NEW TIME AND LOCATION

7:00-8:45 PM EST

Kellen Auditorium, 

66 5th Ave, NY, NY 10011

Bhopal is the Hiroshima of the petrochemical industry.

This December 3rd, 2024, marks the 40th anniversary of the 1984 Bhopal disaster when a poorly maintained pesticide factory leaked a massive cloud of chemical gas into Bhopal, a densely populated Indian city. The negligence of Union Carbide along with the governments of the United States of America and India directly contributed to this ongoing crisis.

Frontline environmental justice communities in the U.S. share a joint fight and understanding with those in Bhopal, India. The Bhopal struggle for corporate accountability mirrors struggles in Louisiana and West Virginia against Dow Chemical and other multinational corporations for decades of environmental injustices from petrochemical production. It has been close to 40 years since the disaster and those who struggle in Bhopal stand alongside survivors of numerous other chemical disasters that are still fighting to protect their community, like those impacted by the Trinity atom bomb tests in New Mexico to East Palestine, Ohio. The environmental justice movement is global. 

Buddha Weeps in Jadugoda chronicles the deadly impacts of uranium mining on adivasis (South Asian Indigenous peoples) living in the community of Jadugoda in the eastern Indian state of Jharkhand. Decades of unsafe mining, milling, and tailings management by the Uranium Corporation of India have contaminated the water, land, and air, destroying local ecosystems and causing cancer, congenital birth defects, and numerous other health problems among local residents. The film highlights the gross abuse of power by state authorities that has displaced the original inhabitants of the region and abrogated internationally accepted norms and safety precautions for the handling of uranium and its by-products.

South Asia’s adivasis (“inhabitants since the beginning” in Hindi) make up one of the largest Indigenous populations in the world. Like their counterparts across the globe, adivasis are on the frontlines of struggles against extractivism, which has accelerated significantly since the liberalization of the Indian economy in the 1990s. This is particularly the case in the mineral-rich eastern Indian state of Jharkhand, which has been a hub of Indigenous rebellion since before the colonial era. Join us for a vital conversation with photojournalist and activist Ashish Birulee about the adivasi-led struggle against uranium mining and its consequences in the community of Jadugoda in eastern Jharkhand.