All this pollution, What’s Going On?

Marvin Gaye’s 1971 album, What’s Going On?, has come to be viewed as the archetype of 1970s soul music. In fact, many music critics and musicians alike regard it as the greatest vinyl album ever. In 2020, it was ranked number one on Rolling Stone’s list of the ‘500 Greatest Albums of All Time’. Gaye’s Motown masterpiece never fails to rank in any prominent top 10 greatest albums charts. In that respect, it is just like Delhi, and so many other Indian cities, that cannot seem to escape any of the top 10 charts listing the most polluted cities of the world.

We are number one. ‘Woah, mercy, mercy me/ Things ain’t what they used to be/ Where did all the blue skies go?/ Poison is the wind that blows/ From the North and South and East’. Let’s not leave out the West. I spent last week in Mumbai, where the air quality plunged from simply noxious to absolutely toxic. Or as Marvin Gaye captured it so soulfully in Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology), the third chart-topping single from What’s Going On?: ‘Woah, mercy, mercy me/ Things ain’t what they used to be/ Radiation underground and in the sky/ Animals and birds who live nearby are dying’.

Social media has been abuzz with poignant anecdotes, finger-pointing and general discontent. Some people blame their governments, others blame our culture. Many bemoan our utter disregard for looking after the public commons, the filth that pervades most social spaces. Our personal private property is kept tidy, but once you dare to cross the threshold of your door – watch out! As for me, I don’t fault either a feckless government or an indifferent society. How about the RSS, then?

The Sarsanghchalaks have repeatedly ascribed to their organisation the fundamental duty of propagating the Vedas and a dharmic way of life. As any Indian political philosopher can tell you, one of the key teachings of the Vedic conception of sovereignty, dharmic political power, is the notion of stewardship; that is, the Vedas, as well as the ancient Indian epics, Brahmanas, and Dharmashastras, all lock the political ruler into a larger cosmology where his function is to guard, protect, and sustain everything he rules over. There is an emphasis on the intertwined and connected human and non-human realms. According to the Vedas, ecology is a dharmic way of life.

As far back as Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj or Savarkar’s Hindutva, the champions of Vedic dharma have always contrasted spiritual Vedic values over materialistic Western ones. In this case too, the Vedic demand of stewardship can be contrasted with the dominant concept of sovereign political power in Western modernity, which is an instrumental one: Western thought conceives of human-non-human rule as instrumental, where the non-human is regarded as a resource for the human, void of inherent value and thus subordinate, there to enhance human comfort and experience. The Indic conception of rule as stewardship entails no such prioritisation of the human over the non-human, but rather obligates us to act as stewards for the interests of non-human entities.

It was precisely the Vedic bent of its judiciary that compelled the Uttarakhand High Court to declare that the Ganga and the Yamuna rivers enjoyed the same constitutional rights as persons, not to mention an earlier judgement that Himalayan glaciers, lakes, and even forests were legal persons. The Supreme Court of India quashed that party, clarifying that rivers cannot enjoy human rights. Vedic dharma took another L.

The Indic conception of rule entails a normative duty for stewardship, for ecological care. Why have we been unable to propagate this crucial value? As an open-water, long-distance swimmer, I can anecdotally attest that there is scarcely a body of open water to be found in India that is non-toxic enough to be swimmable, and you have to hold your nose as you cross most rivers because the stench is overwhelming. Again, Indian cities top the World Health Organisation’s ambient air pollution lists year after year.

Where has the normative conception of Vedic rule as stewardship borne fruit, or where has it been robust enough to function prophylactically against the hegemonic West’s instrumental conception? It’s very difficult to be a vishwaguru when you can’t breathe. ‘Hey, mercy, mercy me, oh/ Hey, things ain’t what they used to be/ What about this overcrowded land?/ How much more abuse from man can she stand?’