While the world is still mopping up the spill caused by the explosion at the oil rig off the coast of Mexico and debating how best justice is meted out, a local court in a central Indian state has sentenced perpetrators of the world's worst industrial disaster - after more than 25 years.
In December 1984, inhabitants of Bhopal, in Madhya Pradesh, woke up to a lethal air poisoned with methyl isocyanate, which leaked from a nearby pesticide plant.
It claimed 4,000 lives, although estimates based on hospital and rehabilitation records show that about 20,000 people died and more than 600,000 suffered bodily damage.
Union Carbide chairman Warren Anderson was allowed to fly back to the US, never to return, after spending just three hours in detention.
The two-year sentence delivered last week excluded Anderson, but implicated seven Indian executives from Union Carbide India Limited (UCIL), as the company is known at present.
They were immediately granted bail, while Anderson was declared to have absconded after the court issued warrants for his arrest and extradition.
While the paltry sentence and the delay is a travesty of justice, what is most disturbing is the contempt with which the victims were treated.
Poisoning the unsuspecting populace demands more stringent punishment, more in line with the decades in jail serious criminals may expect.
It has always galled me that when the prices of commodities have risen very sharply in India due to inflation, the fines for criminal offences on the other hand, have remained unaffected.
Recently, a former Director General of Police from the state of Haryana, charged with sexually molesting a teenager and abetting her suicide, was fined just Rs1,000 (BD8) and jailed for six months.
The Bhopal sentences, albeit after a quarter of a century, amounted to some show of justice, is an insult to those who perished and those who lost loved ones.
The truth is there has been no justice granted to those who survived maimed, blinded and paralysed for life.
No court of justice and no country that calls itself a democracy can consider big corporate houses as above the law and deny its own citizens the justice they are rightfully due.
The victims of the Bhopal gas tragedy have received an average of Rs12,410 (BD100) each as compensation.
Many of the victims continue to live wretched existences in slums adjoining the walls of the dilapidated factory grounds waiting for promised compensation payments.
Moreover, they should be given access to free healthcare for the various nervous and malignant diseases they have developed since the disaster.
Those responsible for industrial accidents should be tried with the same amount of media attention, immediacy and strict procedure of law as war criminals and dictators.
¥ Ms Gnana is a former Bahrain resident now studying in Mumbai
Copyright 2010 Al Hilal Publishing and Marketing Group
'A travesty of justice', Gulf Daily News, June 18, 2010, Jennifer Gnana
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