‘I can’t breathe in this city’: inaction over Delhi’s suffocating pollution sparks rare protest | India

As a familiar smoky night haze gathered over Delhi, crowds began to gather in the hundreds. Mothers and children, students, retirees and environmentalists were all united by a fundamental but desperate demand: the right to breathe safely in India’s capital.

“Delhi is no longer a livable city, it is a death trap,” said Radhika Aggarwal, 33, an engineer who joined the protest on Sunday.

“As I stand here, I breathe air that I know is killing me. But we see nothing but the government’s inability to do anything to stop this and clean up the pollution. No policies, no real action. So I’m here to fight for my city.”

For the past decade, Delhi has held the inglorious title of the world’s most polluted city. The pollution season has become as normalized as the monsoon, as it descends on the city in a choking smog that begins in October and can last for more than four months.

In recent weeks, air quality index (AQI) measurements have steadily climbed to more than a hundred times the level deemed safe by global health bodies and residents regularly describe the city as a gas chamber. Pollution now kills more people in Delhi than obesity or diabetes.

The apparent inevitability of pollution and the failure of successive state governments to do anything about it means that it has often sparked apathy among residents. But on Sunday, as a rare protest against increasingly poor air quality broke out in Delhi’s political hub, anger and frustration were everywhere.

The call for Sunday’s protest was to gather in front of India Gate, the country’s famous memorial to its fallen martyrs. But in the days leading up to the protest, police made hundreds of calls and home visits to those who were amplifying the protest to pressure them to end it, even threatening legal action against them; the latest crackdown on all forms of dissent in India.

Saurav Das, 26, was among those who faced police pressure after he launched a call for action against pollution on social media. Although young and fit, he had recently been diagnosed with allergic bronchitis, caused by dirty air.

“We wanted to gather peacefully at India Gate to send a loud and clear message that people are being fed by ineffective policies and apathy of the government which has failed to tackle air pollution,” Das said. “Instead, we were met with unnecessary brute force.”

On Sunday, police closed India Gate to prevent the protest and within hours, officers aggressively cleared the nearby site, detaining nearly 100 protesters in police stations until late at night, including elderly people, mothers and children. The next day, a complaint was filed against the organizers.

The reasons why the capital swelters every winter are well documented; a deadly mix of emissions from tens of millions of cars, fires set by farmers in neighboring states, factories that burn city waste, coal-fired power plants, and small fires set by people just to keep warm. Cold weather and a lack of wind and rain cause smog to choke Delhi and much of northern India.

Yet state and national government policies to address root causes remain largely absent. Instead, those who can shut themselves up at home with expensive air purifiers or flee to the mountains and beaches of other states, making clean air Delhi’s most luxurious commodity – one that is unaffordable for most of the city’s 30 million residents.

On Sunday, much of the protesters’ anger was directed at the Delhi government. In February, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which also leads the national government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, won elections in Delhi state, raising hopes among residents that it could finally unleash substantive anti-pollution policies at the state and national levels.

Instead, the new BJP state government not only went to court to allow “green” fireworks during Diwali celebrations – contributing to one of the city’s most polluted festival seasons in years – but was also accused by opponents of attempting to fudge the city’s pollution data, either by interrupting reports from the city’s air quality monitoring centers or by spraying water on the monitors of air pollution to bring down the figures. The BJP has denied falsifying pollution figures and called the accusation “politically motivated”, blaming the previous government for the persistent pollution problem.

The BJP’s cloud seeding experiment – ​​an attempt to make it rain using chemicals, in order to reduce pollution levels – proved a failure.

“I can’t breathe in this city anymore, I can’t walk around without having a terrible headache,” said Sofie, 33. “I feel like there aren’t enough masks in the world to make this air breathable.”

Among those gathered at the demonstration, many mothers accompanied their children and signs were held up with messages such as “breathing is killing me”. The nearby central secretariat and Parliament buildings were rendered almost invisible by the opaque brown smog of the evening as the city’s AQI reached 500 – the healthy level is 50.

“Any other city breathing this air would have already declared a health emergency,” said Gopesh Singh, 58. “How many more millions of people will have to die for the government to act?”