FIVE PAST MIDNIGHT IN BHOPAL
By DOMINIQUE LAPIERRE and JAVIER MORO
New York: Warner Books, 2002. 403 pages, $25.95

reviewed by David Vinjamuri

The worst industrial accident in history began a few minutes after midnight on December 3, 1984. An explosive chemical leak from the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, created a cloud of toxic gas that swept over the nearby slums and past the train station, killing between sixteen thousand and thirty thousand people in a few hours. (The death toll is uncertain because entire extended families were erased from history, leaving nobody to account for them.) Hospitals were overwhelmed with casualties, while information about the leaked chemicals that might have saved lives was either not known or withheld. Nearly a quarter of a million people were injured. At the subsequent trial, Union Carbide denied responsibility, attributing the accident to worker sabotage. The civil verdict of $475 million against Union Carbide led to its breakup and acquisition by Dow Chemical and Rhone Poulenc. Only a small amount of that money ever reached those most directly affected by the disaster.

Eighteen years later, a best-selling French author returns to tell the story in Five Past Midnight in Bhopal. Why now? Dominique Lapierre argues that the lessons of Bhopal were never learned. Unlike less deadly but more widely covered catastrophes such as Chernobyl and the Exxon Valdez oil spill, Bhopal did not lead to the creation of new safety standards for an industry or generate a large body of commentary. Whereas Chernobyl terrified Europeans from France to Sweden with elevated radiation counts in soil and cow's milk and the Exxon Valdez offered newsworthy images of America's last pristine wilderness disappearing under a sea of sludge, Bhopal was treated as a "third world" issue. Even Union Carbide's defense hinged on this prejudice: their central argument was that Indians had let the plant slip from the lofty level of safety standards set by the plant's original American management team. But as Lapierre deftly shows, the plant's doom was a long time in coming, and similar accidents still happen on a smaller scale all the time. In fact, less than a year after the Bhopal accident, 135 Americans were hospitalized when the same type of gas leaked from a Union Carbide plant in West Virginia.

If Dominique Lapierre has undertaken a difficult task in demonstrating that the Union Carbide disaster was not unique to India, he is uniquely qualified for the job. Lapierre has unimpeachable credentials as an observer of India (he wrote Freedom at Midnight, about Indian independence, and City of Joy, about the post-Partition slums of Calcutta). He also has street credibility in India because he has taken an intimate approach to his life's workliving in the slums of Calcutta for five years while researching City of Joy and then founding a charitable institution to help the inhabitants. He is one of some few Westerners who can write about India without being dismissed by Westerners for being naive or by Indians for being culturally insensitive.

Given this power, Lapierre is remarkably evenhanded in his treatment of the characters and events leading up to the accident. He spent three years in Bhopal with coauthor Javier Moro researching the disaster. He builds his case carefully, and he was able to interview most of the principal actors in the tragedy, from the first Bhopal plant manager, Warren Woomer, to the last, Jagannathan Mukund. The technical aspects of pesticide production are both detailed and easy to follow, and his treatment of the evidence is careful and methodical.

The book follows two story lines. The first traces the history of the plant in Bhopal from the moment a Union Carbide official first conceived of producing the pesticide Sevin in India through the day of the disaster. This story is at once enthralling and banal. The dead of Bhopal were victims of cost cutting and bad forecasting as much as anything more sinister. But Carbide alone was not to blame. Many of the victims lived in illegal slums much too close to the plant. Instead of relocating the slum dwellers, politicians hoping to curry their favor in elections had issued them deeds to their land. The Carbide plant itself should have been relocated, according to local law, but here again lawmakers favored economic interests over the safety of the inhabitants.

The second story line in the book traces the life of one of the inhabitants of the Orya Bustee, a young girl named Padmini. This slum was one of those hardest hit by the accident; Padmini's wedding was on the night of the disaster. Lapierre traces her family's history from their departure from Orissa to their relocation in Bhopal and graphically details life in the bustee from that day through the end of the tragedy. Ironically, it is here that this otherwise strong work falters. The story that Lapierre tells is so powerful that it works best when he relates it without embellishment. His emotional attachment to the displaced villagers who crowd the slums is apparent, and it colors the narrative. This trait was visible in City of Joy, but it is stronger here. Lapierre tends to dramatize what is already tragic, and his use of stale language (describing two young boys as "tousle-haired little rascals") makes reading these sections of the book a chore, in spite of the underlying drama of the story.

Lapierre also remains silent on the more than passing resemblance between Union Carbide's attitude toward India and that of the British at the outset of the colonial period. Both saw themselves as ambassadors of a superior culture, expressed through economics and technology:

This initial benevolence as much as anything else must have sped the Bhopal plant's fall from grace. In the end, the Americans, like the British before them, tried to withdraw from India as quickly as possible. And like the British, they left disaster in their wake. Lapierre misses a perfect opportunity to reflect on India's troubled relationship with the West.

On the balance, however, this is a strong work. If you believe that an accident like Bhopal couldn't happen in the West, you'll be less convinced when you have finished the book. India's bursting infrastructure, dense settlement patterns, and poor emergency response may have magnified the Bhopal disaster, but the seeds of the catastrophe were sown at Union Carbide's headquarters in South Charleston, West Virginia. Inadequate safety measures in the chemical industry may be less riveting than killer plagues as a threat to the American way of life, but they are no less real. Lapierre makes us wonder what might be brewing in the vats of that innocuous industrial building just at the edge of our town, where the woods occasionally smell of boiled cabbage.