Conclusion

In the 1984-94 decade each tragedy Bhopal experienced built upon the previous one. Union Carbide took advantage of high levels of unemployment among Bhopal's population; the gas disaster then rendered this group poorer, sicker, and more rootless, which contributed in turn to the government's desire to rid the city of them. The riots in effect continued the government's anti-encroachment scheme by destroying thousands of huts that poor Muslim families were living in.

The logic of employing people to work for a plant that was known to produce deadly chemicals, "city beautification," and the riots reflect callousness toward poor, largely Muslim families. The Indian government seemed to assume that factory workers were fortunate to work for UCC, and thus did not take minimal precautions to prevent the remedy from killing the proverbial patient. The BJP government's use of gas-relief funds to demolish slums and provide urban facilities for the rich treated poor Muslim families as the dirt to be cleared. With the riot, there were no longer any safe places for Muslims in Bhopal.

The connections between each of these tragedies lies in the drift toward an electorally-and by implication communally-driven party system. While the BJP embraces an openly, violently anti-Muslim posture, Congress anticipated and continues to employ a paler version of the BJP's approach. The easiest way for political parties to make majoritarian appeals in India today is by
exploiting religious and caste divisions. The Congress Party's appeals to Hindus at a time when its class-based appeals to the poor were becoming less effective laid the groundwork for the BJP's subsequent ascendance.

In the mid-1980s, when Arjun Singh liberally distributed land titles, Congress still relied heavily on minorities and the poor for electoral support. By the early 1990s it had become more dependent upon Hindu votes and refrained from risking unpopularity among urban middle-class Hindus by opposing the BJP's slum-demolition program. In 1992 Congress was determined to unseat the BJP government in MP and return to power at both the state and national levels. But if denunciations of the BJP brought Congress electoral dividends, it did nothing to stop the violence or help reorganize shattered communities: "Arjun Singh has his eyes on the chair in New Delhi," I was told by a senior bureaucrat who asked to remain anonymous, "so he is staying clear of affairs in Bhopal." Deep factional divisions within Congress also contributed to its ineffectiveness in responding to these crises.

Electoral considerations are equally important in explaining the BJP's changing stance. It moved from espousing the cause of gas victims when in opposition to underreporting their injuries when it came to power. Although the BJP's inaction during the riots might appear to undermine its electoral interests, N. Rajan of the National Mail concluded that the riots played a vital role in consolidating its disintegrating Hindu constituency. However, the midterm elections revealed a decline in the BJP's popularity in MP as a result of its poor performance in office. The 1993 elections, after a period in which communal violence had been absent, confirmed the decline in BJP fortunes.

The vacuum created by the inaction of the state and political parties has been filled by grass-roots activism. Muslim women, who had not participated in any form of organized political activity, have been at the forefront of struggles for employment, protest against the demolitions, and attempts to repair the damage caused by the riots.

In different ways the events of both 1984 and 1991 had devastating consequences for women. Numerous studies have shown that women's reproductive capacities were seriously damaged by the disaster. The public health minister of MP reported that 36 pregnant women spontaneously aborted and 6 gave birth to deformed babies just after the gas leak. An Indian Council of Medical Research study in 1990 found a high rate-24 percent-of spontaneous abortion among gas-affected women. Subsequently the abortion rate has tended to be 7.5 percent for women who have been exposed to the gas as compared to 3 percent for unexposed groups.

The gas disaster made it more difficult for women to mother and extended the demands associated with this role. Men were often unable to serve as the principal income earners in the family since their abilities to work full time had often been impaired. Given the imperative for women to earn wages, community restrictions that kept women homebound in the past began to slacken. It became acceptable for Muslim women to hold jobs and to support their families.

The catalyst to the formation of the BGPMUS was the state's tendency to alternate between concessions and repression.25 Initially the government supported women's employment through its creation of sewing centers. Just as women had become reliant on this income, the government closed the centers down. The successful outcome of women's struggles led them to continue organizing. The government also decided to provide 836 widows with a monthly pension of 200 rupees ($12.00). When the more authoritarian BJP government came to power, women were already well organized. Given the high costs of transportation and the difficulties of traveling with young children from Gandhi Nagar to the city, many women had to give up their jobs. It is ironic that the BJP, which has decried the seclusion of Muslim women, was responsible for reprivatizing women's work.

With the family endangered, women sought to defend family integrity and their own roles within the family. Muslim women's assertion of their identities as mothers represents a powerful response to Hindu communalism. The BJP is obsessed with questions of demographic balance between Hindu and Muslim communities. Both its slum-demolition program and the riots aim to reduce the Muslim population so that Hindus will enjoy unquestioned numerical and political supremacy. The BJP's fear that Muslim population growth rates would exceed those of Hindus particularly targets the fertility of Muslim women. Women's anguish at the damage to their reproductive capacities as a result of the disaster should be understood within this context. Similarly, women's attempt to maintain the integrity of their families and communities gains added urgency in the face of the BJP's attempt to create a Hindu state in which the choices for Muslims are exile, assimilation, or death. For women to assert themselves as individuals would pose no challenge to the BJP; to assert their identities as part of a visible, voluble, angry community of poor Muslim women offers the slender hope of cultural survival.

Notes

*I learned a great deal from a number of people in Bhopal, above all about the conviction and compassion that have been indespensable in confronting the ongoing tragedy. I am especialy grateful in this respect to Lajja Shankar Hardenia, Abdul Jabbar Khan, N. Rajan, and numerous Bhopal Gas Peedit Mahila Udyog Sangathana (the BGPMUS) activists I spoke to. Thanks also to Ajay Kant for research assistance and Mark Kesselman for his comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

1. Claude Alvares, "Bhopal Revisited," Illustrated Weekly of India, 8-9 Dec. 1990.

2. The term "communal" is used in the Indian context to denote
sectarianism between members of different religious ommunities, most often Hindus and Muslims. I have put "communal" in quotes to signify my discomfort with the term, but still use it in the absence of a preferable alternative.

3. See, for example, Arvind Rajagopal, "And the Poor Get Gassed: Multinational Aided Development and the State: The Case of Bhopal," Berkeley Journal of Sociology, vol. 32 (1987), pp. 129-52; and Larry Everest, Behind the Poison Cloud: Union Carbide's Bhopal Massacre (Chicago: Banner Press, 1985).

4. Claude Alvares, "Bhopal's Fighting Mothers," Patriot Magazine, 20 August 1989.

5. Ibid.

6. Far Eastern Economic Review, 2 March 1989.

7. "Plans for Gas Victims Backfire," Free Press Journal, 29 November 1991, p. 3

8. Sunday Observer, 24 August 1991.

9. When the results of its survey were greeted with derision and scorn, the government admitted that its survey methods had been flawed and agreed to reexamine its results. However, it did only a random check of 10 percent of the cases, and the figures it resubmitted to the court would have a bearing on only 5,000 cases. Furthermore, in rehearing the case the Supreme Court referred back to the findings of the unrevised study.

10. MN Buch, interview with the author, 30 Dec. 1990, Bhopal.

11. Babu Lal Gour, 13 June 1990, Bhopal.

12. "Encroachment on Civil Rights: Report of an Investigation into the `Anti-Encroachment' Drive in the Gas-Affected Slums of Bhopal" (Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh: People's Union for Civil Liberties, June 1991), p. 2.

13. Rajiv Lochan Sharma, interview with the author, 28 Dec. 1990, Bhopal.

14. "A New Township for Bhopal Disaster Victims," New York Times International, 12 Sept. 1990, p. A11.

15. Arif Aqueel, interview with the author, 13 June 1990, Hamedia Hospital, Bhopal.

16. Sunderlal Patwa, then chief minister of MP, insisted that the slum demolition had not been communal in character, though "some people want to make it look that way to malign the BJP." He also denied that there were many gas victims among those evicted and insisted that adequate arrangements had been made for the families that had been relocated. Sunderlal Patwa, interview with the author, 14 June 1990, at his residence.

17. Indira Iyengar, interview with the author, 15 June 1990, Bhopal.

18. "Bhopal Riots: A Report" (Bhopal: Sanskritik Morcha; and Delhi: the People's Union for Democratic Rights, April 1993), p. 5

19. N. Rajan, interview with the author, 2 Jan. 1993, Bhopal.

20. Shama Begum (pseudonym), interview with the author, 3 Jan. 1993, in Bhopal.

21. "Bhopal Riots: A Report," p. 12

22. Cited in ibid., p. 18.

23. New York Times, 16 July 1985.

24. Times of India, 21 Nov. 1990.

25. The argument is best elaborated by Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward in Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).