Smoke screen: The garam hawa of politics exports Punjab’s pollution to Haryana and vice versa

As the old saying goes, where there’s smoke there’s fire. But contrary to old sayings, common sense, and logic, in this instance the fire is in one place and the smoke is in quite a different place.

The fire is in Punjab, where farmers are burning the rice stubble in their fields before sowing them for next season’s wheat crop. But the smoke resulting from this fire, instead of staying home, is like a footloose vagabond ambling across to Haryana, and more specifically to Gurgaon where I live, to cast a pall of pollution, which is so bad that there are days when you don’t know if the hand you can’t see in front of your face belongs to you, or to someone else whom the thick smog has rendered as totally invisible to you as you are to that person.

And it’s all the fault of those farmers in Punjab, burning their stubble and dispatching the resultant noxious fumes to Haryana.

But hasn’t Haryana itself become a major rice-growing region? Don’t Haryana’s farmers also resort to burning their rice stubble, just like the Punjab farmers?

How come Haryana’s pollution is caused by Punjab’s stubble burning and not by Haryana’s own stubble burning? Could it be that thanks to a tit-for-tat arrangement Haryana sends all its stubble burning smoke to Punjab even as Punjab consigns its smoke to Haryana?

If such indeed is the case, it could provide an intriguing subject of study for scientists, imparting as it does an entirely new twist to the phenomenon of man-made climate change, where the climate of one place gets changed by mutual transfer to another place.

History has witnessed many mass migrations of people. Will science now record mass migrations of climates? Will the Equatorial landscape of the future feature icebergs, polar bears and penguins? Will the North and South Poles become tropical rainforests?

Perhaps. Or perhaps not. Another explanation for the Punjab-Haryana smoke switcheroo might be that Haryana has a BJP government, and Punjab an AAP government, and each makes the other the smog scapegoat, thereby proving the axiom that politics pollutes, and absolute politics pollutes absolutely.

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