Two survivors of the Bhopal gas leak of 1984, Rashida Bee and Champa Devi, have won the 2004 Goldman Environmental Prize for Asia. Almost one year ago, on May 1st, 2003, these two women, plus Satinath Sarangi, a tireless worker for the health of Bhopal survivors, launched a hunger strike in New York City. On the fifth day of the hunger strike, EarthRights International’s Kenny Bruno interviewed Rashida Bee. The following are excerpts from the interview, translated by Nityanand Jayaraman. For more information about the winners of the Prize and the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal, please visit www.bhopal.net.

Excerpts from May 1, 2003 Interview:

Bee: My father used to be a fruit merchant in our village, Sahagpur. But when I was three, his business collapsed. There were seven children, and total of nine people, and all of us had to work to make ends meet. All of us used to roll beedies. [Beedies are hand-rolled cigarettes made from a leaf that grows in central India.] If you rolled 1,000 beedies you got 2 rupees.

At age 7, I started to stay indoors at all times. Until I was 13 I really hadn’t gone out anywhere. If I went out, it was with the burkha. But when I went out I only went about 40 steps to my uncle’s house.

Then I got married [in an arranged marriage] to Dulabai. He was 22, and from Bhopal. We moved to his house in Bhopal. When I was 13, I had a miscarriage, and my husband became very unhappy and went away. For two years I did not know where he was. I was living at the time with my in-laws and I would make beedies in my inlaws’ house. I had to roll beedies, otherwise I wouldn’t get food.

My husband returned after two years. At the age of 18, I had a boy. Three months before the boy was born, Dulabai disappeared again. Before giving birth I was admitted to a hospital, and the doctors advised that I should be taken to a better hospital. But my husband’s older brother, who was there, did not heed the doctor’s advice, so I remained there. The baby was born, but he had pneumonia and five days later the child died.

After that no children. Then I adopted my uncle’s son, who’s name is Elias.

So I went back to my native village. When I returned, I found that things were going very badly over there. All my family was in trouble. The beedie making business wasn’t really working out, wasn’t really bringing in money. I had gone back to my native village with Elias, and I stayed for five years despite all these problems. My father had told Dulabai, who had returned, that if he wanted to stay he should stay with us there, because he kept running away and it made me very worried and anxious. My husband stayed there for one year, and then convinced us all to come to Bhopal where beedies would fetch better prices. This was in 1983.

There in Bhopal, with great difficulty we managed to get by. There were 15 people staying in a room seven feet by eight feet. My brother and sister-in-law would sleep in the small corridor between the latrine and the room. There was a cot, and the dad slept, and everybody slept under the cot.

This was in a neighborhood called Budhwara. [Budhwara is a neighborhood about 3 kilometers from the Union Carbide factory, and downwind of the factory on the night of the gas leak.]

Just as we were trying to make ends meet, this gas was released.

When the gas happened, [translator’s note: residents of Bhopal often refer to the accident as “the gas happened.”] we all ran helter skelter and scattered. After three days, we were just about able to open our eyes. [Methyl isocyanate, the gas in the Bhopal leak, caused blindness and other eye problems for thousands of survivors.] Three days later, five children and two adults from our family were all still missing. We decided to go look for them at the hospital. We looked in the wards, but couldn’t find them. The doctors said we could look for them among the dead. It was very unsightly, because there were bodies everywhere, they were stacked on top of each other. We scanned about 800 – 900 dead bodies but we couldn’t find them.

[Note: About 8,000 people died in the first few days after the leak, and hundreds of thousands were affected. At least 20,000 have died in total, and some 120,000 still require urgent medical care.]

As we were going out, the police said we might not be able to find them, they might be dead somewhere else, you probably lost these people, so why don’t you take 70,000 rupees, 10,000 per missing person.. But we said no, until we find the bodies, we’re not going to take the money. Because they might be roaming around, and we just weren’t prepared to accept that they were dead. The next day we found out that somebody had put them in a truck and they had been taken to a hospital about two hours away, and all of them were alive. But four of them have since died of cancer – brain tumor, throat cancer, stomach cancer and one had TB. All gas affected.

**

After the disaster the government started setting up sheds for employment training. I signed up for training for stationary manufacturing in a government program. They took 50 Muslim women and 50 Hindu women. They gave only three months training. But three months wasn’t enough, so we refused to leave, because we hadn’t learned the trade. They said you have to get out. But we said no and we sat down.

In 1986, we still had no job, we asked an officer [of the job training program] for help. He said he couldn’t help and that we should see the Chief Minister. We said, “What is a Chief Minister?” He said, “He’s this guy who runs the state.” I said I don’t know what that means. Can you give us more clues?” He said there’s a big bungalow over there, just ask anyone for the Chief Minister and they'll be able to point you. So we set off asking for directions for the Chief Minister. We left at 11:00 and we arrived at 3:00. Then we found out he will only meet people in the morning. The next day, we had no money for a bus so we walked back. We left at 5:00 in the morning by 8:00 we arrived. We saw him and we told him our predicament, that we are gas affected people and it is your responsibility to give us a job. He said he would do that. The next day we learned that we would get jobs at a piece rate.

At that time we didn’t know what the implications of piece rate were. We went into work at 9:00 until 5:00, and most days we were not given any work. For two days we were given some work…we did all that and at the end of the month we got six rupees for each person. We said here, you can keep your six rupees, what are we going to do with this? For three months we did not take payment. That’s where our anger began and that’s where our fight began. Then we decided to create a union. A lot of people said come and join us and we will fight for you and we said no. We’re not taking anyone’s help, we will set up on our own.

We started a union of 100 workers, all women. [Translator’s note: Rashida Bee and Champa Devi, another hunger striker who is traveling with Rashida Bee, became the spokeswomen for the workers. They still work in the factory, except when traveling as part of the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal. These two women, one Hindu and one Muslim, are still union leaders today, and are leading the hunger strike to demand cleanup of contaminated water, funding for health care for survivors, and liability for Union Carbide and Dow, the company that purchased Union Carbide.]

In four years, the government made a profit 4 lakhs [400,000 rupees]from our work. That made us angry. We began to learn the tricks of the law. We learned that, according to the State government’s laws, if 20 or more people worked under a roof, then the Factories Act applies, which involves a whole bunch of benefits. Our demand was that the Factories Act should be implemented and that minimum wages should be given. The government was not happy to do that because they said it’s too much money.

In April 1988, we did a 27-day occupation at the factory.

Out of the 90 people doing the occupation, 45 women stayed in Bhopal at the sit-in, while 45 went the Chief Minister’s constituency during the election season and told them that the Chief Minister, who was coming back to be elected, was trampling on these women. The Chief Minister said let’s get these people away.

We won our demands and the Chief Minister at that time, Arjun Singh, actually promised minimum wages would be applied and we would get a wage of 429 rupees monthly.

[I asked Rashida, who spent most of her childhood indoors and was married off at 13, and who now travels the world, appears in newspapers, speaks to audiences of thousands, what her husband and other family members think of her life today.]

Can you believe that now I travel to Japan, to South Africa, to America?…

My children are very proud [of what I am doing]. My husband fully supports me. My father and mother would be proud as well. My uncles have given up on requiring the burkha.