Maha Kumbh 2025: Faith, lies and grandstanding

Bragging about his government’s preparedness and excellent arrangements for the ongoing Maha Kumbh mela, Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath had said they were ready to receive 100 crore (or a thousand million) people, “even though no more than 45 crore are expected to converge”.

That’s an estimated 45,00,00,000 people who were expected to congregate—admittedly not all at once—at the mela site around the Triveni Sangam in Prayagraj, which measures all of 40 hectares (or 0.4 square km). Wrap your head around this!

For devout Hindus showing up in their millions, it’s a never-again opportunity to wash away the sins of a lifetime. Plus, there’s the allure of a heavenly afterlife, as a possible bonus. It must be hard to resist that kind of temptation—after all, the next Maha Kumbh is supposedly 144 years away. So the build-up was intense: 3.00 am was reportedly the most auspicious time for ‘the holy dip’ on the ‘Shahi Snan’ day of 29 January and the ‘nose of the Sangam’ the most sacred spot.

It was only after the stampede that took many lives (the numbers are contested: officially 30, at the time of going to press, but several times that number according to sundry eyewitnesses and media reports) that the devout were told to take a dip “anywhere in the river” — it was, after all, ‘Gangajal’ all the way; even being at the Kumbh was apparently not necessary.

A belated advisory asked pilgrims to leave elders and children at home. Police turned the faithful away, telling them to return later. Even VVIPs of means, who have been the special focus of the state administration’s grand bandobast have reportedly had their passes cancelled — but AFTER the tragic stampede.

Not many media reports were willing to draw attention to the lopsided focus on the VIPs, and how their dream Maha Kumbh event had turned into the common man’s nightmare. When chief minister Yogi Adityanath finally acknowledged the heart-wrenching tragedy, he still seemed to blame the pilgrims for trying to scale the barricades.

Even as social media handles shared horrific accounts from ground zero, the government and mainstream media were in denial. “Don’t listen to rumours,” repeated the chief minister and his officials. “There was no stampede, just overcrowding and some devotees got injured,” said Rajesh Dwivedi, the SSP at Kumbh. It was nearly 20 hours later that they reluctantly admitted that at least 30 devotees had died.

In another grotesque exhibition of apathy, apparently unmoved by the tragedy that had unfolded hours ago, rose petals were showered from helicopters on the saints taking a dip in the afternoon.

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The harrowing experience of common folk has exposed the hollowness of the UP government’s claim that this Kumbh would be the safest by far.

Thousands of cameras, many of them AI-enabled, were projected as the hi-tech way to manage crowds and keep devotees safe. Radio-frequency-aided wristbands and mobile apps would track their movement in real time. But all the supposedly ‘advanced’ surveillance failed to anticipate, leave alone manage, the unregulated — yet expected — surge in the numbers around midnight.

Even after the stampede, with little or no information made available to them, thousands of people were seen going frantically from ‘lost and found’ kiosks to hospitals in Prayagraj, trying to trace their missing kin and companions.

At around midnight before the Shahi Snan (now officially known as ‘Amrit Snan’) on 29 January, Prayagraj commissioner Vijay Pant urged devotees, who were asleep under the open sky on the river bank, to get up and take the dip at once. Remember the saying, he said, ‘Jo sowat hai, soh khowat hai (those who sleep miss out)? Now that you are here, don’t wait… there could be a stampede with more people headed this way.'

His exhortation was put into action by policemen prodding tired devotees with their batons… go, go, go. While one sleepy woman protested: “We will go for the dip at 4.00 am, not now,” others meekly gave in. The administration was clearly desperate to clear the area before the expected surge around dawn. Within hours, though, between 1.00 and 2.00 am by most accounts, a stampede did follow, crushing devotees and triggering a desperate scramble to get out.

For all the grandstanding about the arrangements, clearly no lessons have been learnt from previous stampedes at similar congregations in the past, nor is there any visible sign that the administration comprehends the obvious need to regulate the numbers coming in at any point of time.

In the first week of January 2025, six devotees lost their lives and 35 were injured in a stampede at Tirupati. In July 2024, as many as 121 people were killed in Hathras after a satsang by the self-styled godman Bhole Baba. Twelve pilgrims died in a stampede in January 2022 at Vaishno Devi.

Stampedes have been a recurring feature at religious gatherings, and when you expect 450 million to turn up, the first thing you worry about is crowd control. As a consequence of the Karbala stampede in 2019 that killed 31 people, attendance was restricted; the opposite has happened at the Maha Kumbh 2025, with a massive campaign to attract more footfalls.

Could the tragedy have been avoided? Devotees who bore the brunt of the administration’s bhavya aayojan (grand arrangement) have left some points to ponder:

• Registration: If devotees were asked to register themselves on reaching Prayagraj and given numbered tokens before proceeding to the Sangam, might it have been more orderly?

• Time slots: Could devotees have been given time slots to bathe and return? (though that would’ve worked only if they did not have to walk 10–12 km one way)

• Transport: Could more shuttle buses have been arranged for devotees?

• Lighting and signage: VIP areas were very well-lit while common devotees stumbled in the dark, bumped into steel dustbins, lost their shoes and footing. Visible signage, directing devotees to campsites, changing rooms and information desks, could perhaps have taken precedence over the gigantic hoardings of Modi and Yogi?

• VIP culture: Not just ‘ordinary’ devotees, even the venerated ‘saints’ commented on the obsession with VIPs. The head of the Niranjan Akhada accused the administration of pandering to VIPs, who were indulged in their comfy lounges with laser shows and other distractions; the ‘VIP ghats’ had perceptibly cleaner water and were far less crowded. Swami Avadheshwaranand, one of the sankaracharyas, commented that neither dharma nor the Constitution sanction differential treatment; everyone is equal in the eyes of ‘Ganga maiya’, he said.

A devotee from Maharashtra was livid: “If you do not visit the Maha Kumbh, you are a traitor to your faith and the nation… if you do, you are on your own. You have to survive the crowd and suffer the rudeness, the unbelievable fares, the 20 km walk, the indignity of changing clothes in the middle of the crowds.” His mother managed to escape the stampede but lost her sari. “When we told the policemen that our mother was standing in her undergarments and all our belongings were lost, they laughed and said, people don’t bathe with their clothes on.”

Such “small mishaps” do occur at large events, one minister cavalierly said. “Things go wrong even at weddings, why blame the government?” asked another BJP supporter. No wonder Karl Marx once said: ‘Religion is the opium of the masses’.