A quarter of a century ago, one of India's most respected lawyers made two predictions about the Bhopal case.
“If the suit were filed in India, the judgment would be in the next century,” the late Nani Palkhivala told TIME magazine in December 1984. One year later, in a December 1985 affidavit to the New York district court, his outlook was far less grim: “There is no doubt that the Indian judicial system can fairly and satisfactorily handle the Bhopal litigation.”
His U-turn over a 12-month period is one of the minor ironies of the convoluted litigation surrounding Union Carbide and the Bhopal gas tragedy. Another is that while an Indian advocate — Palkhivala — argued Union Carbide's case for Indian jurisdiction, it was an American legal expert, and American tort lawyers, who pleaded that the victims of Bhopal were more likely to get justice in the stricter American courts.
The Government of India retained Marc Galanter, an American scholar on the Indian legal system, to tell the U.S. court that victims would suffer if the case was pushed to the Indian courts. However, Palkhivala argued that “while delays in the Indian legal system are a fact of judicial life, there is no reason to assume that the Bhopal litigation will be treated in ordinary fashion”.
The New York court accepted his word but with the first criminal verdict in the case this week producing a diluted sentence 25 years after the incident, Palkhivala has been slammed by activists for his statements.
However, an article in the December 24, 1984 edition of TIME magazine article suggests that Palkhivala was arguing against his own knowledge and convictions. The article, titled “The Great Ambulance Chase,” reports on the hordes of American tort lawyers who descended on Bhopal in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, seeking to represent victims in multimillion dollar class action suits in U.S. courts — so that they could claim 30 per cent of the compensation bonanza expected. In order to support its point that Indian courts are notoriously slow, the magazine spoke to Palkhivala, quoting him as “one of India's most respected attorneys.”
His quote to the magazine turned out to be prophetically correct: the Bhopal judgment has indeed come ten years into the new century.
