India's Night of Death: Bhopal

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Again and again, Prime Minister Gandhi and his ministers reiterated last week their determination to impose, and enforce, new and stricter industrial safety regulations. "We are concerned not only about this plant but about similar places as well," said Gandhi at Bhopal. "I believe there must be an overall government policy change."

For all the resolutions, perhaps the most poignant comments came from agonized survivors like A. Raoof, a Bhopal farmer. "We never understood why they would build a factory containing poison gas close to where people live," said Raoof, still choking 30 hours after the gas seeped through his home. "They could have gone out in the jungle where no one lives. Now we are mourning our dead." As he spoke, silent processions of survivors carried the dead, wrapped in white cotton shrouds and covered with flowers, through the streets of the poisoned city to the nearby Chhola Vishram cremation site. There, four, five, six bodies were thrown onto a pyre that usually served only one. Rows upon rows of pyres burned through the night. -By Pico Iyer.

Reported by Dean Brelis/Bhopal