Text dimension

Photos by Money Sharma. Video by Shubham Koul

High within the Himalayas, the place the mighty Ganges remains to be a frigid glacial stream, labourers fill jerry cans with its holy waters to be distributed to Hindus throughout India.

Buyers sparingly use the dear liquid to bless necessary events, from births, weddings, and funerals to festivals comparable to Diwali or the acquisition of a brand new automobile.

“This is for every faithful Hindu who can’t get here personally,” mentioned one of many staff within the pilgrimage city of Gangotri, giving his identify as Ramesh.

“It feels blessed to be part of a project that reaffirms our Hindu faith and delivers this divine water to all corners of the country,” he informed AFP.

The scheme is run by the Indian postal service and is one instance of a raft of initiatives, from the symbolic to the gargantuan, launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi selling Hinduism within the nation 75 years after independence.

The water is taken into account purest closest to its supply so is collected in Gangotri, the place the Ganges begins its roughly 2,500-kilometre (1,550-mile) journey throughout India, and trucked to a bottling plant 100 kilometres downstream.

After being left to accept three or 4 days, it’s filtered in tanks earlier than staff decant it by hand into 250-millilitre plastic bottles.

Bought over-the-counter at submit workplaces round India, they price simply 30 rupees ($0.37) every — clients may also organize them on-line for residence supply at 321 rupees for a pack of 4.

Millions of the little containers have been offered for the reason that scheme launched six years in the past.

Since successful elections in 2014, Modi has put Hinduism entrance and centre of his authorities within the formally secular nation of 1.4 billion.

The core tenet of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and its militaristic ideological guardian the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, is that Hinduism is India’s unique faith.

This worries India’s 210 million Muslims and different minorities. Social media is rife with hate speech and assaults on Muslims and Christians have risen, activists say.

Modi’s greatest non secular building venture is a grand temple being constructed within the historic metropolis of Ayodhya.

Hindu zealots destroyed a centuries-old mosque there three many years in the past, triggering sectarian violence that killed greater than 1,000 individuals — most of them Muslims.

The authorities has additionally pushed a $1.5-billion freeway venture within the northern state of Uttarakhand, which can make it simpler for Hindu pilgrims to succeed in Gangotri and three different Himalayan temples.

The websites already obtain lots of of hundreds of devotees annually, and environmental activists are involved about constructing grand highways and tunnels within the ecologically delicate area.

Modi’s authorities has made clear it won’t let up on its imaginative and prescient, nonetheless, channelling cash into researching the properties of cow urine — a sacred animal in Hinduism — and discovering “proof” of legends in Hindu scriptures.

Some faculty textbooks have been rewritten to airbrush the function performed by Muslims in Indian historical past, whereas Islamic-sounding names of cities have been modified.

These “dramatic initiatives… create an ethos of a majoritarian nation and sublimely reinforce the feeling that we now see ourselves as a de-facto Hindu country,” mentioned Hartosh Singh Bal, political editor of The Caravan, an Indian English-language journal.

“Modi knows exactly what he’s doing,” he added.

“If critics now raise concerns about minorities or injustice, they can be labelled as someone who’s against such schemes delivering holy Ganges water — and shut them up.”

Recipients of the dear liquid, although, haven’t any such considerations.

New Delhi postman Rupesh Kumar, 23, has made a number of deliveries of the holy water, together with in the course of the present auspicious festive interval.

He feels “additional responsibility” at any time when he’s carrying it to a buyer for his or her ritual wants, he informed AFP.

“We also used Ganges water in the family for all special and religious occasions,” he mentioned.

“People are often very thankful and polite after I deliver these bottles to their homes.”

bb/stu/slb/ser/qan