The Devil’s Advocate | What good are AAP’s new-age schools if the air students breathe inside them is poisonous

It’s that time of the year, when festivities, long committed to memory, wake to the fifth stage of hell that possibly no one wished for on Diwali. It’s Delhi-NCR’s smog days. The jubilation around the marginally optimistic AQI numbers post-Diwali was predictably short-lived. We should have known better! From a corner of this gas chamber you can try screaming your pleas for consideration but given the fact that there are election bells ringing in the ears of our politicians, chances are, they won’t be heard. The blame game has begun, and while we observe the baton of guilt being passed around, consume memes as a way to mentally cope, it’s baffling to think that a year’s heads-up hasn’t been enough to get incumbent governments to move on a certain public health emergency.

Every which way you carve this argument, all of us trying to have it, are losers. We are losing at life, and assisted by the inaction of our elected leaders, we’ll be there sooner than we think. If you, like me, were naïve enough to think that the day the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) ascended to power in Punjab was the day NCR’s pollution woes had ended then welcome to the brotherhood. The prevailing argument from AAP has always been their lack of control over things outside Delhi, but a year on, with all the warning signs in tow, little has changed. How does one interpret this ignorance, this brutal negligence of administrative accountability? Gallingly, the leaders, their families, inhale the same air we do — at least I hope so — in which case this under-preparedness for catastrophe that has now been many years in the making, feels humbling.

The caveats of jurisdiction notwithstanding, pray tell us, what the AAP governments of both Delhi and Punjab have done to address this issue? Was a task force ever set up, meetings held, data exchanged, a plan put on paper and people assigned to carry it forward? Or is the federal system of governance so fraught with jeopardy that men can only fight elections side by side but not work? The problem with any environmental disaster of this nature is that it will almost always also translate into a social one. Privilege creeps into the way we deal with risk and you can be rest assured the poor will pay far greater a cost for the passive nature in which the Delhi government has acted.

Badgering a single government led by a party that persistently likes to play the underdog, might be viewed as uncool here but this government has been in power for continuous terms now, has had enough time on its hands to organise sammelans and gatherings in poll-bound states. And yet little has moved, in terms of tangible action, to mitigate what will surely be the crisis that could define the lives of so many who grow up here and eventually leave in a hurry. Delhi isn’t just cloudy with smog; it is slowly being rendered uninhabitable. Governments are elected to rule in favour of people first, territory thereafter. It’s the kind of reckoning that most men with national ambitions would have wanted to meet head on, but even Arvind Kejriwal seems coy on this one.

The problem is not just accountability, which is scant across the board as it is, but the farcical nature of Indian politics. Expounding visionary futuristic ideas is cooler than fixing lived-in everyday problems. You’ll never hear the end of AAP’s work with schools in Delhi, and while that is admirable in itself, what good is a brick and mortar institution if the air children breathe inside it is poisonous and life-threatening. Your promise to send people to the moon, must also be matched by the ability to mend the broken wiring behind your old washing machine, or else you can jettison to any make-believe escapist heaven you like, but you won’t at least be able to live like a human after you get there. Brushing potentially cataclysmic events under the carpet of pessimism would be the equivalent of committing the sin of indifference. Good governance is not merely the display of avowedly inaccessible ideas of the future. It is also about crisis-solving, the modest ability to anticipate that which will happen.

There is really no point to the blame game here, because we are all at fault in creating this living nightmare. Of the reactive instincts though, only the government is to blame, because our purifiers and masks have been refreshed and replaced to fight a losing battle. People who had the right and the power to change something, have again, however, done nothing. It’s disastrous not just because it feels inane, but because it feels suicidal. You’re breathing the same air. It’s your life as well, for god’s sake. Do something for it!

The author writes on art and culture, cinema, books, and everything in between. Views expressed are personal.

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