[The Kumbh Mela — named after a vessel containing divine nectar — is a vast festival that rotates among four locations, drawing multitudes of Hindu ascetics, ordinary devotees, celebrities, tourists and even royalty. A quirk of the astrological calendar dictated that the ritual in the north Indian city of Haridwar would be held in 2021, a year earlier than normal.]
By Joanna Slater and Niha Masih
When the pilgrims returned to their
homes across the country, some brought the virus with them.
The precise role of the Hindu
religious festival — the Kumbh Mela — in India’s raging outbreak is impossible
to know in the absence of contact tracing. But the event was one source of
infections as cases skyrocketed, according to local officials, religious
leaders and media reports.
More than 414,000 new cases were
reported in India on Friday, a global record. About 4,000 people are dying a
day, but such
figures are an undercount. Experts believe the number of fatalities will
rise in coming days, since deaths from covid-19 lag behind new cases.
Dozens of nations, including the
United States, have sent aid to India as it combats a surge that has
overwhelmed hospitals and led to shortages of oxygen. Several Indian cities and states
have announced lockdowns to stem the spread of infections.
[Coronavirus
has crushed India's health system. Patients are on their own.]
The combination of an enormous wave
of coronavirus cases and one of the biggest mass gatherings on the planet has
fueled criticism that India’s government should have curtailed the religious
event or canceled it altogether. Last year, when India had just several hundred
coronavirus cases, the government swiftly imposed a nationwide lockdown.
The Kumbh Mela “may end up being
the biggest superspreader in the history of this pandemic,” said Ashish Jha,
dean of the School of Public Health at Brown University, in
a recent interview with Indian news outlet The Wire. “It brought so
many people together from across India.”
The Kumbh Mela — named after a
vessel containing divine nectar — is a vast festival that rotates among four
locations, drawing multitudes of Hindu ascetics, ordinary devotees,
celebrities, tourists and even royalty. A quirk of the astrological calendar
dictated that the ritual in the north Indian city of Haridwar would be held in
2021, a year earlier than normal.
Such a massive assembly of humanity
— the event sometimes draws tens of millions of people — has long presented public
health challenges. In colonial times, British
authorities limited the entry of devotees several times because of
fears of disease.
Ahead of this year’s festival,
India’s health ministry said that state authorities were not conducting an
adequate number of tests and warned of a “potential
upsurge” in cases. Pilgrims were obliged to present a negative coronavirus
test, wear masks and observe social distancing, but reports indicated
that such
requirements were
flouted.
Tirath Singh Rawat, the leader of
the state where the Kumbh Mela took place and a member of the ruling Hindu
nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, urged devotees from all over the world to
attend. “Nobody will be stopped in the name of covid-19,” he said in March. “We are sure the faith in God will
overcome the fear of the virus.”
Chandrama Das Tyagi, the head
priest of a famous Hindu temple in the central Indian city of Bhopal, arrived
at the festival on April 6 along with 25 of his followers. On April 12, he and
more than 3 million others took part in one of the event’s main rituals, led by
groups of ash-smeared ascetics who charged into the water to the sound of blowing
conches.
That evening the 49-year-old came
down with a fever. Two days later, he and a friend boarded an overnight train
home, where he tested positive for coronavirus, said Lekhraj Sharma, the
coordinator for the temple. Tyagi was admitted to the hospital as his symptoms
worsened, and he died on April 29.
Sharma said that the friend who had
traveled with Tyagi on the train from the Kumbh Mela tested negative, but he
wasn’t sure about the rest of their group. He said the attendees went straight
to their villages after coming back from the gathering at the end of April.
A patchwork effort to test, trace
and isolate returnees has turned up numerous instances of infections. In the
small town of Gyaraspur in central India, 60 of the 83 people who went to the
festival tested positive upon their return, said Abbas Zaidi, a doctor and
local health official. Some of those who returned were reluctant to be tested,
Zaidi said, including the head priest of a well-known local temple. Zaidi went
with a team of police officers to test the priest, whose results came back
positive for the virus.
Sixty cases “is significant for a
small place like ours,” Zaidi said. “I think we could have been in a much
better position right now.”
In Ahmedabad, a city in the western
state of Gujarat, many pilgrims returned from the festival on trains. In one
batch of travelers, about 10 percent of those tested came back positive for
coronavirus, said Bhavin Solanki, a municipal medical health officer. They were
sent to institutional quarantine. Officials in the eastern state of Odisha and
the northeastern state of Assam also confirmed that people returning from
Haridwar had tested positive for the virus.
A famous Bollywood music composer
tested positive for the virus a few days after returning to Mumbai from the
religious festival, his son told
the Indian Express newspaper. The 66-year-old died in late April. The
former king and queen of Nepal also tested positive after attending the
gathering, the
Himalayan Times reported.
In Uttarakhand, the state where the
festival took place, infections spiked. At the start of April, when the Kumbh
Mela began, the state was reporting 500 new cases a day. By the end of the
month, that figure had soared to nearly 6,000. One in five of the doctors and
paramedical staff deployed at the festival tested positive, said Arjun Senger,
the event’s health officer.
On April 17 — after two of the main
rituals had concluded — Prime Minister Narendra Modi appealed
to devotees to observe the rest of the festival in a “symbolic” manner
to “give strength to India’s fight against the virus.”
Modi’s soft-touch approach stood in
stark contrast to his government’s actions at the start of the pandemic last
year. When a gathering of a Muslim missionary group in Delhi emerged
as a superspreader event, authorities shut down its headquarters and
detained thousands of its members — some
of them for months — on charges that courts later called spurious.
[In
India's devastating coronavirus surge, anger at Modi grows]
The Kumbh Mela was by far the
biggest of many large gatherings that went ahead in different parts of India
over the course of April, including election rallies, sports events and
weddings.
“There is no doubt in my mind that
these social gatherings where people are in close proximity has increased the
spread,” said Jacob John, an epidemiologist and community health physician in
the southern state of Tamil Nadu.
Unlike political rallies, the Kumbh
Mela drew people from every corner of the country, John said, allowing variants
prevalent in one region to jump to different geographies. For instance, the
variant first identified in the United Kingdom appears to be fueling
infections in parts of north India, while the so-called Indian variant
is more common in the western part of the country.
The infections also spread among
the attendees, including the members of the akharas, or religious sects, that
spearhead the event. Ravindra Puri, the secretary of the Niranjani Akhara, said
that nine of the ascetics in his organization, all of them elderly, died after
contracting covid-19. On April 15, the group announced that it was withdrawing
from the gathering.
The Kumbh Mela “will happen again,”
Puri said. “But people should not die.”
Other religious leaders who took
part in the Kumbh Mela said they had no regrets. Dharamdasji is a 73-year-old
Hindu priest whose sect sent hundreds of thousands of members to the gathering.
“Covid will come and go,” he said.
“A festival for the gods cannot be stopped.”
Shams Irfan in Srinagar and Taniya
Dutta in New Delhi contributed reporting.