There’s a photograph I keep returning to. It was taken last November in Delhi, when the Air Quality Index breached 500- a number that doesn’t really mean anything until you understand that anything above 300 is considered “hazardous,” and 500 is essentially off the scale of what we designed our measurement systems to accommodate. In the photograph, children are playing cricket in Lodhi Gardens, wreathed in smog so thick it looks like London in 1952, except this is 2024 and we know exactly what causes this and exactly how to stop it.

But we don’t stop it. And that’s the thing that haunts me.

I’ve been thinking about this becaue of a meme I saw circulating among my friends – educated, thoughtful people who should, by any rational measure, be furious. The meme showed the India Gate completely obscured by pollution, captioned: “POV: You’re a Delhiite and you literally cannot see the problem.” People shared it. People laughed. And then they went back to their lives, perhaps filtering their tap water, perhaps installing another air purifier, perhaps planning their next vacation to Goa where they could breathe properly for a week.

This is what surrender looks like in the age of democratic capitalism- just a meme.

I want to argue something uncomfortable: that what we’re witnessing in Delhi is not merely a failure of governance, but a deeper crisis that calls into question some of our most cherished assumptions about democracy itself. Specifically, the assumption that democracy is an appropriate system for populations that have lost, or perhaps never developed, the capacity for collective political consciousness.

Notice I didn’t say democracy has failed Delhi. I said democracy might be the wrong tool entirely when the citizenry has been so thoroughly atomised, so completely captured by what the Italian Marxists used to call “passive revolution,” that they can no longer conceive of themselves as political actors rather than mere consumers of governance.

This will sound elitist. It will sound like the worst kind of technocratic dismissiveness. But stay with me, because I think the reality is more complicated and more troubling than either democratic romanticism or authoritarian cynicism allows.

Let me tell you what political consciousness looks like when it exists. In the 1960s, Ralph Nader published “Unsafe at Any Speed,” exposing how automobile manufacturers had knowingly sold dangerous vehicles. What followed was rage – productive, organised, political rage that manifested as consumer activism, legislative hearings, and ultimately the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act. 

The American public, confronted with evidence that they were being poisoned for profit, decided collectively that this was intolerable.

Or consider the Great Smog of London in 1952, which killed thousands. Within four years, Britain had passed the Clean Air Act. The political consciousness existed to connect cause to effect, effect to responsibility, and responsibility to action.

Delhi breathes air that makes London’s Great Smog look like a light mist, and we make jokes about it on Instagram.

The question I keep circling back to is: what happened? How does a democracy lose the capacity for this kind of collective response? Because it’s not that Delhiites are stupid. It’s not even that they’re unaware. Every person I know in Delhi understands, at least abstractly, that the air is killing them. They understand that their children’s lungs are developing abnormally. They understand that life expectancy in North India is reduced by nearly a decade because of air pollution.

They understand all of this, and yet the political system produces… nothing. Or rather, it produces an endless series of commissions, half-measures, blame-shifting between state and Union governments, and temporary bans on construction that lift the moment the cameras turn away.

Here’s where Nehru comes in, because he worried about precisely this problem, though he framed it differently. Nehru’s great fear, articulated most clearly in The Discovery of India was that political independence would be meaningless without what he called “the building of a nation”. By this he meant not just infrastructure or institutions, but the psychological transformation of subjects into citizens.

And this transformation, Nehru understood, was not natural or automatic. It required cultivation. It required education not merely in the technical sense of literacy, but in the deeper sense of teaching people to see themselves as agents of their own collective destiny.

What Nehru feared has, in many ways, come to pass. We have the forms of democracy- elections, parties, a free press, but we’ve somehow failed to develop the habits of democratic citizenship that make those forms meaningful. We have rights without the consciousness of claiming them. We have votes without the imagination to connect voting to governance. We have the largest democracy in the world, and yet political consciousness has perhaps never been thinner.

I think about this when I see the debates over Delhi’s air. The conversation fragments immediately into technicalities. Is it stubble burning in Punjab? Is it construction dust? Is it vehicular emissions? Is it industrial pollution? And because the problem is genuinely complex, because it crosses jurisdictional boundaries, because it requires coordination between states, it becomes easy, or perhaps irresistible, to conclude that nothing can be done.

But this is precisely backwards. Complex, coordinated problems are exactly what democratic governance is supposed to be for. The difficulty should be an argument for more robust political engagement, not less.

Let me try to be precise about what I mean by political consciousness, because I think we’ve lost the language for it.

Political consciousness is not the same as being informed. Delhi’s middle class is extremely informed. They read newspapers. They follow the news. They can recite statistics about PM2.5 levels.

Also read: At India Gate, a Protest Against Delhi's Pollution Was Met With Police Action, FIRs and Arrests

Political consciousness is not the same as having opinions. Everyone in Delhi has opinions about the pollution. They’ll tell you over dinner exactly who’s to blame –  usually Punjab, sometimes Haryana, occasionally the municipal corporation.

Political consciousness is the capacity to move from observation to analysis to collective action. It’s the ability to understand oneself not just as a consumer of governance but as a constituent of political power. It’s the recognition that the conditions of your life are not natural facts but political choices, and political choices can be unmade.

And this, I submit, has atrophied in Delhi to a degree that makes democratic governance almost impossible.

Consider: When did you last hear of a genuine mass movement around Delhi’s air? Not an NGO filing a PIL. That’s important but it’s elite action, not mass politics. Not the odd dharma or protest- those flare up and die down. I mean sustained, organised, disruptive political action by ordinary Delhiites demanding that their elected representatives treat this as the crisis it is.

It doesn’t happen. And the reason it doesn’t happen is that most Delhiites have outsourced their political agency entirely. They’ve accepted the framing that governance is something done to them rather than through them.

There’s a story I think about, possibly apocryphal, about Indira Gandhi during the Emergency. When asked why people weren’t rising up against authoritarian rule, she supposedly said: “The Indian people have the government they deserve.” It was meant as a defense of authoritarianism – if people won’t fight for democracy, why give it to them?

But flip that formulation around and you get something more interesting: Does democracy have a purpose when people have been so thoroughly depoliticised that they can’t use it?

This is the question I think we’re avoiding when we talk about Delhi. We focus on policy, as if the problem is technical. But policy doesn’t implement itself. Policy requires political will, and political will requires a citizenry that understands itself as powerful.

What we have instead is a population that has been trained to think of politics as something professionals do, something to be mocked and memefied but not participated in. They vote and then they retreat to their private solutions. Air purifiers for those who can afford them. Vacations to less polluted places. Eventually, emigration.

This is what I mean by democracy being wasted on the politically unconscious. Not that they’re undeserving, but that the machinery of democracy requires certain preconditions to function, and one of those preconditions is a citizenry that believes change is possible and understands itself as the agent of that change.

Let me anticipate the obvious objection: Who are you to say Delhiites lack political consciousness? Maybe they’ve simply made a rational calculation that the system is too broken to fix, that the problems are too complex, that individual action is futile.

And yes, learned helplessness is real. But helplessness and political consciousness are not the same thing. A politically conscious population that has concluded the system is broken would be trying to break it further, to rebuild it differently. What we see instead is accommodation. Adaptation. The slow shrug of acceptance.

Think about what it means that the dominant cultural response to Delhi’s air is humour. Not gallows humour that coexists with rage, but humour as a substitute for rage. Humour as anaesthetic. The memes aren’t coping mechanisms that sit alongside political action, they’ve replaced political action.

There’s a particular type of contemporary nihilism at work here, and it’s not unique to Delhi. You see it everywhere that late capitalism has thoroughly penetrated: a kind of ironic detachment that treats everything as equally absurd and therefore equally immune to change. The pollution is bad, but so is traffic, and so is corruption, and so is everything, and therefore nothing is particularly urgent.

This is the opposite of political consciousness. Political consciousness requires the belief that some things are intolerable and therefore must not be tolerated. It requires drawing lines. Making demands. Being, in some fundamental sense, unreasonable.

Delhiites have become very reasonable about their own poisoning.

So what do we do with this? If democracy requires political consciousness, and political consciousness has evaporated, what are our options?

One option, the one that authoritarian states have seized on, is to say that democracy is a luxury. That what people really need is effective governance, and if they’re unwilling or unable to demand it themselves, then perhaps it needs to be imposed. Beijing cleared its air not through democratic pressure but through authoritarian fiat. The Party decided pollution was a problem, and the Party solved it with measures that would be unthinkable in a democracy: shutting down entire industries overnight, forcibly relocating populations, implementing controls on vehicles and factories.

It worked. Beijing’s air is dramatically cleaner than it was a decade ago. And this is offered as a vindication of authoritarianism. See, democracy is too slow, too messy, too captured by special interests. What you need is a government that can simply act.

But I think this is a trap, both practically and philosophically. Practically because authoritarian efficiency is episodic and unpredictable. Beijing cleaned its air because Xi Jinping decided it was important. What happens when the next issue doesn’t happen to align with the preferences of the person at the top? Authoritarian governance is not more effective than democracy in any consistent sense, it’s just effective at whatever the autocrat cares about.

And philosophically because it concedes the entire game. If we accept that people can’t be trusted to govern themselves, that they need to be saved from their own political apathy by enlightened technocrats or strongmen, then we’ve given up on the entire project of human self-determination.

But we also can’t pretend that democracy is working when it manifestly isn’t. We can’t hide behind procedural liberalism- elections were held, voices were heard, democracy is intact – when the outputs of the system are catastrophic and no one seems capable of changing them.

I think the answer, if there is one, has to involve the unglamorous work of rebuilding political consciousness from the ground up. And I mean ground up almost literally  starting with local, tangible, winnable fights.

Because here’s what I suspect has happened: Politics has become so abstract, so national and therefore so distant, that ordinary people can’t see the connection between their actions and outcomes. When everything is decided in New Delhi by parties that all seem broadly similar, when the media covers only national drama and never local governance, when the scale of problems seems planetary – climate change, globalisation, technology – the individual political actor becomes invisible to themselves.

But air quality is not abstract. It’s in your lungs right now. And while fixing it requires coordination across jurisdictions, there are local battles that can be won. Shutting down the coal plant. Enforcing emissions standards. Creating car-free zones. These are things that neighbourhood associations, resident welfare groups, and local activists can actually fight for and win.

And winning matters. Nothing builds political consciousness like victory. Nothing teaches people that they are political agents more effectively than experiencing their own power.

Also read: Toxic Air Caused 15% of Deaths in Delhi in 2023, Analysis Finds

This is not romantic. I’m not suggesting that we can organic-garden our way out of authoritarianism. But I think the alternative, political consciousness, is not the same as having opinions. Everyone in Delhi has opinions about the pollution. They’ll tell you over dinner exactly who’s to blame – usually Punjab, sometimes Haryana, occasionally the municipal corporation. accepting that democracy is simply inappropriate for populations that lack political consciousness Political consciousness is not the same as having opinions. Everyone in Delhi has opinions about the pollution. They’ll tell you over dinner exactly who’s to blame – usually Punjab, sometimes Haryana, occasionally the municipal corporation. is too dark to contemplate.

Nehru used to say that democracy was not just a system of government but a training ground for citizenship. He thought that by practicing democracy, even imperfectly, people would gradually develop the habits and consciousness that democracy required.

I think he was half right. Democracy can be pedagogical, but only if the pedagogy actually happens. And right now, the lesson that most Delhiites are learning from democracy is that their participation doesn’t matter. Vote or don’t vote, yell or stay silent, organise or stay home, the air will still be unbreathable come November.

What does failure look like? Not the absence of elections. The real mark is the absence of belief that elections matter. Not authoritarian repression, democratic exhaustion.

And unless we can figure out how to rebuild the basic premise, that ordinary people are the authors of their political reality, then yes, democracy will continue to be wasted on populations that have forgotten how to use it.

The children playing cricket in the smog don’t know this yet. But they will. Unless we remember first.

Parsa Mufti is the Strategy Head of Samruddha Bharat Foundation, the Director of JK Centre for Peace and Development and a Schwarzman Scholar. 

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