Slow Violence, Suspended Justice: Speculative Futures after the Baghjan Blowout

What are the temporal boundaries of petrochemical catastrophes? How are justice and compensation calculated and contested in their aftermath? And how do speculative finance and ecological harm shape the governance of fossil-fuel extraction? This article examines these questions through a joint analysis of differing media formations of the 2020 Baghjan gas blowout in Assam, northeast India: discourse analysis of government reports; intersections of history and temporality; depredations of extraction; and elemental media. The six-month-long leak and fire caused severe ecological damage, displacement, and loss of life. Six years later, affected communities remain in a state of suspension, awaiting final rulings on compensation, while extraction continues. Drawing on fieldwork, interviews, and media analysis, I critique dominant framings of the blowout as a bounded event. I argue that while the disaster has been widely understood through the lens of slow violence, the Baghjan blowout reveals forms of petrochemical harm that are not only temporally delayed but also structurally produced and elementally mediated. Through comparative analysis of three forms of disaster media—(1) a Supreme Court–mandated expert report, (2) Inside the Burning (a corporate documentary by Oil India Limited), and (3) Baghjan Reels (an independent film amplifying community perspectives)—I examine conflicting narratives of harm, accountability, and justice. Bringing theories of expertise from science and technology studies into dialogue with elemental media theory and environmental humanities scholarship on speculation and temporality, I argue that dominant media forms tend to contain petrochemical violence within event-based logics. By contrast, an elemental media approach enables attention to the durational, saturated, and historically embedded nature of extractive catastrophe, foregrounding how land, water, and air act as media that store and transmit toxic residues across time and space. This article situates Baghjan within a longer history of colonial and developmentalist violence, highlighting how both corporate and state narratives foreclose more expansive notions of justice. I propose ecological reparative justice as a relational, long-term framework—intimate, historical, and future oriented—for reckoning with the ongoing afterlives of extractive disaster.