Spiderman's uncle was right !

I read the Friday Indiana Daily Student paper with an increasing sense of hopelessness. I read about the protest against the campus recruitment effort by Dow Corning. The protest was in regard to the Bhopal tragedy, by students and volunteers of Association for India’s Development.

Dow Corning, a United States-based corporation denied their accountability and affiliation to Dow Chemicals, which has been widely held responsible for the tragedy in India in 1984 that killed thousands, several hundreds of whom were women and children. See www.bhopal.org. Not only has the tragedy been unanswered for, but has sadly been perpetuated by the law and government systems as a whole. With barely five minutes of investigation, I was able to find Dow Corning’s “About Us” statement on http://www.dowcorning.com/, which stated that “[Dow Corning,] A global leader in silicon-based technology and innovation, offering more than 7,000 products and services, Dow Corning is equally owned by The Dow Chemical Company and Corning, Incorporated.” The representative of the company claimed that the good-hearted students had misplaced their protests since Dow Corning was not a division of Dow Chemicals. Now I am not a lawyer or a legal interpreter. So I honestly do not presume to know where the specific accountability rests, especially when lawyers all over the world are fighting to find out the same.

However I do know one thing. Accountable or not, Corning is a shareholder, as confessed by its website and by its recruitment guy. Whether they like it or not, whether they need to or not, they are in a position to sit in a boardroom meeting. Thousands of protestors whose hearts go out for the condition of the victims would sacrifice their lives, time and careers to give 15 minutes of such proximity to Dow Chemical authorities. To be able to gather information, explain, express, demand and not withdraw is their dream and their passion. Corning, as a corporation which declares its commitment to environment and health issues and more than 50% of whose interests lie abroad (From the website), are in a powerful position to become a part of this protest, perhaps even to do more than their job’s worth. Has it become too much to ask a few well placed individuals with great power to show some responsibility? ... not merely to their corporate contracts and their legal bindings but to their conscience and the irrepressible human ability to judge what is right despite all that the paperwork may tell you? I appeal to Dow Corning to view the protest as a reminder of the responsibility that they need to shoulder, a responsibility that comes from their power of being at the right place at the right time with their ammunition of stock statements, not just of cardboard placards in the hands of a few well-meaning students.