In her new rap, posted online by Jhatkaa, a nongovernmental organization that leads campaigns for social justice, Ms. Ashraf employs the occasionally crude idiom of the genre to argue that Unilever has shirked its responsibility to look after the workers and properly clean up the soil and water around the former plant. “Kodaikanal won’t step down,” Ms. Ashraf warns Unillever, “until you make amends now.”

A local environmental monitoring group reported last month that high levels of mercury could still be found in vegetation and sediment in the vicinity of the former factory in Kodaikanal. The company disputed those findings in a statement posted on its website, calling them “in contrast to the results and conclusions of several site assessment and risk assessment studies that have been done by independent experts and institutes over the years.”

In another internal publication, a former Hindustan Unilever executive even called the company’s response to the “Kodaikanal issue,” an example of its “strong values and beliefs.”

“When the local NGOs drew our attention to improper and unauthorized disposal of scrap from our mercury thermometer factory,” the company’s retired director of corporate affairs, Gurdeep Singh, wrote in the Hindustan Unilever employee magazine in 2009, “we could have easily chosen to sweep the matter under the carpet. But that’s not the way we work. We immediately shut our factory operations and initiated, with the help of leading global environment experts, a thorough investigation and remediation which is even now ongoing.”