Nuke liability bill to safeguard US interests: Prakash Karat

Maintaining that the Bhopal verdict was of "direct relevance" to the Nuclear Liability Bill, the CPI(M) today said the legislation bore the "handiwork" of US nuclear industrial lobby as it would exempt them from any liability in case of an accident.

   
The bill is "meant to safeguard the interests of the US companies who will supply reactors to India. In the event of a nuclear accident, they are to be exempted from any liability to pay compensation for the damages caused," party general secretary Prakash Karat said.

   
Maintaining that the Bhopal verdict has "a direct relevance" to the nuclear liability bill, he said the bill "bears the handiwork of the US nuclear industry lobby. The manner in which liability is fixed shows a familiar pattern."

   
In an article in the forthcoming issue of party organ 'People's Democracy', he said the Congress-led government "has obliged the US by bringing this shocking piece of legislation which makes it near impossible to hold foreign suppliers of nuclear reactors to account in the case of an accident."

   
"What (US MNCs) Westinghouse and General Electric want is that even the limited liability which accrued to the Union Carbide in case of Bhopal (USD 470 million as per the settlement approved by the Supreme Court) should not fall on them," the CPI(M) leader said.

   
In the United States, the "powerful" oil lobby had got the US Congress to put a cap on the liability of oil firms for damage done by oil spills at $75 million.

   
Now with the havoc caused by the Gulf Coast spill from the BP's drilling platform, "efforts are on to raise the cap to $10 billion or to leave the scope for unlimited liability", Karat said.

   
Reiterating the Left demand for scrapping of the liability bill, he said, "The people will have to pay with their lives or health in the case of a nuclear accident, but the profits of US companies and the corporate sector in India should be protected by limiting their liability."

   
Observing that the compensation on Bhopal gas tragedy paid by the Union Carbide was Rs713 crore or $470 million, he said a nuclear accident may involve casualties on a much larger scale than Bhopal.

   
Under the Nuclear Liability Bill, the maximum compensation to be paid will be Rs2,140 crore, the bulk of which would be paid by the government, Karat said.

   
The truth, he said, was that the 20,000 people who died and thousands of others affected by the 1984 gas disaster "were poor people belonging to the bastis (slums) of Bhopal who were, as far as the ruling classes and their political representatives were concerned, expendable. The judiciary also reflected this class bias".
   
How "eager the Manmohan Singh government is to fulfil its commitment to the US could be seen in the manoeuvres it resorted to, to bring the liability bill in Parliament," Karat said.

   
After being thwarted in the first half of budget session from introducing the Bill in Lok Sabha, the government "had to strike deals" with parties like SP and RJD to get it introduced in the fag end of the budget session, he said.

   
Maintaining that normally such a Bill should have gone to the Standing Committee on Energy, he said the government decided to route it through the Standing Committee on Science and Technology where a Congress MP is the chairman.

   
The CPI(M) leader alleged that there was an effort by the government before the Standing Committee to delete the clause which gives the operator the limited right to recourse against the supplier in the case of a wilful action or gross negligence.    

"The nuclear industrial lobby of the United States has expressed its unhappiness at even this weak clause and wants it deleted," he claimed.

   
Asserting that more Bhopals and Warren Andersons should not recur, he said for this, Dow Chemical which took over Union Carbide should be made to pay all the costs for cleaning up the Bhopal factory site and the environment.

   
"Ironically, the group of ministers set up by the government includes ministers who wanted to absolve Dow of all such responsibility. This will be an acid test of the government’s intentions," Karat said.