Bhopal gas case: Supreme Court let accused off the hook

Ultimately, the act of criminal negligence by Union Carbide, which claimed 25,000 lives in Bhopal, got reduced to an offence as serious as a road accident. The blame lies partly with a ’96 Supreme Court order.

All the accused shared knowledge of the consequences of the plant’s lethal gas leaking due to safety shortcomings, Altaf Ahmed, the then additional solicitor-general, had submitted before the court. Appearing for the CBI, Altaf had submitted that “ample material was produced” in support of the charges against the accused.

He also told the apex court bench of chief justices AM Ahmadi and SB Majumdar that a scientific and industrial research team probing the incident had pointed out flaws in the plant as the cause of the tragedy.    

Business tycoon Keshub Mahindra, who was sentenced to a two-year jail term on Monday, had moved the apex court saying the session court had wrongly started their trial under section 304-II of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) — culpable homicide not amounting  to murder. It carries a prison term of ten years.

The bench set the tone for its controversial judgment by clarifying in the beginning that the court at this stage was not concerned with the truth or falsity of the allegations levelled by the prosecution. However, it went on to examine the documents that the CBI had produced in support of the charges under section 304-II.

“Our finding is that the material pressed into service by the prosecution does not indicate even prima facie that the accused were guilty of an offence of culpable homicide, and, therefore, section 304-II was out of picture,’’ the court said. The judgment reduced the massive crime into nothing more than a road accident.

The apex court was also reluctant to accept that the accused had committed an offence under section 304-A (causing death by negligence). The mere fact that an accused contravenes certain rules or regulations in doing an act does not establish an offence under Section 304-A, it held.