Last week, Mumbai’s air quality was lower than Delhi’s and most other places in the world. It was the fifth worst city, globally, in terms of its polluted air. In old India, this would have been a matter of shame.But in new India, this is an opportunity—an opportunity to score some political points, polarise some more and ensure that even pollution doesn’t remain secular.When the Bombay High Court last month called the city’s plummeting air levels “an emergency,” it asked the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) and, by extension, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) ruling the civic body, for some immediate steps.To begin with, can public personalities appeal to citizens to heed the court’s ban on firecrackers on public streets and footpaths?The BMC readily agreed and recruited a bunch of renowned figures—from Madhuri Dixit to Ajinkya Rahane, to Marathi actor Swapnil Joshi, among others—to make these appeals.The BJP ignored all these videos, except one, by actress Dia Mirza.BMC Breakthrough: How Fadnavis Delivered Mumbai to the BJPAir Isn't CommunalMirza’s video was shorter than most others. In her video, Mirza stuck to the script. “I request you all to celebrate Diwali with joy, not noise,” she said, warning of the pollution that crackers emit.Mirza was qualified to say this and more. She has been the UN Environment Goodwill Ambassador and even represented the country at the UN Environment Assembly in Nairobi in 2024.The BJP ignored her credentials and underlined her faith.A 28-second video of Mirza was enough to get city BJP leaders fulminating. The BJP city chief, Ameet Satam, posted on X that “We don’t need lessons on how to celebrate Diwali from Dia Mirza. Our traditions are deeply rooted in our culture. (Emphasis added).”Satam’s decision to go after Mirza, his use of the words, We and Our, was a dog-whistle that did not go unheard. Soon after, Mumbai’s mayor and BJP leader Ritu Tawde made it clear for those who couldn’t hear the whistle. Mirza, she said, was “against Hindutva,” and hence, her counsel to Hindus was unwelcome.One after the other, the BJP deployed its leaders to take on Mirza. Nitesh Rane, BJP leader and Cabinet minister in the Devendra Fadnavis government, who faces 20 FIRs for his hate-filled, anti-Muslim speeches, jumped at this godsend opportunity. Rane said Mirza was “against Sanatan Hindu religion,” and asked her to shift her focus to Islamic festivals like Ramzan and Bakri Eid instead.BJP MLA Sanjay Upadhyay said Mirza’s appeal was a part of a broader conspiracy to “constantly target” Hindu festivals and asked her to leave the country, if she had a problem with it. “We will burst as many crackers as we want to,” he added.Its ally, the Shiv Sena, was not far behind. Former MP Sanjay Nirupam laid the bigotry bare. “People of her religion, her community, every Friday, occupy the streets to read namaz. Is that legal? Does Dia Mirza have the guts to oppose this?” he asked.Another BJP MLC Shrikant Bharatiya echoed similar sentiments. Mirza, he said, was a “representative of the Muslims” and hence, she must “first look at what goes on in her community.”Part Of A PatternThis rhetoric shouldn’t have surprised most. Since 2022, Hindutva outfits have held rallies spewing anti-Muslim hate openly. These rallies are headlined by BJP leaders like Rane, who now faces 20 FIRs for his hate-filled remarks in multiple such rallies held between 2022 and 2024, calling Muslims ‘green pigs,’ ‘Pakistani pimps,’ ‘green snakes’, and threatening to assault them and demolish mosques. At the end of 2024, Rane was made a Cabinet minister by Fadnavis.Faced with a resurgent Shiv Sena UBT, the BMC polls last year saw the BJP going back to this rhetoric. Satam, the same leader who first criticised Mirza, had warned Mumbaikars that the city would see a “demographic change” by Muslims if they didn’t vote for the BJP. He also floated conspiracy theories about a global islamist conspiracy to appoint Muslim mayors in major international cities, like London and New York. Now, as the city chokes, the BJP has turned to such rhetoric again. Except this time, people’s lives, their health is at stake.A new study found there were an average of 16 emergency visits on account of respiratory illnesses in Mumbai, every single day. Doctors have equated breathing the city’s air to breathing 1,000 cigarettes in a short span. In 2023, a private hospital had to open a special ICU for respiratory illnesses, after seeing a sharp rise in such cases.Instead of taking on the crisis head-on, the BJP has chosen to take the easy way out—sprinkle religion, stoke hate, and pretend that the problem doesn’t exist. This is what the party did in Delhi, while it was in Opposition and the capital choked with pollution—it criticised the Supreme Court-ordered ban on firecrackers to be ‘anti-Hindu,’ opposed such directives, and even distributed firecrackers. Such mob diktats are now coming to Mumbai.‘Hawker Jihad’ to ‘Doodh Jihad’: The Strategy Behind BJP’s BMC WinThe CapitulationThe BJP’s opportunism aside, the episode also marks the capitulation of yet another institution, the BMC, which is the country’s richest civic body. The backlash against Mirza’s video was enough for the BMC, whose chief Ashwini Bhide is celebrated for her execution of the Metro rail project in the city, to succumb and delete Mirza’s video, even while the other videos remained up. The capitulation was so complete that even after the Bombay High Court directed the BMC to restore Mirza’s video, the Bhide-run BMC refused to do so. Nor did it offer any explanation for why it only removed Mirza’s video, and not other similar videos. In a way, this capitulation seems fitting for the BMC.After all, it is the same BMC that is leading Mumbai in a war against the environment—it is planning on cutting over 3 lakh trees for a new dam outside the city and chopping over 45,000 mangroves for a new coastal road, while allowing rampant construction of roads and buildings in the city.Fittingly, Mirza’s video is gone. But the air in Mumbai continues to stink.(Kunal Purohit is an award-winning independent journalist and author of H-Pop: The Secretive World of Hindutva Popstars (HarperCollins). This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)