The day after Diwali, and why Amitabh 'Kant' be faulted

I usually don't find it difficult to disagree with Mr Amitabh Kant, the sherpa of Raisina Hill (there are no mountains in Delhi other than the Gazipur landfill, so it has to be a hill and not a mountain), but for once I cannot disagree with him on his recent comments on the lifting of the firecracker ban by the Supreme Court.

Of course, there's a little bit of scrambled egg on his face because he forgot that his mentor's government in Delhi is equally responsible for this relaxation, but then, being a hard-boiled egg himself, he can take that in his stride. As Confucius said, an egg a day keeps you in play.

Let me explain with a metaphor. A metaphor is a word, phrase, picture or even event that symbolises or gives meaning to something else. For example, Tiananmen Square is a metaphor for state brutality. The lyrics of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez are a metaphor for youthful opposition to capitalism and an uncaring society. Kangana Ranaut is a metaphor for another metaphor — a bull in a China shop. Donald Trump's ongoing demolition of the East Wing of the White House has become a metaphor for his wrecking-ball style of functioning.

In the same manner, the firecracker discourse/ decision in Delhi is an apt metaphor for how dysfunctional we have become as a nation, society and polity. All our institutions, including the judiciary, have become moribund and defunct, driven more by faith and populism than by science and evidence, their reasoning increasingly sophistical and medieval.

Given that Delhi is a constant among the top 10 polluted capitals of the world and that its citizens' lives are shortened by 8 to 10 years due to the year-long poisonous shroud, firecrackers had been banned here for the last few years. This was reiterated in just April this year by a two-judge Bench of the Supreme Court, ahead of Diwali.

Incomprehensively, however, the ban was relaxed in October by another Bench, to permit the bursting of the misnamed 'green' crackers. No cogent reasoning was given for overturning the earlier order.

There is nothing green about green firecrackers: evidence shows that they cause between 70 and 80 per cent of the pollution of a normal cracker. Furthermore, by allowing them, the court in effect gave a licence to burst any type of cracker, for it is practically impossible for the consumer or the enforcement agencies to identify the 'type' of cracker in the Diwali haze.

It was an appalling decision, but in the grand tradition of previous judgments where also the science and expert evidence had been ignored — Ram Mandir, the Chardham highway, the Great Nicobar project, Pegasus, the stray dogs matter.

Amitabh Kant was perfectly justified in outraging that the court had prioritised the right to pollute over the right to health and life. And, lest he be hauled up for contempt, he then donned the environmentalist hat and went and bought an EV the next day!

The BJP-led government in Delhi, as expected, has been more concerned about projecting its Hindutva credentials than protecting its citizens: it petitioned the SC to allow the bursting of green crackers, which opened the doors for lifting the ban. Having succeeded in this retrogressive venture, it then sat back and failed to enforce any of the conditions the court had imposed (for whatever they were worth, which was not much to begin with).

Instead, it got going on what it is best at — fudging figures. We were told that the maximum AQI reading was somewhere below 400, whereas the international agency IQAIR showed it near 2000! Then reports emerged in the media that air sprinklers and smog guns were set up near measuring stations so as to cleanse the air there and get lower readings. When even that didn't work, one-third of the stations in the main hotspots mysteriously stopped working!

Finally, someone revealed that the CPCB measuring meters were programmed to stop recording air quality when the reading hit 500. Reason? There was little point, since 500 was already lethal enough, any incremental increase after that did not matter! Which validates a saying we have in UP — 'murde par sau man mitti, to ek man aur sahi (there's already a tonne of soil on the corpse, another makes no difference)'. Because it's dead, you see, like you and I will soon be, too. 

As any village idiot could have told the Supreme Court, the good citizens of the NCR, who have the civic sense of tapeworms and the suicidal instincts of lemmings, went into a predictable orgy of incendiarism for a week. The result was there for all to see — and breathe — the day after.

From my sixth-floor flat in the NCR, the nightscape looked like the Gaza night sky: bursts and explosions everywhere, the horizon ablaze with red-tinted smoke, the terrified barking of poor strays on the streets. The road outside our complex was carpeted the next morning with ankle-deep litter of the previous night, rag pickers scrolling through it to eke out a few rupees.

Our vaunted upper middle class, of course, had by then retired to the safety of their air-conditioned and air-purified flats, leaving the jhuggi wallahs and pavement dwellers to bear the brunt of their shraddha and EMI-induced disposable income.

The AQI reading is still near 300 in my area, one week after Diwali. But that, and the half-a-million Indians who die of air pollution every year, are a small price to pay for being the fourth largest economy in the world, isn't it?