Gunpowder, diyas, and the Supreme Court's damp match

In an order delivered on October 29, the Supreme Court of India supplied an unexpected historical footnote to the country's most predictable seasonal debate.

Hearing a fresh set of applications in the decade-long Arjun Gopal litigation, a Division Bench comprising Justices MM Sundresh and Prasanna B Varale paused to trace the ritual lineage of Deepawali. In their twenty-three-page ruling, the judges turned to the classical canon - specifically the Skandapurana and the Padmapurana - to examine how the festival was originally observed.

The scriptures, the court recorded, spoke exclusively of earthen lamps. The ancient observance was defined by deepas, lit in quiet reverence to dispel inner darkness and honor the natural elements. Cardboard cylinders packed with sulphur and metallic salts made no appearance in the sacred texts. They arrived centuries later, entering the cultural mainstream in the baggage train of military gunpowder, the court noted.

The judicial finding was delivered with dry historical precision. Its implications, however, are considerably larger than the regulatory dispute that occasioned it.

The theological alibi

Every autumn, as northern India slips toward the winter smog, any institutional suggestion to moderate pyrotechnics is met with fierce public grievance. The firecracker is defended as though it were an immutable pillar of ancestral faith, coeval with the foundation of the civilization itself. By examining the texts, the court dismantled the theological alibi. It confirmed that an industrial commodity had simply attached itself to an older festival, acquiring over time the emotional armor of sacred tradition.

Yet having noted that bursting explosives has zero scriptural foundation, having observed that microscopic particulate matter enters the bloodstream, and having warned that Delhi-NCR sits in a geographical bowl where winter temperature inversions trap surface emissions, the court arrived at an administrative compromise.

It lifted the perpetual ban across the capital for forty-eight hours. Across Delhi and the National Capital Region, citizens are permitted to buy and burst approved "green crackers" on November 7 and 8, within narrow morning and evening windows: 6:00 AM to 7:00 AM, and 8:00 PM to 10:00 PM. Suspended trading licenses are to be temporarily restored to facilitate sales.

The justification was a study in circular institutional reasoning. In October last year, when then Chief Justice of India (CJI) BR Gavai’s bench first relaxed the blanket ban for two days, the court explicitly sold the concession as an empirical test run. The government was directed to police the market strictly, monitor the air, and return with hard data on whether a regulated window was viable. Twelve months later, the authorities showed up empty-handed - no enforcement audit, no compliance metrics, no health impact study. Rather than penalizing the lapse, the bench treated the total absence of data as a reason to repeat the exercise, reasoning that without numbers, it lacked sufficient grounds to maintain an absolute ban.

To bridge the gap between environmental degradation and public celebration, the bench suggested the state launch awareness campaigns, perhaps inviting prominent figures like cricketer Virat Kohli to remind citizens of the spirit of the festival. An unscriptural commercial practice, having failed every regulatory test and produced zero compliance data, was granted forty-eight hours of legal shelter under the hope of an athletic endorsement.

The manufacture of tradition

The defense of the firecracker relies heavily on the assumption of unbroken antiquity.

When confronted with the historical novelty of military gunpowder, traditionalist counter-arguments often retreat into more esoteric terrain. Apologists point to ancient incendiary recipes - such as the saltpeter mixtures (agnichurna) referenced in early military treatises, or invoke the ritual of Ulka-Dana described in the Skanda Purana and late medieval compendia like the Dharmasindhu. According to this theological view, Diwali isn't merely a celebration of Rama’s return from exile; it marks the conclusion of the ancestral season following Pitru Paksha, where householders raised flaming torches (ulkas) into the new-moon sky to guide departed spirits on their journey back Pitru Loka.  

Yet substituting a modern chemical firecracker for an ancient ulka is a philological sleight of hand.

In classical Sanskrit and liturgical practice, an ulka was simply a torch - a dry reed or bundle of jute bound in cloth, dipped in sesame oil, and held aloft to cast a steady, quiet beam into the autumn darkness. It was an act of solemn remembrance, defined by light (margadarshanam), not acoustic violence. To argue that our ancestors intended to guide the departed through concussive shockwaves, pulverized barium, and plastic casing debris is to confuse sacred guidance with siege warfare. Ancient texts were interested in illuminating the heavens, not detonating them.  

As historian PK Gode detailed in his 1950 work, History of Fireworks in India between 1400 and 1900, pyrotechnic displays entered Indian festivities around the fifteenth century, alongside the wider integration of gunpowder into warfare. Early accounts of pyrotechnic spectacles were recorded by foreign travelers, such as the Timurid ambassador Abdur Razzaq, who described the 1443 Mahanavami celebrations at Vijayanagara. Over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, fireworks evolved into lavish courtly diversions, patronized by Mughal, Maratha, and Rajput rulers for royal weddings and state festivities like Shab-e-Barat.

The transition from aristocratic spectacle to household consumer staple was accomplished in the twentieth century. In the 1920s, two cousins from the arid town of Sivakasi, P Ayya Nadar and A Shanmuga Nadar, traveled to Calcutta to learn the machinery of safety matches. Returning home, they adapted their small workshops to manufacture sparklers and sulfur-based novelties.

Over the subsequent decades, the domestic industry realized the commercial possibilities of festive religious markets. By printing the portraits of Lakshmi and Ganesha onto boxes packed with potassium nitrate and charcoal, manufacturers integrated their factory output into the fabric of the holiday. Over the course of a few decades, an industrial commodity was successfully rebranded as an act of piety.

The decennial docket

The legal battle over this practice began not as an ideological critique, but as a basic plea for biological safety.

In 2015, three infants, the youngest barely six months old, approached the Supreme Court through their advocate fathers - Gopal Sankaranarayanan, Saurabh Bhasin, and Amit Bhandari. Invoking Article 21, the petition argued that the constitutional guarantee of life is meaningless if an infant's developing respiratory system is subjected to severe, preventable episodic pollution.

Over the eleven years that followed, the infants grew into schoolboys while the litigation settled into an annual cycle of institutional hesitation:

2016–2017: Shaken by severe post-Diwali smog, the court suspended commercial retail licenses in Delhi-NCR, before adopting a graded approach under Justice Madan B Lokur, who observed that public health must take precedence over commercial claims.

October 2018: In Arjun Gopal, the court attempted a regulatory middle path. It prohibited conventional fireworks and joined crackers (ladis), barred toxic barium salts, and permitted only "green crackers" certified by CSIR-NEERI.  

2021–2024: Enforcement gradually eroded. CBI inquiries uncovered that manufacturers routinely flouted chemical formulas, blending prohibited barium while packaging older stock with counterfeit QR codes. In late 2024, the Delhi government responded by instituting a complete, year-round ban across all firecracker categories.

April 2025: A bench comprising Justices Abhay S Oka and Ujjal Bhuyan refused to relax the prohibition for green alternatives, insisting on scientific evidence demonstrating that their environmental impact was bare minimum.

October 2025: The judicial approach shifted under Chief Justice Gavai, who granted a temporary two-day relaxation on a test-case basis to assess the environmental outcome under monitored conditions.

The October 2026 proceedings revealed how little progress had been made. Senior Advocate Uttara Babbar, serving as amicus curiae, alongside Gopal Sankaranarayanan, pointed out that the executive had failed to produce a comprehensive enforcement assessment from the previous year’s experiment. Banned barium remained in circulation, and ambient air quality had spiked sharply during Dussehra despite the formal ban.

Appearing for the manufacturers, Senior Advocate J Sai Deepak argued that an outright prohibition merely devastated a licensed domestic trade - an ecosystem CSIR-NEERI estimates at ₹6,000 crore, supporting five lakh households. The manufacturers warned that an absolute ban vacated the market for illicit, unregulated Chinese imports containing hazardous oxidizers like potassium chlorate. Additional Solicitor General Aishwarya Bhati, representing the Centre and the Commission for Air Quality Management (CAQM), assured the court that the regulatory machinery was prepared.

Weighing these familiar arguments, the court chose to renew the test case. It restored retail licenses for three days, mandated non-transferable QR codes, instituted 300-meter buffer zones around hospitals, and required the authorities to submit daily air quality data and hospital admission metrics by mid-December.  

The circularity was evident - having relaxed the rules in 2025 to gather empirical evidence that was never delivered, the court relaxed the rules in 2026 for the same reason.

The chemistry of compromise

The centerpiece of this recurring arrangement is the green cracker developed by CSIR-NEERI.  

These formulations replace barium nitrate and incorporate dust-suppressing additives, achieving an average thirty percent reduction in particulate emissions. A thirty percent drop in emissions from an individual casing is a notable laboratory achievement. But treating it as an environmental solution miscalculates the physical context.

The thirty percent figure applies solely to the output of an individual, compliant product under controlled testing. It does not reduce the city's ambient pollution by thirty percent. Inhaling seventy percent of an industrial emission in an enclosed geographical basin offers negligible comfort to a compromised lung.

The physical behavior of fine particulate matter further complicates the court's hourly schedules. As Sankaranarayanan emphasized during the hearings, PM2.5 particles released from pyrotechnic combustions remain suspended in stagnant winter air for days. A two-hour burst between 8:00 PM and 10:00 PM creates an atmospheric plume that lingers long into the following week, trapped by the seasonal temperature inversions of the northern plains.

Beyond the air, the acoustic toll remains severe. Environmental regulations cap fireworks noise at 125 decibels at four meters - a volume comparable to an industrial drill. Urban animal populations, lacking any comprehension of human calendars, spend those evenings in severe distress. Across veterinary shelters in the capital, the post-Diwali routine involves treating burns, trauma, and panic-induced injuries in pets and stray animals.

Nor can the supply chain be divorced from its human cost. Beyond the consumer’s temporary spectacle lies an unorganized manufacturing base where safety standards remain precarious. In manufacturing hubs like Sivakasi, work frequently spills into uninspected, home-based sheds operating on piece-rate remuneration. The fatal consequences of this informality recur with steady frequency. In February 2024, explosions in manufacturing units across Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, and Tamil Nadu claimed dozens of lives, including the blast at Harda that killed eleven workers and injured nearly 150. The trade relies on impoverished laborers handling volatile chemical powders under minimal safeguards, manufacturing a transient commodity that society later defends as an essential expression of faith.

The institutional mirror

The practical fragility of this regulatory structure revealed itself less than twenty-four hours after the order was signed.

The following morning, the bench was confronted with newspaper reports accompanied by photographs documenting the open sale of unauthorized firecrackers across Delhi markets. The restrictions had barely had time to settle into the law journals before the market resumed business as usual. Conventional explosives, unapproved varieties, and packages completely devoid of authentic QR codes were being traded openly across the capital.

The court’s reaction captured the limits of the entire exercise. Pointing to the photographs, the bench drew the attention of ASG Bhati to the widespread violations and simply asked the government to "look into it". The command was delivered with the resigned recognition that police constables patrolling crowded bazaars cannot reasonably be expected to act as analytical chemists, scanning cryptographic codes on millions of cardboard cartons while managing festival crowds.

This institutional ambivalence surfaced again on the final working day before the Diwali vacation. In another courtroom, an advocate concluded his submissions, bowed to the bench, and wished Justice Sanjay Kumar a happy Diwali. The judge thanked him, smiled faintly, and offered a soft, understated request in return: “Please try not to burn crackers.”

The exchange was gentle, but the institutional contrast was unmistakable. One bench had spent weeks drafting an elaborate administrative framework to license the celebration, while another was left quietly asking members of the bar to ignore the permission.

Then came the grand finale in Courtroom No. 1.

Hearing a parallel air quality matter on that very same afternoon, a bench headed by CJI Surya Kant threw its hands up entirely.

“The more orders the Court passes, the more violations there may be,” the Chief Justice remarked with weary resignation. Physical policing has its limits, the bench observed, so the government should instead ask local municipal ward councillors to appeal to householders and turn clean air into a “people’s movement.”

The institutional progression was dizzying. Within seven days, the court moved from constructing an elaborate regulatory scaffolding of QR codes and hospital buffer zones, to hoping Virat Kohli might intervene, to asking municipal councillors to go door-to-door, and finally to confessing that its own decrees only provoke citizens into burning more. All this while amicus curiae Aparajita Singh placed on record that 43.5 percent of Delhi school children already suffer from permanently compromised lung capacity.

The litany of hopes

Thus, the fundamental question running through the Arjun Gopal litigation is not whether a community has the right to celebrate, but how an entire society came to confuse commercial excess with religious obligation.

Article 25 explicitly conditions the freedom of religious practice on public health and the fundamental rights guaranteed by Part III of the Constitution. The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that the right to life under Article 21 encompasses an entitlement to a safe, breathable environment. Yet when the moment arrives to balance those competing claims, the court consistently steps back, hesitant to confront a manufactured sentiment that treats environmental regulation as cultural persecution.

The court's reliance on public awareness campaigns and cricket icons illustrates that exhaustion. When the judicial branch must hope that an appeal from Virat Kohli will persuade citizens to preserve the lungs of their own children, the legal system has largely surrendered its coercive authority.

As I sit drafting this on the evening of November 7, the legal abstractions collapse against the acoustic reality outside. Even as the clock ticks past the court’s permitted hours, the concussive rattle of heavy aerial bombs shakes the windowpanes every few minutes. The sound resembles a low-grade siege far more than a festival of lights. The dog under the desk trembles with every shockwave; the air seeping through the balcony grills carries the bitter, familiar sting of scorched sulphur. Down on the street, no one is scanning CSIR-NEERI QR codes. No one is consulting the Padmapurana. The law exists on paper in New Delhi; the explosives belong to the night.

On the evening of November 8, the festival will reach its crescendo across the country. The warm, ancient light of clay lamps will flicker on balconies, only to be swallowed by a thick, metallic haze that will settle over the Indo-Gangetic plain for weeks. The respiratory clinics will prepare their equipment, the pollution boards will gather their water and sand samples, and the Supreme Court’s registry will quietly await its compliance affidavits due on December 14 - long after the smoke has entered the lungs of another generation.

In the absence of an enforceable law, one is left with the modest secular prayers of an urban Indian winter. May the lamps burn brightly; may the domestic air filters hold their ground; and may our collective respiratory tracts survive the sacred traditions of medieval gunpowder. Happy Diwali.