A while ago, sports minister Ajay Maken asked the International Olympic Committee to keep the sentiments of the Bhopal gas tragedy victims in mind and drop Dow Chemicals from the list of sponsors for the next year’s London Olympics.

Dow Chemicals, which in July last year signed an agreement with the IOC, is the company that took over Union Carbide, responsible for the Bhopal gas tragedy that killed over 15,000 people and injured over 5 lakh others in 1984.

A concerned Maken said, “We have asked the IOA to lodge its protest keeping in mind the sentiments of Bhopal gas tragedy victims and the people of this country. The IOA should try that this partnership or sponsorship does not take place.”

While Maken’s concern is sterling, his motive is not. He knows well that it is the wrong door he is knocking at. But then the shrewd politician also knows that a knock is more important than the exactitude of the door itself. More so, since he has a problem at hand: the dead end. 

His senior party colleague and then Madhya Pradesh chief minister Arjun Singh, who ordered that Union Carbide chairman Warren Anderson be released and flown to New Delhi by the state plane, now rests in peace. Similar is the fate of PV Narasimha Rao, then union home minister who not only allowed Anderson a safe passage even before he landed in India but also got him released from the police custody in Bhopal. And that “someone” on whose orders Arjun Singh is said to have ordered Anderson’s release remained “someone” all along. A Nehru family loyalist, Arjun would have done anything to protect his PM.

Who will remind Maken that clarity also begins at home? He needs to knock at the madam’s door. A knock at her door is much more meaningful, and certainly more sensible, than taking up the matter with IOC. He won’t do that.

Dow footing the bill of a temporary decorative wrap over London’s Olympic stadium (as per the terms of partnership) has Maken now in a bad mood. But he was not angry when his own colleagues in the cabinet would not let the company clean up the Bhopal plant when the government had a second chance at saving further loss of human lives.

After Dow acquired Union Carbide in 2001, the ministry of chemicals and fertilisers wanted the company to clean up the plant in 2006. The plant still holds tonnes of toxic materials which have seeped through to contaminate groundwater and the environment, as an official study have established. This contamination is making more people sick every day. The men who didn’t like the idea of Dow cleaning up the plant included then finance minister P Chidambaram, then commerce minister Kamal Nath, plan panel deputy chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia and Congress spokesman and lawyer Abhishek Manu Singhvi among others.

Among other things, Maken has also told IOC that “strong public sentiment exists in this matter”. He is right. That sentiment stems from a sense of outrage that people of this country suffered during one of the darkest hours of Indian democracy. Justice AH Ahmadi, the then CJI who, in 1996, diluted the charges against the Union Carbide executives from “culpable homicide not amounting to murder” that attracts 10 years of imprisonment to “causing death by negligence” that entailed two years of imprisonment, also dismissed a review petition filed against his order on March 10, 1997, a fortnight before he retired. Barring two, all the members of the apex court bench headed by Ahmadi which diluted charges were later elevated to the position of CJI.  

But Maken is clear: he wants the IOC to take note of that “strong public sentiment”. Politicians in India are obviously exempt and free to stoke or scratch or play with that sentiment any time. As flies to the wanton boys….