Delhi's BJP Triple-Engine Government: Prioritizing Real Estate Over Clean Air
One of the booth-level agents of the BJP from my constituency in Delhi is a property broker and builder. On the surface, we have very civil relations, occasionally chatting during morning walks and exchanging pleasantries. He openly shares his desire to see a ghetto at one edge of the park, mostly inhabited by Muslim residents, cleared out because he insists it is 'illegal'. However, he sees nothing illegal in selling flats that have come up in areas officially marked as green belts. Business, he says, is better than it was during the AAP era, which ended in February 2025.
Delhi is now governed by what the BJP proudly calls a 'triple-engine sarkar'. The Centre, the State government, and the municipal authorities are all under the control of the same party. This alignment should eliminate excuses. There are no rival governments to blame, no hostile civic bodies to navigate, and no jurisdictional ambiguity to hide behind. If ever there was a moment to enforce environmental norms, regulate construction, get rid of the garbage, and begin taking steps to clean the most toxic air in the world, this would be it. But it is not.
Pollution levels have once again entered hazardous territory, but nothing substantial has been done besides the usual ritual of emergency advisories: brief construction bans announced but not enforced, and office goers and students being told to work from home if possible. The poor, of course, have no way out. Meanwhile, this year the market for air purifiers has expanded from the rich to the middle class.
The triple engine did, however, show resolve when protests against Delhi’s toxic air took place. It got the police into action, briefly detaining protesters for assembling without permission and violating orders. The message was clear: breathe the poisonous air quietly, don't protest, as that, apparently, is a law and order problem.
We could be beyond redemption. Governments are getting away with doing nothing about the horrendous air because many urban legislators across the political spectrum are either real estate brokers and builders or in league with those who deal in the profitable business of urban land sale. Indeed, the motivation for getting into politics and spending crores on getting elected is frequently to seek influence over land allocation and building permissions.
This orientation is also embedded in the BJP’s lineage. The party’s origins lie in urban trading castes, business owners, and professionals employed by those businesses. They view governance through the lens of order, growth, and profitability. The party’s social base has expanded, but the original cadre base that gave the RSS/BJP staying power through the lean times has an idea of profit and loss driven by concerns beyond Hindutva.
The surging costs of elections in the Narendra Modi era also make it difficult for India’s pre-eminent party and others to get off the treadmill of raising funds and delivering quid pro quos to those who made the funds available. The Reporters’ Collective, a grouping of journalists who do investigative reporting, has just released an investigation report revealing that, to enable an Adani group project, the Gujarat government has requested the Centre to remove 63.44 hectares of forest land from a protection scheme.
When governments disburse money just before elections and mobilise lakhs of cadres, the costs add up, and since there are no free meals in politics, the donors need to be paid back. Therefore, on matters concerning the environment, political parties do not serve the greater common good but the margin of profit, be it that of a mega corporation or a small builder-broker. In cities like Delhi and Mumbai, this translates into a preference for construction-led growth and rapid monetisation of land, even when this contributes to ecological or environmental degradation.
It is obvious that the returns from clean air cannot be measured against the profit and loss calculations of the snatch-grab-build models applied by the politician-builder nexus. Construction dust, meanwhile, has repeatedly been identified as one of the largest contributors to particulate matter in Delhi. Unlike stubble burning, it is not seasonal; it is constant. Yet, regulation is only a bureaucratic event on paper, to be managed.
Since this government has no intention of curbing the builders’ lobby or disincentivising car sales to control vehicular pollution, it acts as if managing pollution is a PR problem rather than a structural crisis. This approach has also invited allegations that the government generated fake data to claim that things are not as bad as they appear to be. There have, for instance, been media reports about water sprinklers being used near air quality monitoring stations to suppress the real readings.
Delhi, meanwhile, is where the BJP managed to get rid of the AAP government without delivering on its own election promise of giving Rs.2,500 per month to women. Months into the new dispensation, the promise remains unfulfilled. The triple-engine government has arrived, but the signature welfare promise that helped dislodge the AAP (besides the incarceration of its leaders and change of governance laws) has not been realised. Hope of an exit strategy for Delhi residents not enamoured of the BJP has also receded for now with the opposition so weakened.
Cities such as London and Beijing improved air quality only when environmental regulation was backed by strong political commitment. In Paris and London, cars entering certain zones are penalised, or pay huge fees, or are just barred entry. In Delhi, we have traffic jams around VIP convoys. Beijing shut down coal-fired plants and imposed strict rules for vehicles and their usage. It even risked the slowdown of some segments that contribute to the GDP but this helped China transition to clean energy, and those investments eventually contributed to its economic growth. President Xi Jinping made it a personal mission; Prime Minister Narendra Modi was recently heard speaking passionately in Parliament about Vande Mataram, not the Air Quality Index.
True, Xi Jinping does not have to keep collecting money to conquer new parts of China as he leads a one-party state. But authoritarianism does not automatically mean clean air. The BJP is powerful too but prefers not to take hard decisions.
The result of the triple-engine sarkar in Delhi, meanwhile, is not just thicker smog but subtle changes in the choreography of everyday urban life. Loudspeakers from roadside temples are louder and increasingly immune to municipal norms or decibel limits. There are also increased numbers of morning walkers who brave the pollution not for exercise but to feed monkeys. They are aggressive and refuse appeals to feed monkeys only at designated spots. Inner lanes are, therefore, lined with the banana peels thrown by monkeys. A conversation with the feeders reveals that it is all about faith, and banana peels littering the roads does not matter and neither, presumably, does air quality.
The builder-broker from my morning walk does not see himself as part of any problem. He sees opportunity, and a regulatory environment that rarely says no. He just smiles wryly when confronted with questions about garbage clearance, road construction, clean air. It will all happen, he says. Meanwhile, we choke and the monkey feeders distribute bananas.
