Delhi Air Pollution: AAP built a vote bank in Punjab, and is now hostage to it

Every year Delhi's air quality deteriorates with clockwork precision, causing untold damage to lungs, lives and livelihoods. (Illustration by Suneesh K.)

Every year, around the beginning of October, Delhiites start bracing for the coming suffocation. Within a few weeks, their worst fears come true. A haze descends on the nation’s capital, making it by far the most polluted city in the world. People find it difficult to breath.

It is absolutely astounding that both the Central and the Delhi governments know very well that this will happen, causing untold damage to lungs, lives and livelihoods, yet the health derangement arrives every year with clockwork precision. The smoke wafts in from the thousands of fires lit by farmers in Punjab to burn the stubble—parali in local lingo—left behind by their kharif paddy crop harvest. Farmers burn stubble in Haryana and Uttar Pradesh too, but their contribution is almost negligible compared to Punjab’s score, which rises every year.

For several days now, the air quality in Delhi has been categorized as “severe”, that is, it “affects healthy people and seriously impacts those with existing diseases”.

Yet, the capital’s gas chamber-like situation this year is a bit different. The reason: today, Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) is in power in both Delhi, where the victims are struggling, and Punjab, where the culprits thrive.

In the past, every year, when the smog set in, Kejriwal, as Delhi chief minister, would accuse the Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh governments of killing the people of Delhi. He would demand time-bound plans from these state governments on how they were going to curb the menace.

He claimed that if AAP were voted to office in Punjab, he would solve the stubble-burning problem in a jiffy. The Delhi-based Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI) has developed an extremely inexpensive bio-chemical, which, when sprayed on the stubble, decomposes it and turns the paddy straw into a biomass that can be used as manure. Not only does it solve the pollution problem, it enhances the fertility of the soil and reduces the farmer’s fertilizer cost. In contrast, stubble burning reduces fertility and increases fertilizer cost over time.

Kejriwal boasted that his government had developed the decomposer in collaboration with IRAI (not true—IRAI, a central organization, had developed it on its own), and that using the bio-chemical can “turn the stubble into gold”—as an input to manufacturing fertilizers and “green coal”.

Why were not the governments of Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh using this to eradicate the grave dangers that the innocent citizens of Delhi were facing? he asked indignantly. He claimed that the Delhi government had already sprayed all farmland under its jurisdiction with the de-composer.

But what are the facts, as of today?

Kejriwal’s government sprayed the bio-chemical on 1,935 acres of land in 2020, 4,300 acres in 2021, and aims to use it on 5,000 acres this year. Clearly, he was being somewhat careless with data when he said that all agricultural land in Delhi had been covered.

And according to a news report based on the Delhi government’s statements in the assembly and RTI responses, it spent Rs 68 lakh in 2020-21 and 2021-22 on spraying the decomposer. During that period, it spent 34 times more—Rs 23 crore—advertising the project.

AAP came to power in Punjab with more than a three-fourths majority. Yet, things have only changed for the worse. Union government data on stubble burning in the state last month showed a 33.5 percent rise over October 2021. Meanwhile, cases in Haryana have dropped 30 percent.

The district with the highest number of fires is Sangrur, home to chief minister Bhagwant Mann. It was also the epicentre of the year-long agitation against the three farm laws. Neither Kejriwal nor Mann can dare take any action against the farmers. After all, AAP owes much of its electoral success in the state to its wholehearted support for the agitation. AAP built a vote bank and is now hostage to it.

“If the Centre cannot control air pollution, it should resign,” challenged Kejriwal a few days ago, “We will then show how to do it."

How exactly will they do it? It does not matter. Because this is the classic Kejriwal three-step strategy. First step, promise solutions and freebies (decomposers, electricity bill dues waived off, Rs 1,000 to every woman above 18 years of age in Punjab). Two, ask the Centre to finance the promised schemes (the day after being sworn in as chief minister, Mann landed up in Delhi to ask for an additional Rs 50,000 crore annually in aid). Three, when you cannot deliver, claim victimhood—the Centre is sabotaging my plans.

The most jarring example of this was when the second wave of Covid hit, last year. Kejriwal claimed initially with great confidence that Delhi had more than enough oxygen for patients. But within a few weeks, he was complaining that the Union government was starving Delhi of oxygen and slaughtering its citizens.

In a damning report, the oxygen audit committee set up by the Supreme Court concluded that the Delhi government had been demanding four times the amount of oxygen than was required. The Centre had revised Delhi’s oxygen allotment and supplied more of the gas by cutting short on other states. In reality, many Delhi hospitals had their tanks full and tankers could not even offload the gas there. The committee calculated that this blame-the-Centre lie of Kejriwal’s led to 12 other states facing a severe shortage of life-saving oxygen as their supply was diverted to Delhi.

But the strategy seems to not have worked this time round. His righteous indignation possibly wasn’t cutting much ice with the people of Delhi. So on Friday, November 4, Kejriwal did a volte face and said that the Punjab government took responsibility for stubble burning and the pollution caused by it. The AAP government would be able to control the crisis within a span of a year, he promised, while not forgetting to add that the Centre should intervene and take responsibility for the bad air quality in Delhi.

He also appealed that the issue should not be politicized, and governments should shun blame games and mudslinging. Funny, coming from a man who has politicized everything from rape to the recent Morbi bridge collapse.

But this is the sort of daily blast of politically manipulative hypocrisy that Delhiites have got used to over the years.