Jagdish Nema’s still untold story of Bhopal gas tragedy

Tales of human venality often go hand-in-hand with some that reaffirm the inherent goodness of man. So, if on the one hand, the Bhopal gas tragedy is a cautionary tale of unbridled corporate greed and government apathy, on the other hand, it is also is one of the extraordinary courage of a few good men.

None of these is more amazing than that of Jagdish Nema, who cremated hundreds of the unclaimed dead for over four days after the disaster. "We must have cremated 800 adults in four days. Some of the corpses had become so bloated that our fingers would dig into the bodies. There were so many of them that we had to make mass pyres - on one we burnt as many as 127 bodies," remembers Nema.

"After we'd finished burning the bodies we collected all the ashes and remains in sacks - we must have filled 250. When we finished, we looked like labourers in cement mills, covered in white dust. I then persuaded a transporter I knew who had trucks going to Hoshangabad and immersed them in the Narmada there. We hadn't eaten in the four days, so we were ravenous. But none of us had money - we hadn't had the time to go home to get any - so we decided that we would sell the sacks. No one wanted to buy them, but we managed to find a buyer and got Rs 250 and bought food. Even today I joke that it was the dead who looked after us," laughs. Nema.

"The worst were the children. Some of them looked so peaceful and innocent that they seemed to be sleeping. Their eyes were open and I kept telling everyone that we should be careful the mud did not get into them - the dead also deserve respect. In fact, that is my hand that you see in the Raghu Rai photograph, shielding the hand of the child in the grave. I appear in so many of the photographs of the time - in some I am described as the father of the child I am carrying. The media didn't even bother to get the details right. They would tell me to move my hand, to hold the child in this way or that. I would get angry, tell them to go away," says Nema, his eyes even now blazing with emotion.

This is an extraordinary story of those tragic days following the disaster which would have been lost to posterity had it not been for his childhood friend Musharraf Ali, who followed him with his video camera through the four days and nights. Ali, who worked in Oman, was on leave that fateful night of December 2-3, 1984. He'd brought the video camera back with him to film family videos - "It was the only one in Bhopal then," he says with some pride. His father-in-law and step-mother had died from inhaling the noxious gas - later, his pregnant wife had to have an emergency abortion - and Ali was at the burial ground when he heard about what Nema was doing. "There were so many people coming - journalists from America, doctors. I thought it was necessary to keep a record of those extraordinary days, the dead and what Nema was doing," says Ali.

Ironically, however, Ali's footage lay forgotten all this time. "People knew about it and I played it at my medicine shop ever year on December 2-3. But I was afraid that the authorities would think I was up to some mischief, that I was a spy or something" says Ali.

It's only now that he's been persuaded to part with his tape by Nadeem Uddin, a filmmaker from Bhopal who now lives in the US. Ali's footage will go into a documentary, Bhopal84, that Nadeem Uddin is making. "The tapes were in a very bad condition when Ali gave them to me. He'd kept them in his house and they'd been damaged by mould and dust. But I had it salvaged in a lab in Bangalore and there's at least two hours of footage we can use," says Nadeem Uddin, who has started a crowdfunding drive in Indiegogo to find the money to make the film.