Campaign For Torts # 3

While we mull over the disastrous implications of the Nuclear Civil Liability Bill, BP has agreed to cough up $20 BILLION to compensate victims of the recent oil spill. Our Total Chacha State capped liability for NUCLEAR accidents at $100 million - thereby selling Indian lives cheap. This is a Predatory State. If allowed to continue on its path, this State will totally screw all of us.

In the meantime, there is an excellent article on Bhopal in the Wall Street Journal by Shruti Rajagopalan, now a doctoral student at George Mason University. If you really want to know how this Predatory State screwed the victims of India's biggest industrial disaster so far, read it. She says that scores of American lawyers landed in Bhopal in 1984 to seek clients for a civil tort case. But then:

To "protect" the victims, the Indian Parliament passed the Bhopal Gas Tragedy Act in March 1985. The law handed the Indian government the exclusive right to represent all the claimants.

It is this same Parliament that is trying to pass the Nuclear Civil Liability Bill. "All I wanna say is that they don't really care about us."

Rajagopalan's conclusion is stark. She says:

New Delhi's paternalism, far from protecting the interests of Bhopal victims from sharks, cut those victims off from one of the most promising avenues for seeking compensation in a free-market system.

In this context, the weak criminal sentences against a few employees at the plant are simply the latest in a long string of failures. The people of Bhopal were first betrayed by the employees of UCIL and regulators who allowed this disaster to happen. Then they were victimized by their own government, which has failed to deliver either criminal or civil justice.

We need "free market justice" - via torts. Let no more Bhopals happen. Let this apply to all instances of damage caused by negligence, including especially in the case of nuclear power plants.

Anyway, what's the big deal about nuclear energy anyway? We have a State-owned National Thermal Power Corporation - and we have no power. We have a State-owned National Hydroelectric Power Corporation - and we have no power. What good will a State-owned National Nuclear Power Corporation do? We need to privatise power. We need to privatise everything. Every State-owned entity must be sold.

Good thing is that our Prime Minister, Chacha Manmohan S Gandhi, has completely lost the plot. He is batting on an extremely sticky wicket now. A well orchestrated public campaign for free market Justice - which is Torts - will clean bowl him.