‘AQI’ Chants Greet Delhi CM at Messi Event Amid Severe Pollution

When Chief Minister Rekha Gupta walked the stage to welcome football legend Lionel Messi at the Arun Jaitley Stadium on Monday, she was met with chants of "AQI" from a portion of the audience amid the concerning pollution levels engulfing Delhi.

The Air Quality Index (AQI) hit 498 in the morning and settled at 427 by the evening, putting Delhi in the "severe" zone for the third day in a row due to a dramatic decline in visibility and a haze-obscured skyline.

The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) has attacked Gupta for the "severe" pollution levels plaguing the capital after a video of a portion of the audience yelling "AQI" went viral on social media.

“International Shame, Crowd for Messi shouts ‘AQI, AQI’ as soon as Delhi CM Rekha Gupta arrives,” AAP’s Delhi unit chief Saurabh Bharadwaj said in a post on X, sharing the clip.

The AAP accused the BJP governments at the Centre and in Delhi of being indifferent as toxic air choked Delhi-NCR and parts of North India, saying the situation had reached emergency levels.

“In a country where everyone is talking about pollution, the prime minister is just silent on the issue,” Bharadwaj said.

Gupta had earlier said her government is making all kinds of efforts to curb pollution. She also accused the previous AAP and Congress governments of not doing anything on the issue.

“I want to ask those protesting at India Gate: The problem of air pollution is not new and has been around for years. Where were your protests before? What did the previous government do? “There is a backlog of 27 years. The government needs at least 27 months to fix things. After 27 months, you can ask me about the steps we took to address air pollution,” Gupta had said.

The Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) reports that on Monday, 27 monitoring sites in Delhi registered "severe" air quality, with Wazirpur scoring the worst at 475. Interestingly, AQI values higher than 500 are not recorded by the CPCB.

Every day life was impacted by the heavy smog, which worried locals and tourists about health issues and poor visibility. Heavy fog, according to a resident, made driving dangerous and compelled people to take safety measures, including donning masks.

The Lionel Messi G.O.A.T. India Tour came to a spectacular conclusion at the Arun Jaitley Stadium, where people flocked to see the guy who performs things on the football pitch that are frequently beyond human comprehension.

The much-publicised event had the ending it wanted, after a chaotic beginning in Kolkata on the tour’s first stop on Saturday.

Speaking briefly in Spanish, Messi said, “Gracias Delhi! Hasta pronto”, creating a sense of yearning among the crowds rarely seen before