Warren Anderson was born on November 29, 1921. That makes him 89 years old now. He retired as chairman of Union Carbide Corporation in 1986, that is 24 years ago.  Or just two years after the Bhopal gas tragedy, which killed over 15,000 people and devastated more than two lakh families by maiming at least one of their members.

Anderson majored in chemistry in 1942 and joined the US navy during World War II. He was discharged in 1945 and took up law. As chairman of UCC, he was arrested on December 7, 1985, on charges of causing death by negligence and also for culpable homicide not amounting to murder (Section 304-II of Indian Penal Code, which provides for 10 years' imprisonment on being found guilty).

He was let off the same day on a bail bond that appeared as capricious as it could be. The Bhopal police chief who arrested him, the pilot who flew him to Delhi and an important functionary in the then Rajiv Gandhi government, P C Alexander, have all pointed at some backdoor political influencing for Anderson to be let off on the promise that he would come back whenever required by the trial court. In fact, he did not and ignored repeated summons till declared a fugitive in 1992.

The snail-paced extradition efforts remained buried in the official files till an NDA government took the step after 11 years in sending a request to the US authorities, which expectedly turned it down given Anderson’s clout and position in American society.

The recent verdict of the trial court, whose judicial hammer delivered a soft blow constrained by the incomprehensible 1996 judgment of the Supreme Court that diluted the charges from Section 304-II to Section 304A, accentuated the feeling of helplessness reflected in India's failure to get Anderson extradited and being forced to accept a pittance of a compensation to the victims.

I asked a former Chief Justice of India, not Justice A M Ahmadi, to recall in how many cases he remembered diluting the charges from 304-II to 304A, even when they involved the death of one or two individuals at a time when the case was at chargesheet stage, especially when both the trial court and the high court had felt that Section 304-II charges be maintained and that the accused could fault the evidence for final relief during the trial.

He struggled for more than a minute before he said: “I have always thrown out such petitions which seek to challenge the charge framed against the accused at the chargesheet stage. And if the high court has upheld the charges framed against the accused, there is no question of the Supreme Court going through the evidence mentioned in the chargesheet to alter it or dilute it.”

If political parties are framing grand theories from the statements of people close to the incident of Anderson’s freedom from India in 1984 by attributing the motive to those who have chosen to speak out so late, then the judiciary, especially the apex court, should not be free from the criticism of leniency shown towards the fugitive, who has been able to thumb his nose at the law.