Then on the night of Dec 2-3, right in the middle of a communally polarised election campaign that would produce a never-to-be-repeated four-fifths majority for Congress, lethal quantities of toxic methyl isocynate leaked from a pesticide plant of the Union Carbide Company's Indian subsidiary. Twenty thousand were exterminated in what has come to be known as the world's worst industrial disaster.

This is where the triple tragedy parted ways. Mrs Gandhi's killers were handed prompt retribution. One was gunned down by her security men during the assassination bid, another was hanged after a four-year trial along with a third man, also a Sikh.

He was convicted in more or less the same way as Kashmiri death row resident Afzal Guru, whose sentence was confirmed by the country's highest court — to assuage the collective conscience of society. Some opposition politicians and newspaper editors called Kehar Singh's hanging a judicial murder.

The mass killings of Sikhs and the slow annihilation of 20,000 people and the maiming and blinding of tens of thousands by the acts of commission or omission of an American firm were expectedly, as part of a pattern, put on the political back burner though not without complicit judicial subterfuge.

Unequal and selective justice, however, didn't go unnoticed. In 2004, on the 20th anniversary of Mrs Gandhi's death and the massacre of his fellow Sikhs, writer Khushwant Singh put it bluntly “Four years (after her death), Mrs Gandhi's assassins Satwant Singh and Kehar Singh paid the penalty for their crime by being hanged to death in Tihar jail.

“Twenty years later, the killers of 10,000 Sikhs remain unpunished. The conclusion is clear in secular India there is one law for the Hindu majority, another for Muslims, Christians and Sikhs who are in minority.”

Khushwant Singh forgot to include the poor as the most defining category of Indians that continues to be denied the crumbs of justice. Most of those who were affected by the Bhopal gas tragedy were poor people who lived in slums around the Union Carbide plant.

The high court verdict on Monday clearly reflected that bias. All seven convicted in the nightmarish industrial catastrophe were sentenced to a mere two years in jail and a paltry fine of Rs100,000 each. They were given instant bail for a surety of Rs25,000 each. The Union Carbide's subsidiary in India was found guilty and fined all of Rs5,00,000.

The beneficiaries of the judgment's largesse included Keshub Mahindra, the former chairman of the Union Carbide India Ltd, a unit of the US-based Union Carbide Corporation, and current chairman of Mahindra & Mahindra Company.

Outraged activists declared the verdict as of a piece with India's march towards becoming a banana republic. After waiting for more than 25 years the court found the men guilty of death by negligence, a charge that carries a maximum two-year sentence. Audrey Gaughran, director of global issues at Amnesty International had this to say “These are historic convictions, but it is too little, too late.”

More than 25 years after the disaster, the site had not been cleaned up, the leak and its impact had not been properly investigated, more than 100,000 people continued to suffer from health problems without the medical care they needed, and survivors were still awaiting fair compensation and full redress for their suffering.

US-based UCC and its former chairman, Warren Anderson, were charged in 1987. However, both have refused to face trial.

Naturally, Bhopal survivors are blaming Prime Minister Manmohan Singh for their continued misery. He handles the federal investigating agency. They say the agency's inability to pursue a professional prosecution was responsible for their plight. Worse, they worry that Monday's verdict could set the benchmark for an arriving legislation to handle any nuclear disaster as India gears up to usher in foreign investors in its newly opened nuclear energy sector.

A feature of a banana republic is a collusionary ruling elite whose interests lie in big finance abroad. In that sense India is ripe to adorn the mantle that was once the preserve of Latin American dictatorships. True to form, even in the case of the Bhopal tragedy, it was the high-profile lawyer and former ambassador to Washington Nani Palkhivala, cynosure of India's middle classes, who single-handedly helped the Union Carbide subvert justice.

Once credited with valiantly fighting Indira Gandhi, this lawyer shamelessly filed a damaging affidavit in the southern district court of New York in December 1985. He supported the defendant, the US-based Union Carbide's motion for dismissal of the case in the US court on grounds of forum non conveniens. Palkhivala told Judge John F. Keenan that “there is no doubt that the Indian judicial system can fairly and satisfactorily handle the Bhopal litigation”.

Monday's verdict has put a question mark on this and similar middle-class icons. However, the political circus continues over not only the issue of Bhopal, but the larger question of equal justice for the poor and for a transparent regime to invite foreign capital, particularly in the field of nuclear power.

It is curious that while the Indian prime minister looks for ways to lower the hurdles for foreign investors to enable them to escape any liability should their projects cause a human catastrophe like Bhopal, US President Barack Obama, the Indian prime minister's inspiration, is rowing in the opposite direction.

“As far as I'm concerned, BP (British Petroleum) is responsible for this horrific disaster, and we will hold them fully accountable on behalf of the United States as well as the people and communities victimised by this tragedy,” he proclaimed as his country faced the worst environmental disaster from an unremitting oil slick. “We will demand that they pay every dime they owe for the damage they've done and the painful losses that they've caused.”

Here's a chance for India to emulate a laudable ideal, one that could save it from the ruinous path of being declared a banana republic by its own suffering people.

The writer is Dawn's correspondent in Delhi.