ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to understand the processes that have normalized the pathological and erased the enduring disaster from public notice. It explores why Bhopal has gone from being the potent political issue that it was on December 3, 1984, to a private nonissue, the exact opposite trajectory that many other disasters have traversed. The chapter discusses the factors that have produced and exacerbated vulnerability. On the night of December 2–3, 1984, a gas leak from a factory owned by the Union Carbide Company killed thousands of people in Bhopal, India. The remembered Bhopal disaster is the gas leak from a pesticide factory run by a multinational company, not the day-to-day misery of half a million survivors. In the Bhopal case, the market of pain was formally entered into once the various parties decided to negotiate within the legal system.
