A single official total is 20,000 dead on the night.
The night-time official figure commonly cited is 2,259. Five-figure totals are later attributions or campaign estimates and must be dated.
Mixed means several legal endings, not a mystery about the leak.
English myth still prefers a single death integer and a single villain who can be produced in court.
Still open
- Site remediation — Who must remove remaining waste and treat groundwater is still a live Indian and successor-company argument.
- A dated death total — Night, decade and campaign figures coexist. No later census erased the 2,259 immediate official count.
- Parent and successor duty — Whether UCC or Dow owes more than 1989 is litigated in rhetoric and, periodically, in court.
- Medical follow-up — Chronic illness in exposed wards remains a clinic and research file, not a closed registry.
- Extradition as history — Anderson’s death in 2014 closed a personal docket without closing the principle it stood for.
Myth vs record
No one was ever convicted.
Seven UCIL officials and the Indian company were convicted on 7 June 2010. The sentences were two years under a reduced charge.
The 1989 payment was secretly imposed without a court.
The Supreme Court of India recorded and supervised the settlement, then faced review because criminal cases had been quashed.
The cause of the leak is unknown.
An MIC release from Tank 610 is established. Remaining argument is about water ingress, safeguards and corporate knowledge — not about whether a leak occurred.
Local notes
English news week, 1984
Wires led with poison gas, a death estimate that changed by the hour, and an American executive in an Indian lock-up.
English law memory
US and UK faculties remember forum non conveniens and EPCRA more readily than IPC 304A.
English campaign memory
Amnesty and ICJB English keeps the site photograph in the present; corporate fact-sheets keep 1989 in the past tense.
Bhopal is a known industrial release whose legal endings do not line up — the definition of mixed.
Public-record encyclopedia. Not legal advice. Not a how-to. Graphic detail is withheld. Wars belong in a separate atlas.