1984 is not your ordinary numerical string, people world over may associate it with George Orwell, but for Indians it conjures up the memories of Operation Bluestar and the unfortunate incidents after them. Contentious as the issue might be but being the saffron brigade’s recurring refuge on the Gujarat Riots issue, the matter remains fresh in our memory. But the more tragic (just going by death tolls) incident which needs a court verdict and some public outcry make it to the active consciousness of the generations born after 1984 is the Bhopal Gas tragedy. With the then Arjun Singh(of the OBC quota fame) government facilitating Union Carbide’s chief’s escape from India by providing a state aircraft to him, and successive governments at center never really pushing for an extradition, governmental apathy to the cause could not have been more blatant. While the use and abuse of any issue for political purposes can hardly be justified in any case, but had any party taken up the plight of the sufferers, or had the NGO’s been able to stir up a people’s revolution as they’ve been able to do in some recent cases, the outcome might have been a bit different. But unfortunately dead people can’t vote and even the survivors don’t make up an exploitable vote bank so the issue remained a political non-starter. Media activism which still is in infancy in India was an unknown phenomenon when the fate of the case was sealed in 1996 with Supreme Court intervening to limit the maximum sentence that could have been handed to two years imprisonment. Ultimately the result was that for a catastrophe of unprecedented proportions, only the compensations for which would have, in any country other than India, rendered not only Union Carbide but a dozen more insurance companies bankrupt, the sufferers got only a pittance, but more unfortunately the offenders got away with nothing more than slaps on the wrist.

2010 is the year all of Delhi had been waiting for ever since it was announced in 2002 that Common Wealth Games would be held in the National Capital, and grand plans to transform Delhi into a world-class metropolis were drawn up and postered all over the newspaper as ‘an artist’s impression ’ of myriad infrastructural projects. While we are almost into the second half of 2010, Delhi today is anything but ready to host the mega event scheduled later this year. But just as the Football World Cup, the other hot sporting event of 2010 had started to hog the limelight, Civil Nuclear Liability Bill and its remotely possible overhauling managed to creep into paper spaces. While we as a nation failed miserably to bring justice to our brethren wronged by a foreign company which threw all safety norms to wind for a little larger piece of capitalist profit pie, the least we could have done was to learn from the mistake and make amends and have law in place to deal with Industrial Disasters arising out of negligence and callousness (read Uphaar Tragedy). Far from it the UPA government would have tabled Nuclear Liability Bill in the parliament had there not been protests from corners right and left of it. PM Manmohan Singh had risked his govt. while pushing for the Nuclear Deal with US, termed by many as a project not only close to his heart but also as a tool of redemption to silence his critics for once and all who call him a weak Prime Minister. While the leftist dissent arised mainly out of their traditional aversion to all things American. NDA had demanded parity with a similar American law as to the compensation payable by the defaulting company to the victims which in Case of America’s Nuclear Indemnity Act $10.5 Billion but only $458 Million in the proposed Nuclear Liability Bill of India. That makes an Indian’s life 23 times cheaper than that of an American. And when the companies operating here are going to be the same ones that operate in America, such a disparity is a grave injustice to the taxpayers of India if the exchequer is forced to compensate for the misdeeds of companies. Things look grim even when we haven’t weighed in the fact that a nuclear disaster is going to be multiple times worse than anything fathomable from the Bhopal tragedy.  While India badly needs to become self reliant in energy if it wants to be taken seriously as a superpower, use of imported enriched uranium technology instead of the locally abundant thorium will only make it dependent on NSG (Nuclear Suppliers Group) from its current dependence on OPEC. Thus, continued support to thorium based nuclear tech while plugging energy gap holes with the nuclear co-operation with US is what should be the long term goal of the government, while keeping up the pursuit of sustainable non nuclear energy in the meantime. But none of that should compromise with the lives and livelihoods of people of India, or 2010 could lead us on the path of another 1984.