Pakistan is choking and this happens not just because of its polluted air, but for decades of indifference. Justice Syed Mansoor Ali Shah’s recent remarks cut through the smog to reveal a painful truth: our governments have never really cared about the lives of ordinary people. Policy after policy, promise after promise and all have been crafted for the comfort of the elite, while the rest of the nation gasps for breath, quite literally. When Justice Shah says that everything in Pakistan is designed to please pressure groups and protect industry, he is not exaggerating. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which should be protecting the public, has become a bureaucratic puppet. It approves what it should reject, and it stays silent when it should shout. A watchdog turned lapdog. How can a department meant to safeguard clean air serve its purpose when it is “fully captured by the government,” as the judge rightly said?
The problem runs deeper than weak institutions. It is moral neglect. Also, official neglect. We build roads and towers in the name of progress but turn our faces away from the grey skies over Lahore and Karachi. We talk about “development” while the air our children breathe becomes poison. Justice Shah’s frustration is justified; the state’s failure to respond to climate change is nothing short of a betrayal. Civil society is not innocent either. The judge’s challenge that “If you are not going to fight for your right, nobody will bother about you”, exposes another uncomfortable reality. Pakistan’s civil society has gone quiet when it should have been loudest. Environmental activism here begins with a seminar and ends with a hashtag. When our judges sound more like environmentalists than our politicians, it is a sign of how broken our priorities are. *