Globalization in India

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Lethal Documents: An Anatomy of the Bhopal Crisis

Suroopa Mukherjee

3 December 2001 marked the seventeenth anniversary of the Bhopal Gas Tragedy, a day usually commemorated by a silent procession of victims and voluntary activists marching the streets of Bhopal. The event goes unreported in the national dailies or the ‘Reality Bites’ on television. In a true sense the Bhopal crisis has been contained. Its iconic value is systematically denied so that the very commemorative nature of the event is undermined. By choosing to forget, the victims (they) are rendered useless.

The process of erasure is intricate and inbuilt in systems of disaster management (Vishvanathan 1987, 149). Right from the beginning, the Bhopal crisis was dogged by a lack ...