24361595

Indian Media and the Struggle for Justice in Bhopal
Author(s): Shalini Sharma

Source: Social Justice, Vol. 41, No. 1/2 (135-136), Special Issue: Bhopal and After: The
Chemical Industry as Toxic Capitalism (2014), pp. 146-168
Published by: Social Justice/Global Options
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/24361595
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Indian Media and the Struggle for
Justice in Bhopal
Shalini Sharma*
HREE DECADES AFTER THE 1984 GAS LEAK FROM THE PESTICIDE PLANT OF US
multinational giant Union Carbide Corporation (UCC) in Bhopal that
JL killed over 8,000 people and left more than 150,000 severely injured
(Amnesty International 2004), the Bhopal saga has become far more complex. It
now comprises difficult and overlapping histories of multiple ongoing disasters:
the second-generation effects, shoddy rehabilitation, a contaminated factory site,
groundwater contamination, a long and tricky legal history with Dow Chemicals,
the owner of UCC since 2001, and an ever elusive justice.
Both the discursive climate in which the Bhopal disaster unfolded over the last
30 years and a rapidly shifting Indian mediascape were shaped by the trajectories
of India's political and economic policies, which in turn were tied to the world
polity/economy. In that period, the Indian mediascape emerged from the context of a
national movement for independence (Ghosh 1998) and was gradually transformed
into a vehicle of capitalist modernity (Kohli 2003; Jeffery 2000). Meanwhile, the
survivors' movement became transnational and positioned Bhopal as a powerful
example of corporate violence (Zavestosky 2009).
In postindependence India, the gradual shift from state-owned to corporate media
evokes serious questions about the coverage of critical public issues. Although the
subject remains understudied in India, the market's impact on Western media coverage
is well reported. Specifically, I refer to news selection and coverage based on market
considerations (McChesney 1999; Croteau and Hoynes 2003), the promotion of
sensationalism, drama, and dominant hegemonic interests that maintain the status
quo (Gitlin 1980; Carroll and Hackett 2006), and the propaganda role of corporate
media in manufacturing consent (Chomsky and Herman 1994). How did the media
respond to Bhopal? Although the alternative (specialized or minority) media, such
as the Economic and Political Weekly, provided reasonably critical and consistent
coverage of Bhopal over the years, the mainstream (corporate) media coverage has
been vital in building the public perception and memory of the disaster.
This article focuses on how movement actors (survivors and activists) interpreted
the mass media discourse on Bhopal. They experienced it through four time frames
that involved different "mediascapes," especially in terms of its limitations and
challenges. Within Marxist analyses, the political economy of media (focusing on
* Shalini Sharma coordinates the Remember Bhopal Trust and currently teaches at the Tata Institute
of Social Sciences (Guwahati).
146 Social Justice Vol. 41, Nos. 1-2
Indian Media and the Struggle for Justice in Bhopal 147
ownership and economic control) is a determining factor in shaping media discourse

(Golding and Murdock 1997; Chomsky and Herman 1994; Parenti 1992). In the
Gramscian approach, however, the cultural role of media is pertinent in influencing
public consciousness and maintaining ideological hegemony as common sense
(Hall et al. 1978; Gitlin 1979). Political economists argue that the dominant class
determines the nature and power of media messages, but in Gramscian terms there
is a dynamic alliance of social classes (see Gramsci 1971), instead of a single
dominant class. Media, therefore, becomes a site of competition between different
social classes; the dominant class tries to set the discourse to suit its terms/interests
and the dominated classes attempt to advance their truth claims. The analysis in this
article combines the two perspectives. By focusing on how the dominated/subordinate
class (in this instance, movement actors) experiences media discourse, this article
reveals the constraints they face and have faced while interacting with a mainstream
media that is aligned with the ruling elites. I argue that media representation and
contestation of the Bhopal conflict are intimately connected with its legal trajectory,
demonstrating the influential and intersecting relations between politics, business,
law, and media within a highly unequal global economy.
Because audiences react and respond to media narratives that have meanings
for them in particular contexts (Silverstone 1994; Bird 2003), media reception here
is explored by probing the processual and contextual dimensions (Dahlgren 2006)
of "interpretive communities" (Fish 1980) of activists. The everyday experience
of media reportage, the meaning-making process that forms the ongoing content
analysis within the activist community, as well as an understanding of the context
are captured through ethnographic discourse analysis using interviews, participant
observation, and newspaper archives to grasp general trends in media discourse.
When Bhopal Wasn't News: 1970 to 1984
Before the 1984 MIC (methyl isocyanate) gas leak, there is a glaring absence of
significant media coverage of workers' complaints about mismanagement and
frequent accidents in UCC's Bhopal factory that could have alerted the local
public. Media coverage before the gas disaster occurred mainly due to the efforts of
Carbide workers to reach out to local journalists and to politically influential people
with inside information on the health and environmental hazards at the factory.
But their concerns were reported only in smaller, independent newspapers such
as the Rapat Weekly, primarily due to the persistence of journalists like Rajkumar
Keswani (1982a; 1982b; 2011). The bigger newspapers remained indifferent to the
issue, as shown by their failure to cover the workers' complaints. In the absence
of substantial coverage that could have lent visibility and credibility to workers'
complaints, their efforts to raise awareness and solicit support from the surrounding
communities did not succeed.
This lack of media interest in an important story was due in part to the close
relationships between the local media, factory management, and the state government.
148 Shalini Sharma
In addition, the media did not imagine that an industrial disaster could ever occur
at a plant set up by what was then the world's largest chemical corporation. The
media's unpreparedness to deal critically with UCC (and later with the disaster's
aftermaths) dates back to the Nehruvian era. For the Green revolution to succeed,
the Indian government became dependent on foreign companies such as UCC to
provide specialized technology. Consequently, it adopted a soft attitude toward
them. Essential elements of the Indian state's project of agricultural modernization
and industrialization (Sen 1989) were the development of the media (Schrammer
1979) and of specialized scientific and technical education. The state also maintained
control over science and technical policy and research by creating state-funded elite
institutions such as the Indian Institution of Technology or the Council of Scientific
and Industrial Research (CSIR). That system was instituted during Nehru's time,
ostensibly in the name of developing scientific expertise and a scientific attitude
in the public. The Indian print media, with its genesis in the freedom movement,
assisted in the government's task of nation-building and development. But the
National Emergency (1975-1977), when the government suspended all civil liberties
and imposed severe media censorship, severed the alliance between the state and
print media even though the broadcasting media available then—the All India
Radio (AIR) and Doordarshan (DD) television channel—were state controlled. The
print media, radicalized by the experience of the Emergency, developed its role
as a watchdog (Karkhanis 1981) orientated toward human-interest stories (Joseph
2008), but it could not fully give up its uncritical acceptance of the Indian state's
idea of the "national interest" (ibid).
The Bhopal plant was the first industry to be set up in the agrarian state of
Madhya Pradesh. Therefore, it was the first close experience with a complex
business enterprise for the public, including journalists. Government officials were
known to stay at the UCC's luxury guesthouse in Bhopal and local journalists were
too close to the company to allow a critical outlook. Senior journalist N.K. Singh
(2011), who then reported for the Indian Express, recalled the "cozy relationship"
between factory management and journalists before the disaster. The two often
played cricket matches together and "looked upon [UCC] as a model US company
which is providing jobs to people and following good management practices" (ibid).
Due to this reputation, it was difficult to imagine that UCC could be deliberately
negligent. In desperation, Keswani (1982c) wrote to the chief minister of Madhya
Pradesh about the "death threats to the city by Union Carbide," yet no action
was taken. His fears of Bhopal turning into "Hitler's gas chamber" came true on
midnight, December 2,1984.
Media Coverage during Pre-Satellite TV Era: 1984-1989
The unprecedented nature of the 1984 gas leak affected the existing dynamic
between the local media, the government, and UCC. The Indian government and
UCC responded by controlling information that could have harmed their political
and business interests. UCC maintained an absolute monopoly over information

on MIC toxicity, and the Indian government controlled information on disaster
related death counts and casualties (see Jones 1988; Dembo et al. 1990). During
this time, India's only available broadcasting media—AIR and DD—were state
controlled and were used to promote the government's relief activities. For example,
telecast live on DD was the government's "Operation Faith" project, which aimed
to neutralize the remaining gas in the factory. The relatively free print journalists
initiated investigations that were motivated by a need to understand the disaster
for themselves and others. Of course, such a big story with global implications
could not be suppressed. Thus, the magnitude of the disaster (and its international
dimensions) brought unprecedented national and international media attention to
Bhopal. The result was detailed coverage of the immediate situation, such as death
counts, relief and rehabilitation efforts, spontaneous public protests, and high-profile
visitors such as UCC's then CEO Warren Anderson, politicians like the newly
appointed Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, and social workers like Mother Teresa.
The Indian print media, similar to the Western media that relied on experts and
institutional actors as legitimate sources of facts (Ryan 1991; Chomsky and Herman
1994), sourced information mainly from the UCC and state officials, local doctors,
lawyers, scientists, and other experts. But because of the state of perpetual chaos
and rumors, the media and its sources relied on UCC for information. UCC's control
over and strategic disclosure of information allowed the corporation to backtrack
often on its own statements or to provide misleading information (see Dembo et
al. 1990; Jones 1988). Despite these constraints, Indian journalists investigated
UCC's international operations, particularly with reference to double standards
in Third World countries such as Indonesia. Often, their information came from
international news outlets (see, for example, TOI 1985a).
By January 1985, individuals and voluntary groups organized themselves into
two activist groups—Bhopal Gas Peedit Sangharsh Morcha (or, Morcha) and
Nagarik Punarvas Raahat Committee. According to Morcha leader Alok Pratap
(2011), the protest led by these mass organizations, focusing on the immediate
health care and rehabilitation needs of the victims, attracted mass participation
and resulted in media coverage that was critical of the state; protest-led coverage
presented the disaster as a joint responsibility of the Indian government and UCC.
However, at that stage middle-class activists, mostly outsiders from other cities
of India who arrived in Bhopal to take part in relief activities, led the movement.
With their education, technical expertise, and language proficiency, they became
important media sources, but they also struggled to cultivate trusted relationships
with local journalists. Internal disputes between these organizations also represented
discouraging factors for the media.
Newspaper coverage started to dwindle by mid-December 1985. As a result,
newspapers tucked away some very important events within a paragraph or two, or
coverage was devoid of analysis or observations of the reasons for, or implications
150 Shalini Sharma
of, such an action (see TOI 1985b). For example, there were signs of possible state
corporate collusion, such as the winding up of the N.K. Singh Commission, which
the government set up to probe into the disaster. For the rest of the year, coverage
was concentrated mainly on legal issues: the American lawyers, "ambulance chasers"
pursuing survivors to file independent suits against UCC in US courts to reap hefty
commissions; the 1985 Bhopal Act, which made the Indian government the legal
representative of the victims, ostensibly to protect survivors against exploitation by
American lawyers; and, finally, the US court case filed in 1985 that charged UCC
with civil and criminal responsibility for the disaster. Early in the following year,
the media coverage remained centered around the 1985 court case and the ensuing
debate over the appropriate forum for the case. Would it be US or Indian courts?
Would Carbide be allowed to sell its assets in India? (See TOI 1986.)
Public relations and media management were integral to the media strategy
of UCC and the Indian government. Soon after the disaster, UCC hired Burston
Martesellor, a public relations firm (Ravindran 2002). The Indian government also
carefully monitored the media coverage in India and the United States, primarily
to protect its public standing, knowing that the Indian media picks up reports from
US publications. Because the broadcast media was state controlled, the Indian
government's main concern was print media. Indian newspapers continued to report
on the court case in the United States and provided opinions from a range of legal
experts, but they were compelled to rely on state sources for the government's
understanding of UCC's legal strategy and for information on the government's
legal approach. Meanwhile, UCC aggressively promoted the "sabotage theory,"
which was a joint product of its PR firm and legal departments, to shift blame for
the disaster to an unidentified disgruntled factory worker (see Jones 1988; Dembo
et al. 1990). For this purpose, UCC employed all means and media. It used scientific
conferences, technical reports, and in 1987 even produced and widely disseminated
a documentary film, Unraveling the Tragedy at Bhopal. In the US courts, UCC
successfully argued for forum non conveniens to send the case back to India. Media
discourse on the legal struggle, influenced by the Indian government's strategic
interventions, was framed as "us" versus "them." The Indian media's day-to-day
coverage was reactionary rather than independent, in-depth analysis that could
have revealed shifts in the legal strategies of UCC and the Indian government.
The justice and relief issues in Bhopal were intricately tied to the scientific and
technical aspects of the disaster. The Indian media lacked the expertise required
to understand these aspects of the disaster. Moreover, in the absence of advanced
communications technologies, quick information gathering and consultation was
difficult. Consequently, the media could not independently process the complex
information emerging from different state and nonstate sources based locally and
internationally. The case of the sodium thiosulphate/cyanide controversy and
misinformation on MIC toxicity provides a powerful example for understanding
the implications of the media's reliance on official sources for specialized (scientific
and technical) discourse (for details, see Dembo et al. 1990; Varma and Mulay
2009). UCC itself initially recommended sodium thiosulphate as an antidote to
cyanide poisoning, but later backtracked when it realized that the effectiveness of
this antidote would establish the gas leak as a case of cyanide poisoning (which
was well known for its long-term and intergenerational effects), instead of MIC
poisoning. This resulted in confusion over the agent that was killing people (MIC,
phosgene, or hydrogen cyanide poisoning). When a person died after a German
doctor injected him with sodium thiosulphate, the MP state government acted
self-defensively and banned its use instead of initiating a scientific investigation.
This complimented UCC's damage limitation strategy. The media dismissed the
possibility of cyanide poisoning, with its implied intergenerational effects, as
allegations or fears stemming from activists in a climate of rumors related to the
nature of poisoning (Pratap 2011). Within its routine reportage of the disaster, the
media covered the state crackdown on activists, who continued to provide sodium
thiosulphate to victims. Yet it did not probe more deeply into activist claims that
indicated a deliberate cover-up of the disaster's health impacts. In the following
years, when the death count continued to rise and intergenerational birth effects
became evident, the full implications of these actions were realized. An early
opportunity to save lives, determine a cause-based treatment, and force UCC to
compensate survivors appropriately for their lifelong injuries was lost.
After the state crackdown, the movement splintered in several directions,
evoking negative reactions from media. For example, a special feature report
appeared in India Today (1987) magazine, which wrote that the "Bhopal Tragedy
was turning [into] a bonanza for fly-by-night operators, doctors, lawyers, self
styled social workers—everyone other than the victims of the tragedy." Left
alone, the survivors started their own organizations such as Bhopal Gas Peedit
Mahila Udyog Sangathan (BGPMUS/Bhopal Gas Affected Women's Union, led
by women survivors) and the Bhopal Gas Affected Women Workers' Stationary
Union (or, the Stationary Union). Some outside activists remained in Bhopal and
later started their own groups. One of them, the Bhopal Group for Information and
Action (BGIA), took to citizen journalism to counter state-corporate information.
These organizations kept the issue of Bhopal alive in the public memory primarily
through public agitation and actions on the anniversary of the gas leak. Since the
media is embedded in a patriarchal society that ignored women's leadership and
their voice, BGPMUS opted for mixed membership in its core leadership and later
became a mass organization (see Scandrett et al. 2009), while the Stationary Union
retained women as leaders, but opted for strategic alliances with groups such as
the BGIA, with whom it formed the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal
(ICJB) in late 1990s.
After the 1984 leak, the coverage peaked in 1989, when the Supreme Court
approved out-of-court settlement was announced. The settlement evoked angry
reactions from the survivors and the general public. Media coverage revolved
152 Shalini Sharma
around these reactions, parliamentary debates, and analysis of the implications of

the settlement terms regarding civil and criminal liabilities. Reactions of the judges
and lawyers were covered, fuelling such a public debate that the Supreme Court
responded by asking the legal fraternity to exercise restraint and to refrain from
pressuring the Court through public opinion. Newspaper reports pointed to these
reactions as an indication of collusion between the government and the corporation,
terming the settlement "premature, meager," a "sellout," and a "betrayal" of the
victims (for example, TOI 1990). However, there was no effort to investigate the
circumstances and/or forces responsible for the settlement, beyond stating the
obvious facts that the settlement was negotiated in secret and excluded the victims.
In contrast, due to the relative advantage of available time and space for analysis,
news magazines such as Frontline provided special reports that examined the
settlement in detail, especially its terms and implications (see Frontline 1989).
Despite the angry outbursts from the public against the 1989 settlement, the state
and UCC perceived the Bhopal matter to be more or less closed. These five years
set a pattern for media responses to Bhopal that would continue over the next three
decades. Media reporting was sporadic, reactive, lacked context, reported events
rather than processes, relied on government sources despite signs of collusion with
UCC, and depended on survivors for protest-centric coverage.
Media Routinization of Bhopal in a

"Revolutionized" Indian Mediascape: 1990-2000
From 1990, due to liberalization policies and advances in communication

technologies, the Indian mediascape began to change drastically with the Indian
newspaper revolution (Jeffery 2000), the cable and satellite revolution, and the
subsequent rise of television (Mehta 2008), which took place in quick succession.
The state monopoly over television was broken, but it retained control over radio
by barring FM channels from broadcasting news and current affairs. Globalization
and economic liberalization led to the "murdochization" of the Indian media (see
Sonwalkar 2002; Thussu 2007) alongside increased news commodification and
marginalization (Gupta 2005; Thussu 1998; Rao 2009). Furthermore, the middle
class—the main beneficiary and source of support for the Indian state's liberalization
policies—emerged as the media's primary audience (Fernandes 2006; Fernandes and
Hellar 2006; Batabyal 2010,2012), as well as its primary producers (workforce),
since the media industry tended to recruit from within the elite educational and
training institutes.
The national media's post-disaster coverage of Bhopal was either routine
(revolving around health issues), ritualistic anniversary journalism, or episodic
(marking some main event or new legal development). By now the local media
had a dedicated journalist, often the health-beat reporter, to cover all issues related
to the disaster or had a "Bhopal beat" under which issues related to compensation,
health, relief, and rehabilitation efforts were routinely filed by different journalists.
The environmental and political dimensions of the Bhopal story required concrete
evidence that was difficult to get given the information control and censorship by the
state and UCC. Therefore, routine reportage in the local media relied upon hospitals
and courts for easy access to news. This is unsurprising since news beats primarily
remain state centered, focusing on official sources (Gamson and Wolfsfeld 1993).
Hence, the media could not access the necessary scientific and technical
information or it could not understand the material it received due to a lack of
specialization, training, and experience on developmental issues among practicing
journalists (see Bhattacharjee 1972; Acharya and Noronha 2010). This limited the
media's ability to present scientific and technical issues to the public. It could not
imagine the disaster as an event with consequences that might unfold over a long
period of time. Thus, in some media stories journalists failed to correctly report a
scientific exercise carried out by activists. For instance, when BGIA activists fell
from an air balloon while collecting samples in and around the Carbide factory,
the story was covered as a safety issue regarding activists rather than exploring
why they were doing what they were doing. This prompted questions in Parliament
over the security of the factory premises (Sarangi 2011) and provided a rationale
for curbing popular attempts to collect scientific data.
In the aftermath of the 1984 gas disaster, a new bureaucratic system was
introduced into the city that required an informed and educated response from
the public (and the media) despite an environment of misinformation, lack of
information, and confusion. People were unfamiliar with the new setup (for example,
the gas relief and rehabilitation department, compensation claimants' courts, etc.)
and its requirements of proofs, documentation, etc. Similarly, the media lacked
the expertise to "cope with the bureaucracy" and provide a nuanced analysis by
connecting "corporate business, structures, places far away from India," explained
BGIA/ICJB activist Satinath Sarangi (2011). The influence of corporatization of
the media on news coverage is also visible in its trivialization of important legal
developments. In 1989, the Times of India was overhauled to boost its readership
and keep market interest as the primary concern in its decision-making (Kohli
2003). When the Indian Supreme Court reduced the charges against UCC in 1991
to culpable homicide, the Times of India published a legal timeline sourced to the
Press Trust of India (PTI) under its classified advertisement section (TOI 1991,
Classified Ad 7). This was a drastic shift from the 1980s, when lengthy reports were
published on the disaster and the progress of compensation and rehabilitation issues.
Although most of the media coverage revolved around court decisions as
predicted by media scholars (see Oliver and Maney 2000), legal reporting generally
lacked contextualization and initiative. Journalists lacked legal specialization and
relied on lawyers for quick deconstruction of court proceedings and sound bites.
According to senior journalist Lalit Shashtri (2011), journalists rarely sat through
full court proceedings or proactively followed different court cases. As a result,
only the main outcomes of these cases were reported, not the progress on legal
154 Shalini Sharma
cases over the years or the connections with other ongoing legal cases or their
background, leading to a fragmentation bias in litigation coverage (Haltorn and
McCann 2004). For instance, unlike the 1985 Union of India v. Union Carbide
case, the 1999 Bano v. Union Carbide case filed by several victims of the disaster
failed to receive coverage even though both sought to establish UCC's civic and
criminal responsibility in US courts.
A similar attitude was evident in the coverage of health problems. The media
projected the same diseases and health complaints without noticing or investigating
how diseases develop over time. Coverage remained unanimous in themes and
complaints: insufficient relief work, no improvement in survivors' circumstances,
no change in treatment of victims' symptoms, unknown long-term impact of MIC,
lack of research, casual or random prescribing of drugs, etc. Mismanagement and
corruption in hospitals and government departments were routinely covered over the
years, normalizing the survivors' everyday trauma. Meanwhile, political sensitivity
concerning health issues and state control over information could be gauged from
the fact that the Bhopal gas relief minister at the time called an emergency meeting
in 1999, when a private TV channel aired an interview with a doctor who discussed
the futility of running hospitals, because victims were being treated symptomatically,
and hence were incurable. Newspapers then picked this event (see TOI 1999).
That Bhopal is a political story was largely lost on the media, which could not
grasp and effectively highlight the connections between scientific, legal, and political
matters. Fragmented coverage of these issues was the result (Bennett 1988). For
example, the media reported on the 1991 Supreme Court order that changed the
criminal charges against UCC from homicide to deliberate negligence, on UCC's
subsequent exit from India while returning the factory lease to the state government
without proper cleanup of the site, and on the state-run Indian Council of Medical
Research's (ICMR) sudden announcement of the closure of all research projects on
the Bhopal disaster and its effects. This was primarily routine coverage, with the
"occurrence" of these events reported without venturing into their consequences or
the complex processes leading to these events. Unlike 1984, when the media was
faced with a sudden emergency, now the media should have been more imaginative
in terms of assessing risks and alerting the public about them. For instance, it
could have investigated why UCC's exit was so hasty, especially because disaster
workers had complained of possible environmental pollution caused by the factory.
But groundwater contamination did not emerge as a story in the media until the
late 1990s, when BGIA activists, compelled by signs of similar health complaints
in gas-affected and non-affected communities alike, used a Boston laboratory to
conduct independent tests on soil and water samples. Today, despite the availability
for over a decade of conclusive knowledge of UCC's role in ongoing groundwater
contamination (which predated the gas disaster and is therefore not covered by the
1989 settlement), confusion persists in the media over Dow's liabilities for ongoing
environmental damage.
Similarly, an obvious conflict of interest existed in the appointment of former

justice A .H. Ahmadi as the chairperson of the Bhopal Medical Hospital and Research
Centre (BMHRC), which was set up by selling Carbide's assets in India on the
Supreme Court's instruction. Ahmadi was the head of the bench who in 1996 gave
the order that effectively diluted the criminal charges against UCC. The media failed
to report this conflict until 2010, when public outrage forced Sorabjee to resign
over a June 7 verdict (discussed later) of the Bhopal District Court that was based
on the 1991 order. Public outrage also forced the ICMR to restart research on the
ongoing health disaster in Bhopal.
Meanwhile, following survivors' protests against the 1989 settlement, the
Supreme Court revoked the settlement's removal of criminal liability against UCC
in 1991. The sudden closure of all gas leak related medical research projects by
the state-run ICMR, as well as the state's ongoing denial of any environmental
contamination, strengthened public fears over international pressure on the
government and possible collusion between the Indian state and the US corporation.
These factors, along with the Indian government's failure to provide relief and
justice to survivors, led to new collaboration among activist groups. Activists and
BGPMUS leader Abdul Jabbar (2011) explained that their media work was now
influenced by their previous experiences with media, and "gradually started realising
that it is not enough to just get a story published. What it says and how it says it,
also, what it does not say, is more important."
Activists began to realize that the media's lack of preparedness for disaster
journalism matched the government's own approach to disaster management. Both
were fire-fighting approaches, with little effort at research, or to connect seemingly
different issues or draw from similar experiences elsewhere. Like the government,
the media did not view the disaster as a story that would unfold over generations,
requiring sustained attention and reporting. Activists needed to work strategically
to obtain media and public attention for different aspects of the disasters because
the fire-fighting style of reporting limited the media's understanding of the Bhopal
legal cases—around compensation, health care and monitoring, cleanup, criminal
and civil liabilities —and how these seemingly different issues are all intricately
connected. Knowing that the legal cases against a powerful US multinational like
UCC called for scientific evidence, out of necessity the activists began to learn
the technical languages of science, courtrooms, medicines, bureaucracy, advocacy,
and international organizing.
Organizations such as BGPMUS prompted media coverage through their
legal interventions and direct actions. Yet media coverage began to change with
the success of organizations such as BGIA and Sambhavna Trust in presenting
evidence that contradicted state and UCC claims about the disaster's impacts or
groundwater contamination, and in mobilizing support from international scientific
and environmental groups such as the International Medical Commission in 1994
and Greenpeace in 1999. Through seminars, direct actions, reports, and press
156 Shalini Sharma
conferences on specific problems, the activists began to strategically guide media

attention to specific issues: MIC's long-term effects such as cancer and genetic
and gynecological disorders; shoddy rehabilitation; contamination, cleanup, and
corporate accountability, as well as the relevance of Bhopal as a legal precedent
for the polluter-pays principle. By the late 1990s, signs began to emerge of a strong
movement for corporate accountability that understood the media and enjoyed
media credibility.
Movement-Led Media Coverage in the Era of

Media Convergence: 2001 Onward
As of the year 2000, the entry of foreign direct investment paved the way for
a major expansion and globalization of the Indian media; meanwhile, media
ownership was becoming concentrated in the hands of a few big business families
or media conglomerates (Jeffery 2000). The rise of the Internet and of 24-hour news
channels after the introduction of India's New Economic Policy of 1991 were the
main highlights of this period. It deployed all the gimmickry of a ratings-seeking
television and market-controlled industry, resulting in a hegemonic (middle) class
based articulation (Batabyal 2010,2012). Print media then adopted changes initiated
by television (Kohli 2003; Jeffery 2000). The Internet and mobile phones changed
the definitions of news producers and consumers in the sense that anyone can view,
produce, or disseminate news (Beers 2006; Fenton 2010). Media convergence—in
terms of cross-media ownership and the content flow enabled by digitization and
advanced communications technologies—presented activists with challenges and
opportunities (see Jenkins 2006; Grant and Wilkinson 2009). In this period, the
movement experienced successes and struggles while shaping the Bhopal story
and taking control of the media narrative.
From the late 1990s onward, Bhopal activists began to make strategic
interventions in the framing of issues by understanding the limitations of media and
devising innovative ways to fight media fatigue. From the demands for retributive
justice made by the spontaneous public protests of the early 1980s to the demands
for environmental and social justice with corporate accountability in late 1990s,
the movement had come a long way. Media interest in Bhopal was rekindled with
the UCC-DOW merger in 2001, the transnationalization of the Bhopal movement
in the form of the ICJB, as well as evidence of groundwater contamination and
second-generation impacts of the gas leak, which made opening new legal cases
against Dow possible. Pushed primarily by ICJB activists in strategic alliance with
Dow-affected communities, environmental justice groups, trade unions, and human
rights organizations, they assumed control over information related to science and
the technical dimensions of the Bhopal disaster(s). Besides positioning Bhopal as an
environmental justice/human rights story, ICJB raised issues related to the second
generation through graphic pictures of the affected or of children-led protests. This
was done to shock the media (and the public), as well as to counter state-corporate
denial of the generational impacts of the disaster, although the disability rights
movement has refrained from emphasizing disability.
During the new millennium, the movement has been stronger, more confident,
and aggressive. If it targeted the Indian government for its corruption and failure to
provide survivors with relief and justice, it also targeted Dow's direct interests
its recruitment drives at premier engineering and technical institutes in India, its
corporate social responsibility programs, its new operations, such as R&D projects,
its publicity campaigns, such as "The Human Element," and its high-profile media
events, such as Live Marathons and the Olympics. The controversy over Dow's
bribing of Indian officials to license its Dursban product and protests against Dow's
R&D project in Ranjangaon, Maharashtra, led to media reportage around Dow's
corrupt practices and reminded the public of its Bhopal connection. Alongside the
street activism, the campaign's use of the slogan "No More Bhopals" provided a
powerful rhetorical tool for allies and the media. The ICJB made strategic use of
different skills and resources of survivors and activists in Bhopal and abroad. It also
expanded its media repertoire to the emerging new media of websites and blogs, as
well as to other conventional alternative forms such as posters and wall murals (for
details, see Sharma 2013). Other survivor-led groups with local media credibility,
such as BGPMUS, cite a lack of new media orientation and English-educated
volunteers as the main factors for not using the Internet to their advantage. The
ICJB mastered biopolitics in which the ethical angst of the survivors' protesting
bodies and the media acumen of middle-class activists came together, for instance,
in well-covered protests like die-ins and Padyatra (foot marches) .Activists designed
specific tactics around perceived media biases (Gamson and Woldsfeld 1993; Ryan
1991), which appealed to the Indian middle class and diaspora (and hence to the
media). Through these interventions, the campaign reiterated its demands for an
Empowered National Commission, safe water, and implementation of the polluter
pays principle. Once the protest was over, however, the media tended to return to
its routine business, with no follow-up stories on the demands.
According to Rachna Dhingra (2011), the media never conveyed scientific
and technical issues that had serious political implications—for instance, the
sodium thiosulphate story, the ending of ICMR research, and water contamination
studies—for the people primarily due to the failure of the government's scientific
and technical steps to ameliorate the situation of survivors. Media coverage of these
failures and the need for future action was limited to news of activists' actions, or
responses to those actions, such as court orders or research reports.
The amount of media coverage went up and down in tandem with protest
activities like sit-ins and hunger strikes. To receive mainstream media attention
in India, these well-recognized modes of protest now require several other
embellishments, or what activist/environmental journalist Nityanand Jayaraman
(2011) calls "bells and whistles" in the form of Right to Information (RTI) exposes,
press conferences, and media and parliamentary lobbying. This increased attention
158 Shalini Sharma
did not fully address the problem of the quality of media coverage, because the
media fit these events onto its own "media logic" (see Altheide and Snow 2004).
For that reason, the interest of the national media remained largely episodic. For
Bhopal to become national news other than at its anniversaries, survivors needed to
stage a significant action. Many smaller issues with a great impact on people, such
as dysfunctional hospitals, do not receive national media attention. As survivor
activist Shahid Noor (2011) points out, local media coverage primarily revolves
around "hospitals not functioning, compensation, courts ... basically, anything that
doesn't involve actually going to the bastees [slum neighborhoods] and talking to
people." In these circumstances, activists,freelancers, individual writers, and other
experts have done most of the in-depth work.
The ascent of the New Delhi-centered English-language media to national
dominance was another challenge for activists. They observed that Hindi-language
media focus more on issues of daily life than is the case for the English media. The
need for English-language proficiency and articulation explains why the media,
particularly the national television channels, tend to exclude survivors or limit their
role to providing emotional and reactive sound bites. Noor (2011) pointed to the
absence of survivors on television, where interviews, chat shows, or discussions are
reserved for experts. Highlighting patriarchy within the media, Stationary Union
leaders Rashida Bi (2010) and Champa Devi Shukla (2011) observed how the
media neglected the trade unionism of women survivors, but approached them for
emotional reactions. Similarly, the mainstream media's bias against reporting the
cause of industrial workers continues. For instance, the Stationary Union's ongoing
court case for wage regularization (Bi 2010) and that of Carbide's ex-workers
against UCC do not receive much coverage (Chouhan 2011).
The media have never seriously attempted to get the survivors to speak as thinking
people. More often, victimhood has been the focus, meaning aspects such as "asking
for compensation" or "suffering." Instead of projecting the movement as enjoying
mass support or having mass relevance, the coverage tends to prioritize labels such
as protesters, activists, and victims over social movement or people's movement.
Despite the ICJB's ability to involve survivor groups as primary media agents in
their conflict with media-savvy international organizations such as Greenpeace
(see Mac Sheoin 2012; Gopal 2011), an ongoing challenge has been the issue of
dealing with potentially rift-causing factors such as the media's tendency to create
heroes from within the movement or to play certain movement actors against others.
Some encounters with the media were instructive for the campaign's media
strategy. For instance, a veritable media stampede took place during a 2006 visit by
Hindi film actor Aamir Khan to the Bhopal sit-in camp in New Delhi. Activists had
to physically stop them from trampling over the hunger strikers. That confirmed the
campaign's strategy of generally refraining from involving celebrities in their cause,
unless movement control could be maintained through carefully choreographed
protest designs. In keeping with changes in media technology, the movement's
media strategy became audio-visual and multiplatform (Sharma 2013). Adapting

to a dynamic mediascape was easier than influencing the memory and perception
of Bhopal in a context where the disaster and its politics are constantly unfolding,
and where the movement faces an immensely powerful multinational giant, with
political and business clout and a PR machinery in India and abroad.
Carefully planned direct actions and strategic exposure of evidence gathered
by activists through meticulous scientific and technical investigations shaped the
Bhopal story in the media. On the twentieth anniversary, the media widely reported
the release of an Amnesty International report that identified Bhopal as violation of
human rights by a state and corporate entity. Similarly, in 2007 a series of exposes by
ICJB activists revealed collusion at the top levels of the Indian and US governments,
pushed by Dow Chemicals. Information gathered through the RTI process led to
media coverage that was critical of the Indian state's ongoing soft stance on Dow.
Over the last two decades, India's mainstream media has been recasting the
ideological domination of the state-corporate nexus as hegemony. This became
evident in the manner in which it attempted to influence public perceptions of
Bhopal. Though complicated, Bhopal's history has been presented as a web of
entangled issues, creating a perception that resolving the conflict will be difficult.
Lacking a positive dimension, Bhopal became a negative story. The government's
failure to provide adequate relief and rehabilitation to people was regularly reported
and exposed, but there was an implicit acceptance that the state of affairs was
unchangeable. Instead of investigating Dow's truth claims, the media accepted
carefully crafted propaganda that maintained that Dow and UCC were two distinct
entities, while keeping silent on the distinction between the 1984 gas disaster and
the water contamination that predates it. Moreover, it held the 1989 settlement as
full and final, and confused the situation regarding the liabilities Dow had inherited
from UCC. Thus, there was a perception that obtaining justice in Bhopal is a difficult
objective, and that monetary compensation alone could provide a tangible respite
allowing people to move on.
Given the huge emotional value of Bhopal in India, despite corporate propaganda
Dow does not receive positive coverage in the Indian media. Dow's direct relationship
with the Bhopal conflict is usually underplayed. To do so often highlights means
other than legal ones to resolve it. For instance, on the disaster's twenty-fifth
anniversary, for which Dow hired the Indian PR firm Perfect Relations (Holmes
Report 2011), most media coverage, while substantial and sympathetic toward
the survivors, urged people to move on in the interest of the nation's growth and
development. So far, the media has not critically evaluated the state government's
sudden interest in building a memorial. Local journalists generally believe that
this construction activity is the last disaster-related account left from which to
siphon money. The media has not addressed whether this might also be an attempt
at closure through commemoration, in the name of healing and social catharsis,
160 Shalini Sharma
without giving a concrete offer of justice to the survivors or involving them (similar
to the 1989 out-of-court settlement)Only the movement has constantly challenged
the state's intention and plans.
The media response to the June 7, 2010, order by the Bhopal District Court
is useful for understanding the media-movement dialectic. This order brought
unprecedented media attention to Bhopal since it was the first verdict to pronounce
all eight accused UCC officials guilty, including big industrialists like Mahindra. It
punished them with two years of imprisonment—the maximum punishment allowed
under the charges revised by Ahmadi's Supreme Court bench in 1996. The terms of
the punishment were condemned as "too little, too late" and a "travesty of justice."
These were not the not the only factors fueling public outrage. The timing of the
judgment was also crucial. As it happened, it coincided with the Indo-US nuclear
treaty discussions and the BP oil spill. The Obama administration's double standard
over disasters in Bhopal and the Gulf of Mexico, and its insistence that India pass
the Nuclear Liability Bill, highlighted Bhopal as a failure of the Indian state to
protect its people (see Narain 2010a) and ruptured the state's glorifying accounts
of India's progress and renewed confidence. Also contributing to the outrage was
the new context of 24/7 news channels, which made it difficult for any news to
go unnoticed (see Sardesai 2010). This increased awareness of links between the
environment and health, alongside the emergence of a post-Bhopal generation in
the country that was shocked by the scale of human suffering (see Narain 2010b).
J ay araman (2011) attributed the "bigness" of the story to the tendency of journalists
to weave themes such as "black people in, white people out" and double standards
into a story that matched middle-class interests and popular sentiments, even if it
lost crucial details in the process.
The story also matched the corporate media's reliance on the thematic tensions
generated by drama, conflict, and human interest. Indeed, for the first time since
the 1984 gas disaster, the media undertook original journalism. Its in-depth,
investigative, and sharp analysis uncovered new sources of information, going
beyond the usual suspects (the government and activists) to the pilot who carried
Union Carbide Chairman Warren Anderson to Delhi from Bhopal in 1984 and the
former head of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). Lacking official records
such as press statements, to construct a coherent narrative and find new angles on
the story the media also relied on the memory and experiences of senior journalists
who had reported on the disaster. Unlike the government or activists, they were not
considered to be a vested interest. The coverage in the first 15 days after the Bhopal
court order gave the audience a historical overview of the disaster and its fallout.
The media reflected on its own silence, admitted its role in betraying Bhopal (see,
for example, Dutt 2010), and took up a "crusading role" (Tiwari 2010). Television
broadcasts still took the form of exclusive primetime news, while newspapers,
especially regional ones in Bhopal, launched public campaigns involving polls,
candle-lit marches, and signature campaigns (ibid.). According to the ICJB activist
Dharmesh Shah (2011), this was unprecedented: "Before this, media would campaign
for only those issues that affected the middle class directly, like Jessica [the murder
of a high-profile model in New Delhi] or Mattoo [the rape of a Delhi University
student] or the Uphaar Tragedy [a cinema fire in New Delhi in 1997], but here we
were surprised at this unexpected outrage on an expected decision."
After the first week, coverage concentrated on buck-passing and the constant
shifting of blame between the two main Indian political parties—Congress and the
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)—each of which had led the government at the state
and federal levels. The media scanner settled on demystifying the circumstances
surrounding Warren Anderson's exit from Bhopal in 1985 and the role of Congress
leaders, who led the state and federal governments, in facilitating Anderson's flight
from India. The more immediate question of corporate accountability was sidelined by
the media's obsession with who allowed safe passage to Warren Anderson and why.
In a story like Bhopal, television's format and biases diminish complex facts.
As Satinath Sarangi (2011) explains, this significantly limits its potential in
comparison to print:
The entire problem with the post-June verdict media was that it was
mostly television, and in television you cannot do much more than say
whether it was Rajiv Gandhi or Arjun Singh, BJP or Congress, and things
like that. In the format that we have today in India in national television
media, no other debate was possible because that would beg for much
more intense information.
Although print headlines are almost the same as in television, the coverage is
in-depth. As Jayaraman noted (2011), "the electronic media ... defined the canvas,
and that was very limited, but within that the print [media] did much more than
the electronic media.... Print would actually bring documents and get other people
who said stuff."
Activists faced the challenge of countering the media's framing of the issue and its
tendency to privilege certain issues over others. They tried to direct media attention
to the larger question of the state-corporate nexus and the Indian government's
vulnerability to US pressure. Activists used documents obtained under the Right to
Information Act. Jayaraman (2011) states that after the June 7 media hype around
Bhopal, they realized that they had to be better prepared, since the magnitude of
the coverage and demands from journalists caught them on the back foot.
Faced with public outrage, the government responded by reconstituting the Group
of Ministers on Bhopal (GoM). That body announced an enhanced compensation
package, the government's intention to reopen legal cases against UCC-Dow and
to expedite Anderson's extradition, and to restart research into long-term medical
effects. This gave some respite to the media, which needed tangible outcomes
for its campaign. By late June 2010, just after these government announcements,
media coverage began to dwindle. Since then, the media have not followed up
162 Shalini Sharma
on the criminal and civil curative petitions filed by the Indian government after
the media outrage over the verdict of June 7,2010. Nor has it attended to activist
protests over the inadequacy of this enhanced compensation, or the need for accurate
figures of deaths and injuries, without which the government was bound to lose
its Supreme Court case.
The media forgot about Bhopal until controversy arose concerning the Dow
sponsored London Olympics in 2012. Activists opposed the association of the
Olympics with Dow and demanded an Indian boycott of the games. Indian media
framed the story in terms of "national pride." The Indian and UK governments
resorted to a policy of wait and watch. Statements made by officials reveal the
remarkable similarity of elite narratives to Dow's public stance and the exclusion
of any consideration of survivors' voices and their evidence.2 Those surveyed
were people within the Olympic committee and the UK government, including
the chairperson of the International Olympic Committee (see BBC 2011) and the
British prime minister, who was directly questioned on Indian television about his
position on the ethical implications of Dow's sponsorship of the London games (see
CNN IBN 2012). Though Dow's sponsorship remained intact, it received immense
negative publicity. This was compounded when the whistleblower group Wikileaks
(2012) revealed that Dow had hired the private intelligence firm Stratforto monitor
the activities of Bhopal activists. To find Bhopal newsworthy again, the media now
awaited another big development or the Thirtieth Anniversary.
Although the media supported the Bhopal survivors in their pursuit of justice,
it did not expand its discourse to frame the disaster as corporate violence, to
criticize corporate-led development, or even to talk about the limitations of cash
compensation. The latter addresses neither the survivors' decades-long trauma nor
the issue of future deterrence. Rather, it is tailor-made for sustaining neoliberalism,
which weighs each human life according to its market cost. As Sarangi (2011)
observes, the historical and geographical alienation of Bhopal from "other slow
and silent Bhopals" has been the media's constant response and the movement's
constant challenge.
Conclusion
This article uses four mediascapes to outline a historical overview of dominant media
discourses on Bhopal and activists' responses to this reportage. It reveals that the
state-corporate nexus sought to disremember Bhopal by deliberately manipulating
the factual context of the ongoing disasters, while the media discourse on Bhopal
remained largely within the limits set by state and corporate interests. In Gramscian
terms, to a certain extent the movement learned the media modalities. It took control
of media narratives and shaped media content and stories. Dow's main concern,
however, was to keep Bhopal from developing into a systemic critique of capitalism
and corporations (Wikileaks 2012). For three decades, the mainstream (corporate)
media has attempted to fashion a common-sense public response to nearly every
aspect of the disaster: from remembrance as symbolic/ritualistic commemoration,

cash compensation as the only form of justice, Bhopal as a standalone event (with
no historical precedent or likelihood of recurrence), to a refusal to develop the
notion of corporate/industrial violence as products of corporate modernity and the
modern bureaucratic state.
NOTES
1. For survivors' perspectives on the Bhopal memorial, see the article by Rama Lakshmi
Shalini Sharma in this issue.
2. For instance, activists provided evidence refuting Dow's claims that UCC and Dow are separate
entities. See Moyna (2012) and Sethi (2012).
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Indian Media and the Struggle for Justice in Bhopal

Author(s): Shalini Sharma

146 Social Justice Vol. 41, Nos. 1-2

ownership and economic control) is a determining factor in shaping media discourse

When Bhopal Wasn't News: 1970 to 1984

Media Coverage during Pre-Satellite TV Era: 1984-1989

and business interests. UCC maintained an absolute monopoly over information

around these reactions, parliamentary debates, and analysis of the implications of

Media Routinization of Bhopal in a

From 1990, due to liberalization policies and advances in communication

Similarly, an obvious conflict of interest existed in the appointment of former

conferences on specific problems, the activists began to strategically guide media

Movement-Led Media Coverage in the Era of

media strategy became audio-visual and multiplatform (Sharma 2013). Adapting

aspect of the disaster: from remembrance as symbolic/ritualistic commemoration,

Acharya, K. and F. Noronha, eds.

Carroll, W.K. and R.A. Hac

2012 "The Devil's Advocate." CNN IBN, March 11. At http:l/ibnlive.in.comlshowsl

Croteau, D. and W. Hoynes

Scandrett, E., S. Mukherjee, T. Sen, and D. Shah

2012 Wikileaks' Bhopal files released on February 26. At wikileaks.org.

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