With more revelations surfacing each day about former Union Carbide Corporation chief Warren Anderson’s release within hours of his arrest after the 1984 gas disaster, senior police officers here point out that the law enforcing authority had buckled under pressure from the top and completely abdicated its responsibility.
Police officers, having a long experience of supervising and inspecting police stations, told this correspondent that entries in the case diary are not changed or altered on an hourly basis. If at all any change is required to be made on the basis of preliminary investigation, it is done either at the end of the day or the next day. A DIG of police level officer, handling law and order in the state capital said one cannot imagine how the police officer in-charge of Hanumanganj police station (the Union Carbide pesticide plant of Bhopal came under this police station) could convert the charge against Mr Anderson from Section 304 IPC to Section 304-A IPC within hours of his arrest and he was released on a personal bond. He had no grounds to conclude within a few hours that the criminal liability for a disaster of such a huge magnitude came under the scope of Section 304-A, which covers culpable homicide not amounting to murder and not 304. In this way the charge against Mr Anderson was diluted in the case diary from culpable homicide to negligence.
Another police officer said it is not just a question of bending the law to release Mr Anderson along with the then chairman of Union Carbide India Limited Keshub Mahindra and the then managing director of UCIL, V.P. Gokhale, soon after their arrest on December 7, 1984 by diluting the charge against them.