New Delhi, August 13: For the second consecutive day on Thursday, the BJP tried to pin the government down on the Bhopal gas disaster by raising the issue of then Union Carbide chairman Warren Anderson leaving India. However, it found a tough combatant in Union Home Minister P Chidambaram.
Before Chidambaram could reply to the debate on the issue that began on Wednesday, Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Arun Jaitley sought special permission to intervene. He contested the claim of Arjun Singh, the chief minister of Madhya Pradesh at the time of the tragedy and now member of the Upper House, that then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi did not know about Anderson being released, saying the explanation given by Singh was “doubtful and highly dubious”.
“A farcical impression is being given that then prime minister did not know, that then chief minister did not know (about Anderson being allowed to leave). But how did this curious thing happen? The country is entitled to know,” Jaitley said. He also referred to remarks by former foreign secretary M K Rasgotra that the then government gave a safe passage to Anderson.
However, Chidambaram took the sting out of the attack when he said that instead of asking questions now, Jaitley should have asked them when he was law minister in the NDA regime as at that time some people who could have answered those questions would have been alive.
Chidambaram then went on to reiterate that everyone present in the House was equally culpable in not addressing the disaster and the grievances of the victims in a satisfactory manner.
The Home Minister said the real intention of the BJP was to somehow prove that Rajiv Gandhi was involved in letting Anderson leave, though there was no evidence to back this.
Chidambaram also reiterated that the government did not have the records to show who took the decision to allow Anderson to leave the country, an issue that was later taken up by the CPM’s Sitaram Yechury. “It is a very, very serious point that you have archival records of what happened during British rule but do not have records of what happened 20-25 years ago,” Yechury said.
On allegations that the decision to let Anderson leave was taken under US pressure, Chidambaram said he “has not found any evidence of US pressure on anything that was done or not done in the last 25 years”.
“If there has been a commission, it is our commission. If there has been an omission, it is our omission,” he said.
Chidambaram said the manner in which successive governments had addressed the Bhopal tragedy was “most unsatisfactory” and lamented that the Executive and Legislative had completely “abdicated” their responsibilities and let the judiciary run the show.
——-Agencies