Forty years after a lethal gas, methyl isocyanate, leaked at the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal on a cold December night, the world’s worst ever industrial disaster remains a blot on India as a nation and as a metaphor for injustice. More than 3,700 people died within days and over half a million others were affected by the poisoning, including thousands who suffered permanently disabling injuries. Union Carbide paid compensation worth $470 million to the Indian government, which had demanded a substantially higher amount. While none of the company’s senior executives faced any legal consequences, eight lower-rung employees were convicted of negligence in 2010. They were sentenced to just two years in jail, but immediately got bail, sparking national outrage. The Supreme Court rejected a government challenge to that verdict and a sessions court is still hearing petitions. Meanwhile, two generations of families, who lived near the plant, have grown up in the shadow of death, desperation and a sense of betrayal.

While there is little doubt that Union Carbide and its subsequent owner, Dow Chemicals, have done little to assuage the anger and the pain of the victims and their families, state and Central governments in India are the ones who have failed the sufferers the most. Consider the outcome of some of the world’s other major industrial disasters. Just six weeks after the Chernobyl nuclear tragedy of 1986, the facility’s director and two other senior executives were convicted and sentenced to 10 years in prison. In 2015, five years after a devastating oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the justice department of the United States of America secured a record $20.8 billion payout from BP Deepwater Horizon, the company that had pled guilty to charges related to the petroleum leaks. The spill had led to massive damages to the ocean ecosystem and, consequently, to the tourism and fishing industries.

That successive Indian governments, prosecutors and courts have failed to secure anything close to justice for the victims of Bhopal has left a deep scar on the nation. It has raised questions about the strength of India’s justice system in the face of mammoth corporations with deep pockets and armed with efficient teams of lawyers. More crucially, it has left the country as a whole constantly fearful that its political and legal systems are not equipped to protect citizens and of a repeat of Bhopal. Those fears played out most dramatically during the negotiations over the Indo-US nuclear deal. For families who were directly affected by the gas leak, there has never been any closure either. That failure on the part of the Indian State will continue to cloud public perceptions of its ability to defend the country’s interests against giant firms and, in turn, hurt investors wary of protests driven by public fears they have done little to stoke. Bhopal is a reminder of why a nation can never truly move on sans justice.