Step towards Bhopal retrial

Rejoicing will have to wait till the Supreme Court orders retrial of the Bhopal gas tragedy case by invoking the law against ‘culpable homicide not amounting to murder’ which attracts a maximum punishment of 10 years’ imprisonment. Even so, the decision to admit the CBI’s curative petition that seeks to review the apex court’s own verdict in 1996 is no small achievement. This has given rise to hopes that the grave injustice involved in the June 7 verdict of the Bhopal trial court would be undone. For the common man, the full implications of the 1996 verdict that freed the Union Carbide officials from the serious charge became clear only when the Bhopal court sentenced seven of them to two years’ imprisonment. Worse, they were released immediately on bail.

In fact, the trial court had found all the seven officials guilty but it could give them only the maximum punishment prescribed for ‘rash, negligent act’. It is a different matter that it is the kind of punishment violators of traffic laws get in this country. The very thought that Union Carbide officials got away with such light punishment, that too after 25 years, for causing the world’s worst industrial disaster in which thousands of people were killed or maimed militated against one’s sense of justice. Even more shocking was the fact that it was at the instance of the apex court that the more stringent law was dropped against the guilty officials. How truly it is said, “Of all injustice that is the greatest which goes under the name of the law”!

It is not often that curative petitions are upheld by the apex court. In fact, the conditions on which the court ‘reviews’ its own verdict are so exacting that the government and the CBI will have to marshal all the legal acumen at their command to convince the court about the need to restore the Bhopal victim’s faith in the judicial system. After all, the Supreme Court had on three different occasions and under three chief justices examined matters relating to the gas disaster. Once the charges against the seven guilty persons are toughened, there would be greater heat on the then Union Carbide chairman Warren Anderson, who jumped bail and was declared an ‘absconder’. The government stands committed to bring the fugitive to book. As time is of the essence in this case, a quicker hearing, if necessary, by constituting a bench exclusively for the purpose becomes inevitable.