Justice for Bhopal! And No More Bhopals! Three decades of national and international campaigning

• Campaigns resulted from failures by the Indian state and Union Carbide (UC) in responding to the chemical catastrophe at Bhopal.
• One campaign, to obtain justice for the victims, targeted the Indian state and the responsible corporations, UC & Dow.
• Another campaign, to prevent similar chemical catastrophes, targeted the CPI, governments and inter-governmental organisations.
• Both campaigns involve alliance formation, knowledge production, advocacy and political action both nationally and internationally.
• While neither campaign succeeded, the spectre of Bhopal continues to haunt the Indian state and the responsible corporations, UC & Dow.

Dissatisfaction with the responses of the responsible corporation, Union Carbide, and the Indian government to Bhopal resulted in a campaign by national and international NGOs (non-governmental organisations) over the past three decades. While initially the Indian and international campaigns were separate, over time greater international cooperation took place. In the immediate aftermath of the disaster local NGOs prioritised health, justice and rehabilitation issues, while international NGOs used Bhopal to question chemical industry process and environmental safety in their own countries, as well as internationally. Indian NGOs called on international NGO resources to gain legitimacy for their campaign, to use NGOs as proxies and to extend the geographical scope of the campaign, while international NGOs used Bhopal as an example to advance NGOs analyses and policies. Over the period of the campaign, Indian NGOs became more sophisticated in their campaigning. The international campaign has increasingly become an online campaign, involved in an image or reputational war with Dow Chemical, which took over Union Carbide, while the original campaign issues of justice and reparations over the process safety disaster were joined by similar issues related to environmental safety of abandoned toxic waste.