Imagine, for instance, a person with diabetes who continues to quaff toxic amounts of sugar, or someone sick with liver disease who continues to drink heavily. Imagine then the family members around these ill people just letting them do what they want.
Imagine the doctors shrugging their shoulders, even as they deliver increasingly pessimistic prognoses — ‘You are on the verge of becoming terminally ill, but this is just the way things are. These are the medicines and the preventive steps, but maybe don’t bother.’ Now widen this idea from an individual to an entire society; imagine the family members and doctors as dangerously sick themselves but all bent upon committing collective, slow-motion harakiri. ‘We are all critically under threat from a disease that’s been clearly identified for a while. We know full well the serious steps we need to take to get better and stay better. But it’s too much trouble to change our ways!’
When I look at the satellite photo of the orange swathe of pollution scarring the subcontinent from Lahore to Patna, I remember the same image from this time last year, the year before that, and the one preceding that — it’s like an annually delivered Diwali card. From late October, when people in Delhi, Agra or Kanpur look out of their windows, they see the dot of the sun through a red-grey pall. That poisonous rust-coloured pall is what we are as a society, as a civilisation occupying the planet at this moment.
Burning dangers
We know that husk-burning creates foul, dangerous pollution. We know husk is burned at this time so that farmers in Punjab and Haryana can get on with planting the next crop. We know that both States are intimately linked with the sprawl of the NCR, with people constantly going back and forth. Leaving aside the husk-burning, we also know that motor-vehicles and many types of industry and construction are also heavily polluting. We know that Delhi and its environs, to name just one urban concentration, tend to trap air and create a dome of pollution above a population of about 17 million. We know that the children in this population are the most vulnerable; we know that people in the NCR are suffering and dying of respiratory diseases in previously unheard of numbers.
Those of us with a modicum of education and general knowledge also know that, like radiation from a nuclear blast or poisonous gas from a faulty chemical plant, toxic air recognises no class and no privilege — sooner or later, it will swat aside your air-conditioners and air-purifiers and come and get you in the poshest house, even as it gets the slum-dweller much earlier. And yet, we nod in approval as political leaders dribble on about India reaching a $5 trillion economy; we cry in dismay when the automobile industry takes a hit and car production temporarily dips.
Cult of growth
We are bombarded with guff about Swadeshi, Make in India and sanskaar , about how we’ve had the best know-how for 7,000 years, about how, in New India, we will no longer blindly ape Western ideas and philosophies. Yet, none of us will think to question this imported idea of ‘growth’ and constantly enlarging GDP as the chief measurement of our well-being and happiness. No government minister and no opposition party will have the courage to state the obvious.
What is the obvious? We don’t need a $5 trillion economy with the ecological bill that it will bring. We need to feed every malnourished person in this country with the food stock we already possess. We don’t need more polluting industries to compete with China and the U.S., we need a radical redistribution of the wealth and resources that exist already. Does this mean the top 1% is put against the wall as in some Communist fantasy? No, the rich can keep some of their money, a lot of it, in fact; it’s the mad, ceaseless expansion and the formation of oligarchic monopolies that has to be stopped.
What we need to address on a ‘war-footing’ is not the buying of more fighter planes, putting our minorities in concentration camps, or constructing more grandiose buildings around India Gate. What we need to treat as an emergency is the widespread distress among the most deprived sections and see the clear links between that distress and the ecological meltdown that is lowering down upon all of us. Just to start with, we need all the politicians who are in power in Delhi and Chandigarh to get together and find a way to make our air breathable around the year.
The writer is a filmmaker and columnist.
