The Bhopal gas tragedy verdict continued to roil the political firmament, forcing the Centre to reconstitute a Group of Ministers on Wednesday to go into a “range of issues” on the world’s worst industrial disaster in 1984, including relief and rehabilitation for the victims. Union home minister P. Chidambaram will head the 10-member body.
The GoM under Mr Chidambaram will comprise Union ministers Ghulam Nabi Azad, Jairam Ramesh, S. Jaipal Reddy, M.K. Alagiri and Kamal Nath. The Madhya Pradesh minister in charge of rehabilitation will be part of the GoM.
The decision to reconstitute the GoM came amid a growing uproar as more skeletons tumbled out of how former Union Carbide Corporation chairman Warren Anderson was given bail immediately after his December 1984 arrest. The then CBI chief, meanwhile, rejected claims that the agency was asked not to pursue his extradition.
Bhopal’s then district magistrate Moti Singh told reporters on Wednesday of how he was asked to ensure bail for Mr Anderson hours after his arrest. “They (Anderson and others) came to Bhopal from Mumbai, taken into police custody at n Turn to Page 3
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the airport... then taken to the Union Carbide guesthouse, where they were told they were under arrest.”
Then, he added, at around 2 pm (on December 7, 1984), the chief secretary called the SP and the DM to his office and told them to release Anderson and put him in a plane waiting at the airport to go to Delhi.
“Accordingly, we went to the place where he was lodged. We observed the formalities of granting him bail. A Carbide employee stood surety, and thereafter he was released on bail, taken to the airport and put on a state plane to New Delhi,” Mr Singh said.
In Hyderabad, former CBI director K. Vijayarama Rao rejected claims by former joint director B.R. Lall that the agency was told by the external affairs ministry not to pursue Mr Anderson’s extradition from the US.
The external affairs ministry also refuted Mr Lall’s claim and denied it had any conflict with the CBI as suggested by him. It also said it had not come across any evidence of such a request being sent. It claimed that as late as 2008 it had asked the CBI for more information to pursue the matter of Mr Anderson’s extradition.