On Sunday, the national capital awoke to a sepia cityscape, its skyline erased under a pall of toxic air. The Air Quality Index (AQI) breached 400 in several areas — “severe” yet unfortunately routine for this time of the year. Later in the evening, however, something unusual happened. Hundreds of citizens braved the smog to show up at India Gate — parents clutching their children, students with handmade banners, elderly citizens, masked and resolute, demanding clean air. In a city where the acrid smog has smothered what was once a beloved season, the gathering was a much-needed act of affirmation — that people will no longer be passive sufferers and that clean air is not charity from the state but a right of the citizen.
For years, India’s political class has treated air pollution as a seasonal inconvenience at best and fodder for a partisan and polarising politics at worst. Blame has floated from the city-state to the Centre, farmers to industries, from motorists to Opposition governments in adjoining states, a fog of evasion thicker than the smog itself. Citizens, too, have been complicit in their inertia and resignation. The India Gate protest indicates a possible and potential rupture in that paralysis. It reframes pollution not just as an administrative lapse but also as a political betrayal, and clean air as a non-negotiable right. This new civic grammar starts with the recognition that clean air cannot remain the privilege of the wealthy with access to air purifiers or the means to escape Delhi’s winter haze for mountain retreats, that the National Clean Air Programme (NCAP) must commit to sustainable, workable solutions, that it is the most fundamental of equalities — the breath that unites the rich and the poor, the young and the old.
