Description
This paper interrogates how scientific authority is mobilized to legitimate political and religious agendas in the governance of Delhi’s recurring air pollution crisis. Drawing on Science and Technology Studies (STS), it explores how the Indian state and judiciary have increasingly invoked the rhetoric of science to stabilize public controversies surrounding environmental management. The Supreme Court’s endorsement of “green crackers” as a technological solution to pollution, despite contested scientific evidence, illustrates how religion was re-inscribed within the idiom of scientific reason. Through a discourse analysis of media reports, scientific commentaries, and governmental actions, the paper traces how epistemic uncertainty surrounding air quality data, including allegations of monitoring station shutdowns and artificial interventions such as cloud seeding, becomes a terrain for political maneuvering. Rather than viewing science as an objective arbiter, the study demonstrates how it is selectively packaged to sustain legitimacy and reconcile contradictory imperatives of faith, governance, and environmental responsibility. By foregrounding the co-production of evidence and belief, the paper situates Delhi’s “toxic air” as a sociotechnical problem where pollution governance becomes inseparable from the politics of truth, authority, and the moral economy of the state.
