Manu Joseph: Why national pride has not cleaned up Delhi’s air

First, a part of Chennai was brought to a halt as an ambulance sped to the airport; then Bangalore halted as another ambulance raced to a hospital. It was as if India dearly wishes Indians to live.

I got the same warm feeling during the pandemic too. That great lockdown, and cops threatening to beat us up for stepping out of the house, and India coming up with its own vaccine. Some days, I do think India wants to take care of us. Then the winter arrives in Delhi. It comes every year and takes the country by surprise.

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In many regions of north India, the air quality is not fit for life. Hundreds of thousands of people probably die every year directly or indirectly on account of air pollution. Some schools are shut in the national capital region. People feel choked. And many ask why we cannot solve this problem.

The winter air is a subject of one of the worst arguments I have made as a columnist. Eight winters ago, when the air was poisonous, as it is today, I argued in the Hindustan Times that we have hope.

That nationalism will clean the air. Now, I must withdraw that opinion. If you want to be right about India, you have to say something bad. Being hopeful is perilous for a columnist.

My chief argument then was that the history of other nations should teach us that nationalism always begins with dangerous pride but slowly becomes something more genuine in the form of true love for a nation.

And when that happens, pride is replaced by shame, a national shame for all its flaws. And people then solve their difficult problems. I thought that might happen in India. Our nationalists will be filled with shame and they will clean the air.

At the time of writing this column, the air quality index of Delhi for very tiny particles, the most dangerous sort, is 424. This is as the worst band of AQI. It means that the air can put even perfectly healthy people at risk of developing respirational problems.

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I have been waiting for national pride to blossom into national shame. But now I don’t think anything so genuine is going to happen.

Air quality is not a major political issue yet; but the reason why it is so bad in the national capital region is influenced by politics. Some people want to believe the problem is the burning of crop stubble by farmers in Punjab, which is a cheaper and nastier way of getting rid of farm waste.

Others wish not to have fingers pointed at noble farmers, “the hands that feed us" fast carbs, but at vehicular pollution and industries that surround the capital region.

It is bizarre how vulnerable the capital region is to many polluting industries, including factories that make products for pharma majors based in advanced nations.

The latter have set up operations in countries like India not only for comparatively lower costs of production, but undeniably also for less stringent environmental regulations.

These regions often allow higher levels of certain pollutants, which may include pharmaceutical waste, chemical by-products and heavy metals, than would be acceptable in the US and Europe.

I am reminded of what Lawrence Summers wrote in an internal memo, in 1991, when he was the chief economist of the World Bank—that toxic waste from factories should be moved from America to poorer countries because the value of life is cheaper in poor countries.

When the letter got leaked, Summers said he was only joking. Maybe he was joking, but I would go with what my daughter used to say when she was little: “A joke has to be funny." Even in a joke, people are not always joking. In any case, this is exactly what rich nations are joking about.

I am breathing bad air because I live in a poor country, air that is unfit for Americans and Europeans. Put that way, the shame feels greater. A shame that I wanted engulfing patriots. But that did not happen.

Another argument I had made eight years ago, when I believed that nationalism could clean the air, was based on my observation that the Indian upper-class was digging its heels in here more decisively than ever.

The elite had their best lives here with their families and a social order where respect was easy and the poor ensured almost everything was subsidized for the rich, while life in advanced economies was rough even for an upper-class Indian.

And this decision to stay in India, I thought, would raise the stakes for the elite, and they would find a way to influence politicians to solve the air quality problem. But then I get the feeling now that they feel bad air is just a price they have to pay.

Apart form our lack of shame, there is another reason why we breathe this air. India does not have what it takes to solve difficult problems.

In this case, serious political will must combine with great bureaucratic talent in a person of high integrity who is brilliant and knows how administrative wheels move. In short, an E. Sreedharan, who gave us the splendid Delhi Metro.

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To clean the air, we would need many like him. I don’t think that is going to happen.

So we have a situation in north India where life has assumed the quality of an over-the-top satire. Even an exercise routine would be a bad idea because one would breathe more bad air.

And to be a child would be a disadvantage because children breathe twice as much as adults. India may not have shame, but it is always funny.