Writing the disaster: substance activism after Bhopal

Abstract

In 2008, survivors of the 1984 Bhopal Gas Disaster in India undertook a 500-mile march to New Delhi, protesting a long history of governmental neglect of the survivors of the event. This is one episode of a 25-year-old organized international campaign that continues in the present. This article examines the ways in which three bodily substances – blood, hearts and ketones – were produced and circulated through the 2008 protests. Placed within a broader history of substance-politics in the region, this article suggests that these protests produced an imagination of bodily substances that surfaced messy contradictions that became difficult for the Indian State to disregard. This article also shows how these protests distanced themselves from the cynicism attached to similar modes of corporeal activism in the contemporary Indian landscape. In sum, this article traces the production of an activist corporeal counter-discourse that, for at least a time, contaminated the procedures through which the Indian State disregards the health of its marginal citizens.

Keywords:

• South Asia
• substance
• activism
• biopolitics
• Bhopal

Acknowledgement

A special thanks to the members of the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal for the use of their time and resources. Their pathbreaking work can only continue to inspire scholars and activists all over the world.

Notes

^†The title signals a debt to the work of philosopher Blanchot (1986). Blanchot's work helped elucidate for me the relationship between writing and disaster as not simply the process through which something called the disaster is communicated, but also the violence to representation done by the disaster – in how disasters produce their own mediums of communicability and incoherence.

1 After these 2008 protests, the work of these second-generational youth survivors was formally recognized by ICJB through the formation of a new nested organization: Children Against Dow-Carbide.

2 Barthes suggests that a condition of our time is that sarcasm is now a possible condition of truth, a potential tool of critique (1972). That is, Barthes thinks of the linguistic device as a deconstructive mode within language that denaturalizes the normal function of language to naturalize bourgeois ideology. In a similar spirit, the sarcasm suffusing the blood letter and the conceit of the ‘have a heart’ campaign denaturalize the genre of the political petition, playing out within it the fissure between the promise and practice of political responsibility and care.

3 I am borrowing the term necropower from Mbembé, who uses the term to indicate forms of contemporary power that exercise the sovereign right to create zones of abandonment, thus creating conditions of life close to death where the lines between resistance/suicide and sacrifice/redemption are blurred (2003).

4 In popular culture, one may encounter this compound in popular ‘low-carb’ diets such as the Atkins – ketones are what cause weight loss when the body is deprived of carbohydrates.