Every winter, Delhi is a city that appears to have been robbed of its ability to breathe fresh air. The air hangs low, thick, and metallic; the sun is weak, almost unwilling to pierce the haze in the atmosphere. Parents send their children off to school wearing masks; working professionals cough their way to work in the morning; even senior advocates arguing before the Supreme Court begin their arguments with a repetitive, tired curtailment, “My Lords, my throat is bad, or may I be allowed to appear online?” Judges nod sympathetically, usually fighting an equally annoying irritant to their lungs.

Within this shared construction, Delhi acts as a broad social equalizer. It spares no demographic: not the affluent resident of Lutyens’ Delhi, not the vendor in Nizamuddin, not the auto rickshaw driver in Karol Bagh, nor indeed the lawyers arguing in the Apex Court. A city of more than 30 million residents appears to inhale toxic air every day.

Yet, there is a paradoxical continuity of behavior. Life goes on: driving, construction, burning, blaming, and discourse on social media continue to resume the very next day. The air turns more inhospitable, but mass ire withers away. The Air Quality Index rises, but a sense of urgency dissipates. A collective tolerance what behavioral scientists refer to as “learned helplessness” has, in effect, become an implicit national policy.

This may be described as India’s Nero moment: The city is choking; and we look away. Delhi’s Smog Is Our Fire, And We Are All Nero.

A Judicial Reminder: When Law Speaks Truth to Our Complacency

Something powerful stirred beneath this nation’s numbness recently.

In the case of CREDAI v. Vanashakti, Review Petition, a majority in the Supreme Court permitted the retrospective environment clearances for projects already built, under narrow circumstances. They framed it as a practical move to avoid “development paralysis.”

But one voice ran against the administrative logic Justice Ujjal Bhuyan’s dissent. It wasn’t a question of one airport or one steel plant. It spoke of something deeper -an aching concern: what happens to a society where environmental violations become routine and the law loses sight of its purpose?

Justice Bhuyan warned that allowing retrospective clearances:

• Risks diluting the precautionary principle, the very backbone of environmental governance;
• Polluter-pays principle cannot replace prevention fines cannot repair irreversible ecological harm;
• Once compliance is optional, “environmental protection becomes a post-mortem exercise.”

His dissent wasn’t a rebuke to the majority; it was a rebuke of our national habit of treating violations as mere annoyances. A moral pop-up to remind us why environmental law exists in the first place.

A Silent Public-Health Emergency

India is living through the largest chronic public-health disaster the world has ever recorded.

Air pollution led to 1.72 million deaths in India in 2022 a 38% rise since 2010, says the Lancet Countdown 2025 Report. Indeed, in Delhi alone, 17,188 deaths in 2023 were directly linked to PM2.5 exposure one out of every seven deaths. Residents of Delhi-NCR are losing 8.2 years of life expectancy because of polluted air. Hospitals across the capital report seasonal surges in cases of asthma, COPD, bronchitis, cardiac distress, and pediatric respiratory emergencies. 

What makes Delhi’s tragedy deeply upsetting is not so much the scale of the atmospheric contamination as such but the collective emotional numbing by which it is endured.

The phenomena have become normalized:

• N95 respirators worn as habitual winter attire.
• Children coughing their way through completing examinations.
• Colleagues calling in sick with the assertion that “the air feels heavy.”
• Entire institutions operating under a noxious atmospheric milieu.

Air quality index in Delhi repeatedly surpasses 400 and 450 with an alarming frequency. However, the public outrage it creates is lukewarm and dissipates faster than the haze itself. Even in the Supreme Court a sentinel of Article 21’s right to life senior advocates begin hearings with sore throats. Judges break proceedings to reach for warm water. Deliberations shift to virtual platforms. Democracy itself seems to be wheezing. Pollution has become the ambient soundtrack of Delhi: pervasive, constant, and dangerously ignored.

The choking of Delhi is not a single failure. It has been caused by hundreds of small violations-garbage burning, unregulated construction dust, unchecked vehicular emissions, diesel generators, stubble burning, lax enforcement-that have become socially acceptable. We are not victims of one catastrophe. We are victims of a culture of adjustment. 

A Call to Feel Again

Bringing Justice Bhuyan into the conversation isn’t about second-guessing the majority’s choice, which is anchored in administrative reasoning. It’s about recapturing the emotional clarity his dissent offers to an India that has grown numb to alarm.

Neither Delhi needs more expert committees, nor it needs more circulars. What is needed is less finger pointing public outrage addressed by administrative accountability.

Justice Bhuyan’s dissent, born from what appeared to be a narrow clearance case, has become an ethical nudge we desperately needed. A very quiet yet powerful reminder that principles can never be traded for convenience.

The right to breathe is not a winter luxury. It is the heart of Article 21. It’s a shame, really; Delhi deserves better. India deserves better. Perhaps if we stop treating pollution as background noise and start treating the voices of dissent as moral compasses, we will find our way back to a future in which merely breathing is not a constitutional privilege but an unquestionable right.

Disclaimer: The opinions and views expressed in this article/column are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of South Asian Herald.

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