed the company to sell their Indian assets in 1994, ⁹ making it difficult to challenge Union Carbide locally. ¹⁰ Second, given Dow's transnational operations and its human rights and environmental abuses beyond Bhopal, transnational resistance was strategic. Through activism in India, the United Kingdom, and North America, ICJB aims to hold the Government of India, the state government of Madhya Pradesh, and Dow accountable for the Bhopal gas disaster. ¹¹

Initially focusing on a wide-range of groups, including labor, consumer rights, environmental, and EJ groups, ICJB in the United States shifted focus to two other key constituents: 1) Non-Resident Indians (NRIs) and the Indian diaspora, and 2) high school and college students. U.S.-based outreach after 2001 became formalized with the campaign appointing organizers to streamline its activities outside Bhopal. The first such organizer was Krishnaveni Gundu, who primarily focused on connecting the campaign to communities involved in similar EJ struggles. Gundu, a former copywriter with an advertising agency, had spent a considerable amount of time volunteering with the Bhopal struggle in India. Later, on migrating to Houston, Texas, Gundu became the coordinator of ICJB-US. From 2002 to 2003, Gundu engaged in ally-building using teach-ins, toxic tours, movie screenings, protests, demonstrations, and other tactics. Much of Gundu's work focused on EJ solidarity, alongside U.S.-based allies, including shrimper and noted EJ activist, Diane Wilson, and Casey Harrell, Greenpeace USA's full-time campaigner on the Bhopal gas disaster. In 2002, Gundu and Harrell organized a toxic tour for survivors, aimed at solidarity-building and knowledge-exchange with U.S. communities impacted by industrial waste. ¹² These connections laid the foundation for transnational solidarity at key moments in the EJ movement for chemical safety in the United States.

Meanwhile, the Indian diaspora began to engage with the campaign, largely because of the efforts of Rachna Dhingra. A student at the University of Michigan, Dhingra was the coordinator of the Ann Arbor chapter of the Association for India's Development (AID), a diaspora organization that supports community-led development. Dhingra first became involved with the Bhopal campaign in 1999, after meeting with Bhopali survivors and activists who had come to Midland, Michigan to protest the Dow-Union Carbide merger. As a result of this meeting, AID Ann Arbor (and subsequently other AID chapters) began to focus on the Bhopal gas disaster, eventually gaining membership in the ICJB coalition. ¹³ Solidarity with the Bhopal campaign was, according to Dhingra, one of AID's first forays into supporting a social movement. ¹⁴

In 2002, Ryan Bodanyi, a student at the University of Michigan, and an intern with Greenpeace, began to mobilize students around the Bhopal gas disaster, eventually meeting Dhingra and other members of AID Ann Arbor. Together they formed Justice for Bhopal (J4B), a student group based out of the University of Michigan. The two organizers played pivotal roles in student mobilization, particularly amongst NRIs and Indian diaspora communities. ¹⁵ Soon, the need to be kept abreast of the day-to-day developments in Bhopal was recognized, and Dhingra was chosen to be a liaison between the Bhopali survivor and support groups and the U.S. campaign, leading to her relocation to Bhopal in January 2003. ¹⁶

In November 2003, Gundu resigned. Because she was instrumental in the campaign's EJ focus, many of those connections were lost in her absence. Prior to Gundu's departure, she acknowledged the need for student mobilization within the campaign. Bodanyi (of J4B) was chosen as the coordinator of the newly formed, Students for Bhopal (SfB). With the loss of the campaign's EJ focus, SfB became the prime North American tier of ICJB. As a result, student mobilization became the North American campaign's focus. According to Gary Cohen, ¹⁷ a long-time supporter of the Bhopal campaign and founder of the Environmental Health Fund, a student-centered effort made perfect sense, “since students were most likely to take aggressive stances on human rights and justice issues and link up with other student movements.” ¹⁸

By the twentieth anniversary of the disaster, in 2004, Bodanyi had, with the support of AID chapters, Campus Greens, the Sierra Student Coalition, and other student groups, mobilized students in 70 high schools, colleges, and universities. A wide range of actions, including film screenings, candlelit vigils, presentations, photo exhibits, performances, hunger strikes, and other forms of protest took place, leading to “the first mass student movement Dow [had] faced since the Vietnam War.” ¹⁹ Much of SfB's support came from AID chapters, and many AID members formed local SfB chapters. Founding members estimate that over half of the member/supporter base was ethnically Indian, both Non-Resident Indians and Indian Americans, with the remaining supporters being mostly white. Members were typically students between the ages of 20 and 35, and many continued to work with the campaign in various capacities after graduating. As a group comprised of NRIs and members of the Indian diaspora, particularly those from more privileged socio-economic classes, AID volunteers proved to be an especially influential support-base in actions targeted at the GOI. The participation of this constituency in the campaign is particularly significant relative to the marginalization of the poor, lower-caste Hindu, and Muslim gas-affected communities, and their associated lack of voice. Several protests were organized at Indian embassies and consulates with the participation of the diaspora, pressuring the GOI to adhere to the demands of Bhopali survivors and activists.

The sustained collaboration with AID was facilitated by the work of Dhingra and Bodanyi. In mid-2003, survivor-activists traveled to AID's annual conference in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where they addressed volunteers from AID chapters across the United States. Dhingra, in her role as liaison between the Bhopal-based survivor and support groups and the U.S.-based ICJB groups, soon became the recipient of an annual fellowship from AID. ²⁰ This led to AID chapters engaging more actively with the campaign, and eventually to AID's identifying the Bhopal struggle as a key component of their advocacy work.

In 2004, AID Cincinnati hosted SfB's first national conference, which for the first time, brought together student activists from across the United States. During the conference, members identified the need for a more formalized institutional structure to distribute responsibilities more evenly, while helping to train new leaders. This led to the formation of the Structural Working Group (SWB), comprised of Bodanyi and four others. The SWG interviewed other similar groups, including the Sierra Student Coalition and AID to arrive at the most suitable organizational structure for SfB. The new format consisted of an elected advisory board (AB) and task-focused working groups. ²¹

Campaign Actions and Successes

True to its name, Students for Bhopal was initially focused primarily on building awareness about the disaster and Dow's greenwashing efforts amongst college and university students. Actions planned and coordinated by the campaign broadly fell into two categories, 1) campus-focused campaigns and 2) community-focused campaigns. Campus-focused campaigns worked with students in colleges and campuses to urge universities holding Dow Chemical Company shares to either divest or use the shares to support a Bhopal shareholders' resolution. Students were also organized around getting universities to reject funding from Dow, as the millions of dollars the corporation donated to universities, it was argued, could be used towards remediating the disaster in Bhopal. Efforts were also made to dissuade students from working for Dow and many were recruited to take the “Don't work for Dirty Dow” pledge. ²²

Community-focused campaigns, meanwhile, built support through actions in non-academic settings. Pressure tactics were used to creatively and persistently remind decision makers at Dow, who “lived in a bubble,” about Bhopal. ²³ The corporation's Board of Directors had the power, argued the Students for Bhopal website, to order a comprehensive cleanup of chemical waste in Bhopal, to obey the law and submit their subsidiary Union Carbide for trial, and to save lives, by funding medical care for the people poisoned by their chemical waste. ²⁴ Pressure and shaming tactics were also targeted at the Government of India that was “far more responsive to public pressure from abroad” than to its own citizens. ²⁵ The best example of the influence wielded by the NRI community came in April 2004 when the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in the United States ruled for the first time ever that a corporation based in one country could be held responsible in that country for an environmental cleanup abroad. Union Carbide's cleanup of Bhopal became a possibility with this ruling, provided the GOI, the owner of the title to the land, submitted a No Objection Certificate (NOC) to the court. When the GOI was uncooperative, the SfB, AID chapters, and ICJB-India initiated a series of sustained transnational actions with thousands of faxes, calls, and e-mails sent to the GOI, protests organized at Indian consulates in Chicago, Houston, New York, and Washington DC, and a six-day hunger strike by survivors in Bhopal. Within days, these concerted actions prompted the GOI to agree to submit the NOC, and since then, adopting the official stance that Dow be held liable for a comprehensive cleanup. ²⁶

Here we begin to see how the campaign's activities illustrate what Keck and Sikkink (1998) have named the boomerang effect. In their conception of the boomerang effect, transnational advocacy networks, of which ICJB is an example, link activists in developed countries and less developed countries to move the local government to act. Domestic actors seek help from international allies when they find their influence on state actors ineffective. International actors, in this formulation, “amplify” the asks of domestic groups to whom the state has been unresponsive. Among the most economically influential diasporic groups in the United States, overseas Indians' participation in activism surrounding Bhopal exerts considerable pressure on the GOI, often leading to little victories and changes in political stances such as the one described above. However, because of the need to hold Dow in the United States accountable, along with pressuring the GOI, these international activists behave in ways that are different from Keck and Sikkink's conception. The work of these international diasporic activists is not limited to amplifying and echoing the demands of domestic activists back to the less developed state. They also relay the demands of the domestic activists to Dow, a non-state guarantor of rights, within the international terrain.

By 2008, Bodanyi left the campaign, and since then, various organizers and the AB have continued to work with environmental and social justice groups, students, and the Indian diaspora. During this time, Bhopal activists in India decided they wanted a more structured relationship with North America and chose the name the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal-North America (ICJB-NA). ²⁷ This new identity reflected, along with students, a freshly graduated base of professional members, and supporters in mainstream and grassroots environmental justice and human rights groups.

The unique contribution of the U.S. campaign, as a loose coalition of groups originally and in its structured avatar later, was in forcing campuses and publics across the nation to confront the Bhopal disaster and the struggle for justice. With numerous actions targeting Dow's attempts at greenwashing and the apathy of the Government of India, the campaign has, to a great extent, been able to mitigate concerns about the erasure of the Bhopal gas disaster from public memory, ²⁸ since the Dow-Union Carbide merger. Some of the actions that have helped maintain the campaign's visibility have included proxy presence at Dow shareholders meetings, city council and student government resolutions to refuse Dow's funding, solidarity and facility tours with local environmental justice groups by survivors, flash mobs, die-ins, sit-ins, candlelit vigils, fax/phone/e-mail protests, petitions, solidarity fasts, countering Dow advertising, connecting Bhopal to the BP oil spill and other environmental disasters, documentary tours, and using photo exhibits, art, and theater to create awareness.

Conclusion

To an extent, the legacy of the three organizers that helped build the movement after the Dow-Union Carbide merger continues to shape where ICJB-NA directs its energies today. The campaign continues to successfully engage students and the Indian diaspora to effect the boomerang. Thus, the movement in the United States, which was formed, in part, to challenge Dow's deceptive public image as an environmentally sustainable and ethical corporation, has fulfilled this mandate to some extent and continues to do so. However, the goal of building a transnational EJ movement remains a challenge due to difficulties in securing funding for full-time organizers, leading to current organizing work being staggered across volunteer bodies and part-timers. More needs to be done to ensure that vulnerable communities, locally and globally, are protected from hazardous industries. Recent disasters, such as the 2013 ammonium nitrate explosion at a Waco, West Texas facility and the 2014 crude 4-methylcyclohexane methanol spill in the Elk River in West Virginia, point to the lack of enforcement of the policies that came into existence in the United States as a result of the Bhopal gas disaster. In response to a question posed by the authors, Rashida Bi, survivor and leader of the women's union, Bhopal Gas Peedit Mahila Stationery Karmchari Sangh, outlined how the Bhopal disaster sets a precedent for similarly affected communities everywhere:

Anywhere that a factory is set up, the people need to ask: “What are you going to do for us that you did for Bhopal?” Whether this factory is set up in America, in Africa, in France or in Russia, the first question is what did you do for Bhopal? It is a model for other places. The issue is still unresolved today. Dow Chemical has not taken any responsibility for this issue. Even the government of the United States could do nothing to hold Dow Chemical accountable. Then why site a factory here? These are the kinds of questions people need to ask ²⁹ (emphasis ours).

With the disaster serving as a “strategic point of reference for global activists,” ³⁰ Rashida Bi's words are reminiscent of Mary Kaldor's concept of the “double boomerang.” ³¹ The most recent example of the double boomerang in action was when activists invoked Bhopal as a cautionary tale in protests against Freedom Industries' and the state of West Virginia's handling of the Elk River spill. However, in pointing to the issues being unresolved, Rashida Bi hints that we need to move beyond invocations that relegate the disaster to something that happened in 1984. As a first step, communities struggling for environmental justice locally and globally must join forces to form a sustained movement in acknowledgment of the ongoing impact of toxics on people and their environments.