Ram bharose at the Kumbh

ASHES to ashes, dust to dust. Equal parts devotion, despair, desperation, anger and even, fulfilment. Above all, the ability to swallow insults over millennia. And so the Ganga gobbled up another 31 bodies on the night of the sacred Mauni Amavasya earlier this week at the Maha Kumbh in Prayagraj and seven more in the neighbouring village of Jhusi — a much smaller stampede, the day after. What’s 38 lives when several crore people took a sacred dip in the Sangam at exactly the same time, cleansing both body and soul.

Yogi Adityanath has still not confirmed the numbers his police have put out. PM Modi has reassured the families. VHP global chief Alok Kumar has said that this is the “will of god.”

The problem is that the VHP leader is right. There is probably deep sorrow in the ashrams and akharas on the banks of the Ganga these last few days at the deaths of the pilgrims, but the overwhelming sentiment remains, “Chalo, ho gaya. It was terrible, but this is the Kumbh. Not just an ordinary Kumbh, a Maha Kumbh. How can any government be blamed when millions of devotees want to pray together at the same time in such a small space?”

People like me will point to the unshakeable fatalism of the Hindu devotee and say, perhaps this is part of the problem. Some of you upstanding folk may metaphorically stomp your feet and add, Sack this CM, transfer that DGP. Instead, I would entreat all of you to get out of your heated homes and go to the nearest railway station from where the Kumbh Specials for Prayagraj are leaving.

People carrying bundles of provisions on their heads, the poorest of the poor, with nothing to hold on to except their faith in the Almighty — perhaps, someday, she May improve their lot. The coaches of the trains are packed to the gills with human beings, dark, expectant eyes set in bronzed faces, men with gamchas tied over their heads, women wearing brightly coloured saris — red, orange, pink, the colours of fertility, of celebration. Of course this is also a pilgrimage of joy.

“Jai Ma Gange!” echoes as you walk and walk and walk over the pontoon bridges on the Ganga and then to and from the Sangam, over the sand in which bodies were buried during those awful Covid years barely five years ago. You remember the pictures of dogs poking their noses in those sands. Families have spread themselves on it now, on plastic sheets made from used KitKat wrappers. Home Minister Amit Shah and his wife, accompanied by Yogi, also came for a dip in the Sangam on Monday, so the police shut 17 bridges back into the city, in the name of security. Scenes of mothers with babies as well as older people exhausted beyond belief plead with UP policemen to let them pass, but they remain unmoved. You must trudge to the 18th and the 19th bridge to return, another 4 km upstream, they say. Upar se aadesh aaya hai.

A minor political row has broken out since the Mauni Amavasya stampede, with Akhilesh Yadav crying foul, saying he doesn’t believe the low numbers of deaths being cited, while Rahul Gandhi has complained about the “VIP culture” that discriminates against ordinary folk. Certainly there are still many missing people.

A judicial enquiry will attempt to figure out the truth, but the fact remains that nothing these Opposition leaders say is likely to amount to even a drop in the churning ocean of UP politics, because they are not seen as serious alternatives to the political regime at hand. Any anger against Yogi, it is now clear, will only come from the faceless devotees themselves, who feel that the chief minister, elected on a majority Hindu mandate, hasn’t done enough to take care of them.

Moreover, the cynic will point out, anger cannot be transformed into a political challenge unless it is channelised by someone. Look high and low in UP — there’s no one with either the credibility, the political heft or the staying power that can oppose the BJP today.

Opposition leaders love to blame the ruling party for their autocratic behaviour — and god knows, many of them have a point. But look at what Rahul Gandhi did when the water in Delhi’s Yamuna between Arvind Kejriwal and the BJP began to get hot last week? He got an activist from the SANDRP NGO to take him for a boat-ride on the river that is really a nullah and explain to him what’s going on.

Against the light, Rahul looked so good in that photo-shoot. But let’s cut to the chase and ask, how many votes is the Congress going to get in Delhi? And if Rahul is so keen on a joint INDIA bloc against Modi’s BJP, why didn’t he overrule his own party workers who turned down his idea of an alliance with AAP in the Haryana polls last year? And why didn’t he float the idea this time in Delhi?

To reiterate, the vote-share difference between the winning BJP (39.94%) and the losing Congress (39.09%) in Haryana was 0.85 percentage point, while AAP won 1.79 per cent of the votes. Guess who would have won if Congress and AAP had fought together. Still, the Congress refuses to learn. Nearly four months after the elections, a sense of chaos and ad hocism prevails — a leader of the legislature party in the state has still not been appointed.

A stunning win in Haryana gave the BJP the impetus to win Maharashtra. And now the all-important battle for Delhi, with voting day on February 5, looms large.

It is hardly a coincidence that the PM has picked that day to take his dubki in the Sangam — it follows that all the TV channels will devote much air-time to Pilgrim Modi’s journey to the Kumbh, which also means that the life-and-death battle for Delhi is in danger of being pushed to the second spot.

As for the life-and-death battle in Prayagraj, there’s a lesson for the Opposition here too. Back in 2022, the BJP won back UP again (255 seats to the Samajwadi Party’s 111) despite the fact that Yogi’s administration had failed to cope with Covid and people ended up falling like flies.

But Yogi still won because the alternative just didn’t measure up — several Samajwadi Party leaders had escaped to Delhi, some even to London. They were not even present to lend a shoulder to the biers and cremations that took place during the pandemic, many on the banks of the Ganga.

That’s why it’s Ram bharose in UP. Not because the BJP fights for every vote in every village and city, but because the Opposition simply doesn’t.