Political jugglery and other pollutants

Union Minister for Transport and Roadways Minister Nitin Gadkari is generally regarded as one of the more credible and performance-oriented members of the BJP-led government. But even he can’t resist stooping to hyperbolic bombast at election time. In May he loudly promised that Delhi would be completely free of air and water pollution in three years, committing a largesse of Rs 50,000 crore to decongest the capital. He sealed the deal, saying, “all my announcements are credible. I have built this credibility. No one can tell me that I have promised something and not delivered.”

With the ruling Aap Aadmi Party flailing — and failing — with half-hearted, hand-wringing measures like intermittently shutting down schools, odd-even car use, and altogether banning construction activity, there is not much respite from the toxic fug that envelops the city. In 19th century industrialising Britain the notorious yellow haze was known as a “pea-souper” and took a terrible toll on human life. Present-day statistics are not that far off: 10,000 people a year may die prematurely in Delhi as a result of air pollution; one study claims that citizens would live on average an extra nine years if Delhi met WHO air quality standards.

In 2015 reactions to an impassioned report by Gardiner Harris, the New York Times correspondent — including an account of his young son being hospitalised due to breathing difficulties — were mixed when he sought to go away. There was general dismay at the article but he was also reviled for giving the impression of Delhi as a hardship posting. The story was sharply brought home to me the other day when a young banker of my acquaintance had to put his 10-month-old son under a respirator — air purifiers weren’t enough. At the pediatrician’s suggestion, he sent his wife and child to relatives in Mumbai and was making inquiries about renting a flat in Goa for the winter. If such are the last resorts of well-off middle class professionals, how do the large majority survive in congested habitats with poor sanitation and putrid air? Many shut their doors and windows, lock their children up indoors, and don masks on stepping out.

Year after year it is the same, a chronicle of political tall talk and broken promises. Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal’s Rs 1,200-crore gift to combat criticism, prior to facing an election early next year, is free bus and Metro rides to women passengers, a move that E Sreedharan, the Delhi Metro’s creator, says will push the network into “inefficiency, bankruptcy … and a debt trap”.

Against the nerve-racking, government-formation drama in Maharashtra, where the BJP’s filibustering tactics failed, I have been in Mumbai, and Goa, where a similar strategy succeeded when the party “acquired” 10 MLAs from smaller parties to form a government after Manohar Parrikar’s death in March. Together with Delhi, Mumbai and Goa count among the richest places in the country. Yet behind the swank lobbies and clubs of south Mumbai where “women come and go … talking of Michelangelo” and the susegad-induced languor of Goa eateries with names like “Sublime” and “Gunpowder” is a shifting, rootless mass of humanity that powers everyday services. 

The majority are migrants from far-flung parts of the country, with a preponderance of Nepalis in Goa. In Mumbai nearly every taxi driver (those ever-dependable conversation companions in traffic jams) was from Uttar Pradesh. Shahid from district Faizabad and Devendra Kumar from Gorakhpur were among those who described their grim, ghettoised lives. Of the Rs 40,000 they averaged monthly, one-third went to the malik (car owner), one-third spent on board and lodge, and the rest sent home. The arrival of a Shiv Sena-led government has only exacerbated their gnawing anxiety and insecurity of tenure. 

A stirring account of these fragmented, down-and-out lives is portrayed in the award-winning filmmaker Ritesh Batra’s (of The Lunchbox fame) latest feature Photograph (available on Netflix). Nawazuddin Siddiqui plays a photographer taking pop-up tourist shots outside the Gateway of India. Poised on the jagged edge between hope and hopelessness, the protagonist’s desire to forge a human connection is set against his blighted living conditions. It is a chronicle (despite the Shiv Sena’s new-fangled promise of 10-rupee thalis for the hungry) of how shabbily waves of job-seekers are treated in search of livelihoods.

For escapees from the polluted north, Goa’s sea air may be salubrious but it is a badly managed and expensive tourism destination in comparison to Southeast Asian resorts. Unseasonably long rain this year has wrecked the roads and ruined the rice crop. Jobs are scarce, power cuts frequent, and the taxi mafia’s grip on inflated fares inexorable. Chief Minister Pramod Sawant’s government is bust, relying on development handouts from his patrons in Delhi. Key flyovers, to the airport, for example, are incomplete. Nitin Gadkari’s helping hand is akin to his promise of purifying Delhi.

At the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, Alice insists that saying what she means is the same as meaning what she says. “Not a bit!” retorts the Mad Hatter. Ditto for political leaders: What they say is not what they mean at all.