“It Will Settle Down”: After Delhi’s Smoggiest Diwali in Five Years, a Debate Over Who Gets the Blame
For a few hours on Diwali night, the sky over north India is full of colour. By the next morning it is usually full of something else. This year the hangover was especially heavy: Delhi recorded its most polluted Diwali in five years, with an average Air Quality Index of 376 on Sunday. On Monday at 10 a.m. the capital still stood at 371, and 14 monitoring stations were reporting air in the “severe” band.
The smog did not stop at the city limits. Neighbouring Noida registered 332, Ghaziabad 324 and Baghpat 305, while some parts of Ghaziabad, Meerut and Saharanpur also slipped into the severe category. Further east, the numbers were lower but far from clean: Lucknow at 245, Varanasi at 274 and Gorakhpur at 261.
A chief minister who refuses to apologise
Into this haze stepped Yogi Adityanath, the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, with a message few health experts would choose. Speaking at an event on Wednesday, he defended the festival’s fireworks and said his government had deliberately imposed no restrictions on them. Even if pollution rose during Diwali, he argued, it would eventually subside, so there was no reason to worry. He went further, asking why people who had polluted “the entire system” through corruption were never questioned, while families celebrating with firecrackers for a single day were singled out.
Politically, the line is easy to understand. Diwali is a deeply loved festival, and restrictions on fireworks are often resented as a scolding aimed at ordinary believers. Framing the issue as one of fairness turns a public health question into a cultural one.
Why the argument matters
The trouble is that air does not respect the framing. Diwali smoke arrives at the worst possible moment, as cooler, still air settles over the plains and traps pollution close to the ground. It adds to emissions that are already there from traffic, construction and the burning of crop residue in the wider region. The festival is not the only cause of north India’s winter smog, but it reliably makes the first weeks of the season worse.
“It will settle down” is also technically true and practically misleading. The pollution does disperse eventually — but the people breathing it in the meantime include children, older people and anyone with asthma or heart disease. For them, a few bad days are not an abstraction.
A shared problem across state lines
The figures also show why no single government can solve this alone. Delhi’s air and that of its neighbours in Uttar Pradesh rise and fall together. A permissive approach in one state and a stricter one next door produce the same grey sky. Until the region treats Diwali night as part of a joint winter plan — cleaner celebrations, better forecasts, shared rules — the morning after will keep looking like this one.