On 1 February 1992, the Chief Judicial Magistrate of Bhopal declared Warren Anderson a fugitive from justice for failing to appear at the hearing of a culpable homicide case.
Mr Anderson was chair and CEO of Union Carbide at the time of the Bhopal disaster in 1984 which had killed thousands. In 1982, auditors had warned of a possible disaster. UCC would maintain that it was an act of sabotage by a rogue worker.
Union Carbide India was not a wholly-owned subsidiary. The US corporation owned just over 50%, with Indian banks and the Indian public owning the balance.
US courts consistently dismissed suits directed to Mr Anderson and UCC. In Mr Anderson’s case, one issue was want of evidence. In UCC’s case, the courts found that UCI was a stand-alone Indian entity and, in effect, that Bhopal was a problem for India’s courts. An arrest warrant issued in 2009 but was not answered.
The event remains a pungent example of the issues of individual and corporate responsibility in a post-colonial world where the corporation and not the individual is the basic economic entity.
One curious outcome of the tragedy and its aftermath has been UCC’s maintenance of a publicly available website detailing its narrative, at www.bhopal.com.
Mr Anderson died in 2014.
Pulitzer Center. Image by Rohit Jain, India, 2018.