I am writing this essay from Delhi where the air has officially been poisonous for a week. “Delhi’s air improves slightly after 8 days, AQI at ‘very poor’ level” was the Kafkaesque headline in yesterday’s newspapers. A decade back, an equivalent level (at around 400 AQI) had been grimly reported as the highest-ever level of pollution. That now passes off as an improvement!
Should we expect the air quality in Delhi and the wider northern Gangetic belt to improve over the next decade? Probably not; unless we are able to fundamentally reconfigure the nature of our polity. That will be extremely hard to do because our deformed polity is entrenched in the commanding structures of our society and economy.
Consider the discussion of the problem of pollution in the national media where the figure of the ‘stubble-burning farmer’ has by now become the staple scapegoat. Amongst the Delhi upper-middle classes, one regularly hears fervid calls for prosecuting these ‘ignorant’ agents of destruction.
A study by the Centre for Science and Environment in October, however, found that farm fires on an average contributed only 4.4% to year-round PM2.5 levels in Delhi. A larger share of the yearly pollution comes from vehicular pollution, much of it emitted from the private cars of the upper-middle classes. Another major source are the industries that are ringed around the capital. In fact, as researchers from the CSE noted, the air quality in Delhi had turned ‘very poor’ even before the uptick of contribution from stubble burning on pollution levels.
Among the more sober sections of the press, buzzwords like “cloud seeding” and “smog towers” made the rounds as technological silver bullets. Yet, as Shahzad Gani, an aerosol scientist at IIT Delhi, wrote recently, the environmental problem requires long-term strategic planning, not quick fixes.
“Coordination among various agencies: Air pollution is a complex, multi-sectoral problem that requires coordinated action across government bodies. Effective collaboration between agencies responsible for transport, industry, agriculture, and urban planning is crucial to ensure that policies are aligned, and efforts are not duplicated,” wrote Gani.
This is exactly how China has been successfully combating its environmental challenges. The country’s 13th Five Year Plan (2016-2020) provided the blueprint for a concerted effort to reduce pollution: controlling air pollutants at their source by improving energy efficiency and expanding clean energy. “In 2021, after eight years of fighting a ‘War against Pollution’, China has seen remarkable progress in reducing pollution and it is winning its war,” noted a report from the University of Chicago.
Meanwhile, the State capacity for planning and co-ordination has been systematically dismantled in India post-liberalisation, especially over the last decade. After coming to power, one of the first steps taken by the Narendra Modi administration was replacing the Planning Commission with the government think-tank, NITI Aayog. The latter has proved remarkably ill-equipped in dealing with pressing national challenges like poor levels of health and education, upturn in unemployment and under-employment, and severe environmental degradation.
A beehive for consultants roped in from the private sector, NITI Aayog busies itself with cooking up fantastical, harebrained schemes such as the Rs 72,000-crore ‘mega-development’ project on the Great Nicobar Island. The Great Nicobar Betrayal, a recent book curated by Pankaj Sekhsaria, an academic at IIT Bombay, persuasively describes the project an impending economic, ecological and human disaster. The indigenous communities of the island which have been navigating through multiple challenges over thousands of years might not survive this hubristic idiocy emanating from the new technocrats of Delhi.
Talking about idiocy, The New York Times recently published the results of a scathing investigation, carried out over five years, on a government scheme to get rid of the mountains of trash piling up on the outskirts of Delhi by incinerating them in newly-constructed plants. “The government’s answer to its bursting landfills and boundless need for energy is exposing as many as one million people to toxic smoke and ash,” the paper noted. Despite internal government reports testifying to disastrous results (including pumping out ten times the permitted level of toxic dioxins), “the government has doubled down on its strategy nonetheless… vowing to build similar facilities in dozens of cities where tens of millions of people live.”
What is behind the incapacity of the State to provide basic public goods (such as clean air and water or nutrition and education to children)? A recent book on Peru (Peru: Elite Power and Political Capture) by the academics, John Crabtree and Francisco Durand, explains the weak capacity of the Peruvian State through the concept of ‘political capture’. Unlike the familiar concept of State capture, political capture casts a wider conceptual dragnet, demonstrating how a cross-cutting network of political and business elites manage to colonise the entire mainstream political agenda. This is achieved not only through capturing the levers of State policy but also by exercising controlling influence on civil society (media, think-tanks, professional bodies).
This is the kind of political capture whose tentacles stretch over our own polity, keeping it “locked in place”. Let’s take the news of the indictment of Gautam Adani in a court in the United States of America over allegations of paying more than $250 million in bribes to Indian government officials to obtain solar energy supply contracts expected to yield $2 billion in profit. Forget for the moment that none of this is surprising, given the open secret of Adani’s central place in the patronage network operating from the top rungs of the polity. Also disregard the fact that almost all of the frequent disclosures about Adani’s corrupt dealings emanate from outside of the country, itself a telling insight on the workings of India’s media establishment. To understand the current moment, hark your mind back to the period of 2011-12 when an ‘anti-corruption’ movement over ‘massive scams’ of the United Progressive Alliance-II government raged across the country. The movement was fuelled by the corporate media, with its characteristic framing of ‘corrupt politicians/inefficient State’. There was hardly any mention of the structural question: what is the nature of the relationship between oligarchic business and the State that facilitates crony capitalism?
The result of the anti-corruption movement was predictable. It brought a strongman to power, even more invested in crony capitalism, who oversaw a smoother alignment of big business-corporate media and the State apparatus. The upper-middle classes have prospered under this alliance (which explains the tacit approval of the upper echelons of ‘civil society’) but the rest of the population has experienced only stagnation, not to mention episodes of material decline, as during the pandemic.
Over the last decade, the congenital relationship between neoliberalism and right-wing populism has become clearer. Early cases of this phenomenon appeared in Latin America (Alberto Fujimori in the 1990s in Peru). Now they are found all across the globe, from Donald Trump in America to Giorgia Meloni in Italy to Modi in our own country.
When questions of the political economy are systematically removed from the agenda of the political discourse, the latter inevitably becomes polarised around the search for ‘national enemies’ or cultural scapegoats (minorities/immigrants, left-wing activists, trans-people and so on). Furthermore, even as the fiscal constraints and the ‘informalisation’ of the economy imposed by neoliberal austerity ravage organised society (such as trade unions, civic associations, and even political parties), it opens up space for micro-targeting of isolated communities. A favourite autocratic instrument is targeted cash-transfer centred around the benevolent leader. This ensures that subaltern sectors stay afloat and are invested in the system but are kept weak, fragmented and, thus, unable to pose any countervailing challenge to the status quo.
The economist, Daron Acemoglu (who recently won the Nobel Prize in Economics with two others), had written on the development stasis causes when an incumbent elite becomes invested in weak State capacity. “By choosing an inefficient state structure, the rich may be able to use patronage and capture democratic politics, so reducing the amount of redistribution in democracy.”
The multi-dimensional challenges facing the country call for an alternative project of imagining the nation-state built on the base of the popular sectors. The present elite-run status quo of Hindu nationalism-inflected crony capitalism is veering towards a catastrophe.
Asim Ali is a political researcher and columnist
