Sitting in the cool shade of the Murree Hills, I felt it before I understood it. Not through a thermometer, not through a data chart, I felt the heat of Delhi radiating across the border like a fever in the body of the subcontinent. Delhi this week recorded 46°C, the warmest May temperature in nearly fourteen years.
Millions of people, street vendors, schoolchildren in unventilated classrooms, construction labourers with no shelter, were pushed to the very edge of survivability. I watched the news with the grief of a neighbour who knows this land intimately, and who knows, with a scientist's painful clarity, exactly why this is happening. And it did not have to happen. That is what makes it so unbearable.
Let me say what too few are willing to say plainly: what is scorching North India today is not some distant, abstract force called "global warming." It is the precise, measurable, and entirely preventable consequence of decisions made on the ground — decisions about coal, about the Himalayas, and about the lethal confusion between military ambition and national security. This is man-made climate destruction in its most local, most traceable, and most tragic form.
The coal machine and its killing loop
I have visited New Delhi many times over the years, working alongside the scientists and policy thinkers at TERI — The Energy and Resources Institute — in the era when the late, great Dr R K Pachauri led it with towering technical authority. Every time I stepped off the plane, before I saw the Red Fort or the sweep of Lutyens' boulevards, I smelled it: a sharp, acrid bite of burning coal, the odour of sulphur hanging like a shroud over Mughal gardens. For years, the 700-megawatt Badarpur Thermal Power Station sat inside Delhi's own city limits, poisoning the lungs of twenty million people. It took the relentless advocacy of Sunita Narain — Director General of the Centre for Science and Environment, one of the finest environmental minds this subcontinent has produced — to finally force Badarpur's closure in 2018. It was a historic victory. But the coal did not go away. It merely multiplied elsewhere.
India today generates over 70% of its electricity from coal-fired plants. When heatwaves push Delhi to 46°C, demand for air conditioning surges to record levels, and utilities respond by burning more coal. The pollution from that coal traps additional heat in the atmosphere, which raises temperatures further, which demands still more electricity, which burns still more coal. This is not a metaphor. It is a feedback loop with a body count. And India’s own Supreme Court has tried to break it.
What the science shows
Coal combustion releases PM2.5 and PM10 particulate matter, sulphur dioxide, and nitrogen oxides, causing acute air quality crises in major cities. The carbon dioxide emitted from India’s coal fleet traps outgoing thermal radiation, directly increasing the length, frequency, and peak intensity of pre-monsoon heatwaves. Every extension granted to a non-compliant coal plant is not an administrative formality. It is a measurable addition to the temperature that working people endure in May.
Himalayan forests act as vast moisture pumps, releasing water vapour through transpiration that seeds the monsoon clouds, feeding five hundred million people on the Indo-Gangetic plains
The Supreme Court of India has, through four decades of landmark environmental jurisprudence from the M.C. Mehta cases of the 1980s to its recent directives on emission-non-compliant coal plants, consistently held that the right to life under Article 21 of the Constitution includes the right to a clean and breathable environment. The Court has ordered plant closures. It has set deadlines. It has done its constitutional duty with a courage that the executive branch has conspicuously failed to match. The judges have shown the way. The government has offered extensions, waivers, and silence.
"The Supreme Court of India has ruled. The science is settled. The glaciers are retreating. Only the government is still looking for a reason to delay — and that delay is measured in degrees and in deaths."
The deeper wound: what is being done to the Himalayas
But coal, as grave as it is, may not be the deepest wound. Stretching 3,488 kilometres from Ladakh in the northwest to Arunachal Pradesh in the northeast, the Indian Himalayan Region is not a backdrop to the nation's story. It is the climate engine that makes North Indian life possible. The science of how it works — and what happens when it is broken — is no longer contested.
Himalayan forests act as vast moisture pumps, releasing water vapour through transpiration that seeds the monsoon clouds, feeding five hundred million people on the Indo-Gangetic plains. The snowfields and glaciers function as thermal regulators — their high reflectivity, or albedo, bounces solar energy back into space, keeping the plains cooler than they would otherwise be. The ridges and valleys channel wind patterns that circulate cool air across North India. This is not poetry. It is atmospheric physics. And it is being systematically dismantled.
Deforestation for hydropower infrastructure, road construction, and unplanned urbanisation has broken the moisture recycling systems that once tempered the heat of Indian summers. When forests are cleared, that moisture pump is switched off, and dry, sensible heat pours down onto the plains instead of rain. When reflective snow and glacier fields are replaced by dark asphalt and bare rock — as happens wherever a road or a garrison is carved into a mountain — the terrain absorbs rather than reflects solar radiation, creating localised heat hotspots that amplify temperatures downstream.
Degraded soils, stripped of their capacity to hold water, can no longer cool the air through evaporation; they simply bake it. Forest fires — made more frequent and more severe by drier, fragmented landscapes — send plumes of black carbon soot that settle onto glaciers, darkening their surfaces and accelerating their retreat. Every one of these mechanisms is operating simultaneously across the Indian Himalayas today. The heatwave in Delhi is the sum of its consequences.
The construction no one will name
There is a dimension of Himalayan destruction that the Indian climate community rarely discusses openly, and that political culture makes nearly impossible to raise: the massive expansion of military infrastructure along the Line of Actual Control with China and Pakistan. The Border Roads Organisation has blasted thousands of kilometres of roads through some of the most ecologically sensitive and climatically critical terrain on the planet. Airbases, garrisons, and strategic containment facilities have been excavated into the Himalayan landscape at a scale that, in any civilian context, would be immediately recognised as an environmental catastrophe.
Protect the Himalayas, and the subcontinent breathes. Destroy them for coal, for concrete, for flags on a ridge, and we all burn
I say this not as an adversary, I am a Pakistani, and I understand that nations feel compelled to defend their borders, but as a scientist and a neighbour who breathes the same air. The land–atmosphere feedback systems of the Himalaya do not recognise the Line of Actual Control.
The warming they can no longer prevent does not stop at any boundary. It falls on Delhi. It falls in Lahore. It falls on Dhaka and Kathmandu. No military advantage gained on a Himalayan ridge is worth the cost of the heatwave that the ecological destruction of that ridge imposes on the civilian population of North India. India’s territorial ambitions in the mountains are, quite literally, sending its own citizens to hell.
A direct word to Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of India
Mr Prime Minister, I write as a neighbour, not an enemy. I say to you without irony or political calculation: I would gladly help facilitate a vision of a demilitarised ecological corridor along the Himalayan frontier — a protected zone, endorsed by the United Nations and UNESCO, where the forests and glaciers that regulate the climate of two billion people can begin to recover. Declare the Indian Himalayan Region a global ecological sanctuary with legally binding protection.
Enforce your own Supreme Court's coal directives without further delay. Pivot India's vast industrial capacity towards the solar republic that geography and economics have already made inevitable. Alexander the Great passed through these mountains. Ashoka governed from their shadow. Every wise ruler of this subcontinent understood that the Himalayas are not a weapon — they are a gift. The leader who cools this subcontinent will be remembered long after every border dispute is forgotten.
The solar republic that already exists in waiting
India does not need coal. That sentence, which would have seemed radical a decade ago, is now an economic fact. India possesses some of the highest solar irradiance on earth, enormous onshore and offshore wind resources, and a technology sector fully capable of deploying both at scale. The cost of solar electricity has fallen to the point where new coal is economically irrational. What stands between India and clean energy abundance is not technology or finance. It is political will — and the dead weight of relationships between government and coal plant operators that the Supreme Court has repeatedly tried to break.
The people of India have the power to supply that will. This is the world's largest democracy. Its government responds when citizens are organised and insistent on public pressure. The heatwave killing people in Delhi this week is not an act of God. It is a policy outcome. Demand a binding, published schedule for coal plants' retirement. Demand that the Supreme Court's environmental orders be enforced as the law they are. Demand that all large-scale construction in the ecologically fragile Himalayan zone be subjected to an independent climate impact assessment — including, and especially, military infrastructure.
The conclusion of this science is simple, and it is hard: without shelving coal power plants, without ending India's addiction to territorial ambition in the fragile body of the Himalaya, and without declaring the mountains a protected climate sanctuary that two billion people depend on, them to be — the heatwave will return. It will return harder, longer, and earlier each year, until the question is no longer how to cool Delhi, but whether Delhi can be lived in at all.
From my hillside in Murree, I feel a deep and aching sympathy for the people of Delhi and North India — not as a Pakistani looking across a border, but as a human being who knows that the mountains above us are the same, the rivers between us are the same, and the sky burning overhead is the one sky we share.
Protect the Himalayas, and the subcontinent breathes. Destroy them for coal, for concrete, for flags on a ridge, and we all burn.