Fly out of Delhi and you can see it: a band of grey smog, so thick it blots out the sun. Tune in carefully and you’ll hear it, too: a subtle symphony of snorts, coughs and wheezing.
To the untrained nose, Delhi’s air is a potent bouquet. High notes of charred biomass mingle with sulphurous remnants of Diwali bonfires, with base notes of subsidised diesel, burned plastic and coal.
I moved there in early 2017. To me, a relative outsider from south-east India who spent her 20s trying to draw attention to injustices in India’s coal belt, Eau de Delhi smelled a bit like justice. It was only fair that the city’s most powerful and privileged breathed a fraction of what they extracted from communities who relied on land and forest. I hoped that this toxic air would waft down the same corridors where environmental safeguards had been rapidly undermined by the Modi government.
I was wrong. Jet-setting politicians almost never shared the same airspace; they keep office windows closed with air purifiers on. Barely a year of bloodshot eyes and blocked sinuses later, I left Delhi, conscious of the privilege to be able to do so. For my wisest counsellors – the city’s auto-rickshaw drivers who didn’t wear masks, and chain-smoking environmentalists – leaving for good was not an option.
What is it like to live and love in a city that shoves two packs of cigarettes down your throat every day without your consent? How did Delhi get here?
Its geography doesn’t do it any favours. Delhi is a land-locked city-state of 29 million. In winter, low-speed winds bring dust from the Gulf and cold-air inversion keeps pollution close to the ground.
Delhi borders the wheat-bowl states of Uttar Pradesh, Punjab and Haryana, which were the laboratories for India’s green revolution – a revolution that rescued India from famine, but the city is now facing the fallout from industrial farming and climate change that’s changing rainfall patterns. Farmers have an extremely short window to clear their land for the sowing of winter crops. There’s not enough machinery to go around, little demand for biomass power plants and no assurance that early maturing seeds will ensure high yields. Farmers confess they have no choice but to set fire to their fields, but the smog affects them, too.
Delhi also has 13 coal-fired power plants within a 300km radius, and hundreds of cement plants and smaller factories to cater for the construction of a new urbania that knows no seams. Throw in the waste of a metropolis and you have a steady toxic baseline, summer and winter, that is said to shave seven years off your life.
The inertia around the capital’s killer air, however, owes a lot to a unique political deadlock.
Delhi is host to the Narendra Modi-led government, the Aam Aadmi party (AAP) at state level, and a municipality administered by Modi’s Bharatiya Janata party (BJP).
Ask for accountability and things get tricky. Crop-burning spans multiple state borders and ministries. Communication breakdowns have bordered on the ridiculous in recent years, with the state’s chief ministers trying to set up emergency meetings via public spats on Twitter.
In charge of Delhi is Arvind Kejriwal from the AAP. His “common man’s party” was formed on the back of a powerful, nationwide movement in 2013 that promised to clean up politics. AAP came to power in Delhi in January 2015 promising cheaper electricity, a transition to renewables, and an end to the city’s pollution and water woes. Months later, key environmentalists in AAP were ousted, including activist-lawyer Prashant Bhushan, who took on coal oligarchs in court, and pro-farmer Yogendra Yadav, prompting another prominent activist, Medha Patkar, to quit.
In Kejriwal’s first winter as chief minister, he announced an odd-even traffic scheme as an emergency measure on a trial basis: drivers with odd-numbered plates could drive on odd days of the month and vice-versa. It was met with disbelief, valid questions of who it let off the hook and attempts to subvert it. Single-SUV households became double-SUV households to circumvent the ban. Studies show particulate matter levels did go down at choke points. But activists say shutting down Delhi’s more than 40-year-old Badarpur power plant in 2018 was far more effective in easing the city’s airways.
Cut to a few weeks ago. The AAP government announces free public transport on the city’s buses for women, but this is dismissed as an election gimmick by the BJP. AAP rolls out odd-even again and a defiant BJP MP rides into the heart of the city in an odd-numbered car on an even-numbered day in protest. Delhi’s coal plants fail to meet emission standards that the BJP authored four years ago, but a BJP leader wonders aloud if Pakistan and China were releasing noxious gases.
Which takes us to this week, when India’s supreme court ordered “the entire police machinery to ensure that not even a single incident takes place of [crop] burning henceforth”. The directive has brought temporary relief but is also deeply unsustainable and classist. What the highest court has done is force poor people, once again, to shoulder the burden of environmental accountability, while putting them at risk of punitive action.
It’s a pattern that environmental movements know well. The past five years have seen vicious reprisals against indigenous defenders, bright lives reduced to statistics in Global Witness reports. These indigenous people resisting encroachments, such as large-scale deforestation by big coal, are on the frontlines of the battle against climate breakdown. Many of their strongest advocates have allegedly been spied on. While big polluters can fund political parties using electoral bonds, which are effectively anonymous, organisations such as Greenpeace have been crippled by Modi-imposed funding restrictions.
But urban climate movements are wising up. This week, Delhi mothers and sanitation workers stood together with banners screaming #BullshitNoMore. And, faced with storm surges that could wipe out the city, Mumbai’s well-heeled stood with Warli tribe elders to save the Aarey forest, the last of the city’s lungs.
On the hallowed steps of Bangalore’s town hall, the city’s de facto protest site, I spotted hundreds of new faces at this September’s school strikes. “A for apple, B for ball, climate change will fuck us all!” screamed eighth-grader Greta-believers at their first ever protest.
Seven of the 10 most polluted cities in the world are in India. If the nation is to breathe better and survive the crises at its door, it could use a whole lot more irreverence and unlikely alliances – holding to account governments that do not consult the worst-affected on decisions that affect us all. There can be no climate justice without equality – locally, intergenerationally and internationally. Will politics ever catch up?