Dow, Politics, and Poison: Bhopal’s Fight for Justice After 41 Years

Image : Bloomberg The morning of December 2 and 3, 2025 began with a familiar heaviness in Bhopal. Under the Bharat Talkies underbridge, where the city’s forgotten gather each anniversary, survivors assembled with banners, inhalers, grief, and the last scraps of patience they have carried across four decades in Bhopal's fight for justice. From there they marched, as they do every year, towards the JP Nagar Gas Memorial. The crowd was large but muted, the kind of silence that exists only in places where memory is inseparable from survival.

As the procession moved forward, the political cry hardened into one directed not just at Union Carbide, the ghost that has never left Bhopal, but at its present-day parent company, Dow Chemical. At the front, an effigy of Dow swayed clumsily on bamboo poles, waiting for the flames that would consume it at the end of the rally. Survivors called it a symbol of “forty-one years of betrayal,” a shorthand now for the State’s unwillingness to confront the corporation that still shelters Union Carbide, an absconder in the criminal case.

Afsari, a 62-year-old resident of Qazi Camp, adjusted the scarf around her mouth before speaking. “Every year we walk this road to remind the country what it wants to forget,” she said. “They say the world has moved on. But for us, nothing has moved. Not justice, not medicine, not even clean water.”

Dow Chemical’s Expanding Footprint

What sharpened the mood this year was the growing evidence, highlighted repeatedly by survivor organisations, that Dow Chemical’s presence in India has expanded dramatically over the last eleven years. They pointed to the reconstruction of discarded machinery from Dow’s plant in Germany—equipment scrapped in Europe for failing to meet environmental norms but rebuilt in Dahej, Gujarat, where regulations are more forgiving.

Survivors said the Dahej complex is now Dow’s largest facility in India, producing chemicals capable of generating Methyl Isocyanate—the same compound that engulfed Bhopal in 1984. Another major facility in Maharashtra’s Lote Parashuram region continues to operate with little transparency or public oversight.

Standing near the rally’s banner, 29-year-old Rehan from Blue Moon Colony watched the effigy bob through the crowd. “They shut their toxic plants in Europe because the laws there protect people,” he said quietly. “But here, they open new ones. Our tragedy is their opportunity.”

The Role of Public Sector Undertakings

Survivor groups also used the rally to underscore how deeply India’s public sector undertakings have become entangled with Dow’s operations. They said that PSUs—Indian Oil, GAIL, BPCL, HPCL and ONGC—now provide raw materials for Dow’s manufacturing facilities and, in some cases, purchase Union Carbide’s intellectual properties.

It is a relationship that activists argue violates the essential principle that Indian entities should not engage in business with a corporation refusing to appear in an Indian criminal case. Some of these dealings have reportedly taken place despite explicit court restrictions.

Rachna Dhingra of the Bhopal Group for Information and Action offered a blunt explanation of what this entanglement means. “Public Sector Undertakings have had a major role in boosting Dow Chemical’s business in the last eleven years in India. PSUs such as Indian Oil Corporation Limited, GAIL, BPCL, HPCL, and ONGC provide raw material for Dow’s manufacturing facilities. Many of these also purchase Union Carbide’s intellectual properties from Dow Chemical, which is forbidden under criminal law,” she said.

Habib, a 70-year-old from Arif Nagar, leaned heavily on his walking stick as the march paused near Sindhi Colony. “My wife died the first night,” he said. “But it took me years to understand that the real killing is done in files, in signatures, in deals. They betrayed us with gas, and now they betray us with development.”

A Political History of Protection: The BJP’s Long Shadow At a press conference that followed the rally, survivor groups presented an extensive “chargesheet” tracing what they called the BJP’s four-decade-long record of shielding Union Carbide and, later, Dow Chemical. They argued that beginning as early as 1982—two years before the gas leak—the party had cultivated a relationship with the corporation that persisted across governments.

Their accusations ranged from the small but consequential to the actively obstructionist. They cited an incident from 1982 in which BJP leader Babulal Gaur, who would later become Minister for Gas Relief, allegedly intervened to ensure that complaints about cattle deaths from toxic effluents in Union Carbide’s ponds were quietly settled and never formally registered.

They recalled how, in 2002, the CBI—acting, they said, on instructions from the then Home Minister L. K. Advani—filed an application to dilute charges against Warren Anderson and Union Carbide Corporation from culpable homicide to negligence.

In 2006, they said, the BJP’s national general secretary issued a legal opinion claiming Dow Chemical could not be held liable for the Bhopal disaster. Between 2006 and 2007, the party accepted a donation from Dow Chemical before returning it in 2008, after public objection.

From 2008 onward, the accusations intensified. Survivor groups said former Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan blocked efforts to establish an Empowered Commission for long-term medical and economic rehabilitation, and later reneged on his promise to set up an expert panel on environmental damage. They pointed to documents showing that Chouhan’s government failed to revise survivor death and injury figures in the Curative Petition before the Supreme Court, weakening the case for additional compensation.

They described how in 2015, the BJP government rejected the United Nations Environment Programme’s offer to conduct a scientific assessment of contamination around the abandoned factory; how Prime Minister Narendra Modi hosted a special dinner that same year for Dow’s CEO despite the company ignoring court summons; and how, in 2019, Gas Relief Minister Vishwas Sarang attempted to divert ₹135 crore allocated for survivor rehabilitation to infrastructure projects in his constituency.

Campaigners also highlighted the persistent denial of pensions to hundreds of widows, the purchase of a Union Carbide product (UNIPOL-PE) by Indian Oil in 2024 despite a court order, and the long-term failure—across 2004 to 2025—to implement recommendations of the Supreme Court Monitoring Committee on healthcare for gas victims.

Namdeo, one of the rally’s organisers, summarised the sentiment. “For forty-one years, governments have changed, but the pattern has not,” he said. “When it comes to Bhopal, the BJP has consistently chosen Dow over survivors.”

RTI Findings: A System Designed to Fail

The charges were not merely rhetorical. Survivor organisations backed them with a trove of RTI findings documenting where the State had failed its citizens—or, worse, abandoned them.

In 2010, ₹272.75 crore was sanctioned for medical and social rehabilitation. RTI records show more than half remains unspent. The money that was used resulted in upgrades that survivors describe as superficial: modular operation theatres that haven’t conducted a major surgery in three years; oxygen pipelines installed in hospitals without ICUs; diagnostic machines worth crores lying idle because technicians were never appointed.

Sitting in the corridor of a gas-relief hospital, her medical file pressed to her chest, Shakuntala pointed to a locked sonography room. “The machines are there. They look shiny in photographs,” she said. “But it’s like being shown food when you’re hungry and told you’re lucky to see it.”

Social rehabilitation has fared no better. RTIs reveal that seven yoga centres built for survivors employ no yoga therapists. Some of these centres now double as wedding venues. In Widow Colony, ₹5 crore sanctioned for drainage repairs a decade ago has produced nothing but stagnant sewage during every monsoon.

Economic rehabilitation, too, has collapsed. Survivor groups used RTI applications to inspect training records from the ₹18 crore vocational training programme run between 2011 and 2013. They found that a quarter of the trainees were fictitious, more than half the job-offer letters were forged, and 94 percent of payments to training agencies were fraudulent.

Soni, who underwent one such training course, held up her certificate inside her small JP Nagar home. “I got a piece of paper,” she said softly. “And they got crores. My daughter still asks when the job they promised will come. I don’t know how to tell her.”

Silence, Then a Hint of a Rebuttal

When Karvaan India contacted the BJP office in Bhopal for a response to the allegations, officials declined to comment. They said the party would issue a formal rebuttal soon.

The Rally’s End—And the Weight of an Unending Past

By late in the day , the rally reached JP Nagar. The effigy of Dow Chemical was set alight, flames curling upward against the grey sky. Survivors watched in silence—some in anger, some simply exhausted. In the distance, the rusting carcass of the Union Carbide factory loomed unchanged, a monument to the world’s worst industrial disaster and to the impunity that followed.

As the crowd thinned, Amaan, an 18-year-old whose grandparents were survivors, walked away slowly with his younger sister. “People tell me tragedies fade,” he said. “But we still breathe the past. We drink it. We live inside it. Nothing fades here.”

Forty-one years after the night that changed India, Bhopal remains defined not just by a toxic leak, but by toxic governance. For those whose lungs have never healed, whose water remains poisoned, and whose children inherit their illnesses, justice continues to be an act of endurance—marched each year from Bharat Talkies underbridge to JP Nagar, carried forward by the living because the dead cannot.