KUMBHA MELA : A SPECTACLE LIKE NO OTHER
I have been in Parliament for over forty years now. There was a time when the people who came to me with some or other request, the largest number used to be those wanting a telephone connection. Most of them would say that they have been on the waiting list of applicants for a connection for years, and yet the possibility of getting a phone connection is nowhere in sight.
With the arrival of cell phones, things have radically changed. Today hardly any one comes with this demand. Mobile Phone use in India is growing faster than anywhere else in the world. By 2010, it was estimated that there were in the country more than 60 crore cell phone subscribers and 15 million new subscribers are being added to this number every month. There is an explosion in the number of Internet users also. In 1998, this number was 1.4 million. Today it is more than 75 millions. Harvard Professor Diana Eck whose book on India titled Sacred Geography, I quoted a fortnight back has described India as the “Capital of the technology revolution”.
The last chapter of Diana Eck’s book is titled “A Pilgrim’s India today”. In this she writes:
“It should not surprise us that the revolutions in transportation and communications have stimulated an even greater flow of pilgrimage traffic. Far from fading with the onrush of modern technology, pilgrimage has gained new energies. The Internet provides access to websites for Tirupati or Vaishno Devi, where one can make a booking for pujas and special darshans and make a reservation in a dharmashala. If one is simply unable to make the trip, one can listen to the chanting of the morning suprabhatam in the Tirupati temple and there are connections for online darshan and donation. Pilgrims can browse the Internet for the best deals on the char dham yatra in the Himalayas or pilgrimage packages to seemingly countless destinations, from Badrinath in the mountains to Rameshvaram in the far south of Tamil Nadu”.
Yet another example this chapter has given is about how the volume of pilgrims has been growing in Vaishno Devi (in J&K). Diana says that in 1986 visitors to Vaishno Devi were 14 lakhs, while in 2009 it was over 82 lakhs. In the last three years, the annual number must have surely crossed one crore !
Last week at Prayag, at the triveni confluence of Ganga, Yamuna and the mythical Saraswati, the Kumbha Mela, the largest religious festival in the world, commenced. Prayag is not the only place where this gigantic Kumbh Mela is held. Kumbha literally means an urn, and in case of the sacred Kumbh Mela, an urn containing amrita (nectar). The Mela is held at three other places also though at different points of time – at Haridwar, Ujjain and Nasik.
I had been to the Prayagraj Kumbha twelve years back. More recently, I had been to the Kumbh Mela in Haridwar. That was in 2010, when BJP’s Dr. Ramesh Pokhriyal ‘Nishank’ was Chief Minister. At this Mela, His Holiness the Dalai Lama was also with me at most of the functions.
Shortly before visiting Haridwar where I ordinarily stay at the Parmarth Niketan headed by Swami Chidanand ji, I had read an excellent write up on the Kumbh Melas by Mark Tully, who for many years had been BBC’s Chief of Bureau in New Delhi and who was externed from India by the Congress Government during the Emergency because he was strongly opposed to the Emergency. It is significant that after retirement Mark Tully has settled down in India.
In this write-up, Mark Tully had regretted that while media estimates often spoke about the number of millions who took bath in the Holy Ganga at the Kumbh, never have satellite photographs, computers and the other paraphernalia of modern technology been used to make a reasonably accurate estimate of the actual numbers.
So, when I visited the Kumbh in 2010, I asked our C.M. Dr. Pokhriyal to do this. Pokhariyal asked the ISRO National Remote Sensing Centre of the Union Government, and the Uttarakhand Space Application Centre of the State Government, to make a more dependable assessment of the number of pilgrims who had come.
The above mentioned two organizations using high resolution Indian Satellite Data and Ground Based Information made an estimate of the number of pilgrims who took bath on the Pramukh Shahi Snan Day (April 14, 2010) of the Kumbh Mela, and gave the estimated figure as 1 crore, 63 lakhs, 77 thousands and 5 hundred ! I hope these space organizations, on their own also, make an assessment about this year’s Kumbha Mela at Prayagraj.
Mark Tully’s piece on the Kumbh, taken from his book No Full Stops in India, says
“No other country in the world could provide a spectacle like the Kumbh Mela. It was a triumph for the much maligned Indian administrators, but it was a greater triumph for the people of India. And how did the English-language press react to this triumph? Inevitably, with scorn. The Times of India, the country’s most influential paper, published a long article replete with phrases like ‘Obscurantism ruled the roost in Kumbh’, ‘Religious dogma overwhelmed reason at the Kumbh’, and ‘The Kumbh after all remained a mere spectacle with its million hues but little substance.’
When Tully went to Allahabad, that is Prayag, he stayed with Sant Bax Singh, an ex-M.P. and brother of Shri V.P. Singh, a Congressman who later revolted against Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and became P.M. in 1989-90. Talking to Sant Bax Singh about religion and secularism, Mark Tully expressed the feeling that when so many millions attend the Kumbh Melas, is not fear of the elite justified that such religious congregations may lead to Hindu fundamentalism ?
The reply given to this question is not only interesting, but educating as well. Let me quote Sant Bax Singh’s response to the fear expressed by Mark Tully:
“Look, you know perfectly well that the vast majority of those who have bathed at the Sangam will go away and vote for secular parties like the Congress or my brother’s Janata Dal, so where is the question of a threat to secularism? Actually, this debate about secularism is a Western debate, because in your part of the world, religion blocked reason and science. Debates here have never been religion versus non-religion – that has been brought here by you.”
After quoting this conversation, Mark Tully sharply criticizes “aggressive secularism”, and calls it “a barren creed which can cause great offence to religious people.”
L.K. ADVANI
New Delhi
25 January, 2013
To Write Comment Please Login
.gif)
