Street Eternity

  Four Kanwarias, killed by speeding trucks near Allahabad (UP), two crushed to death at Manesar (Haryana), two more at Kotputli (Rajasthan)...  Kanwarias go on the rampage smashing buses and cars... Police resort to lathi charge... Normalcy returns. This happens almost every year. The scene repeats itself, although the details are different each year.

Initial reaction to these incidents is apathy and disgust. Politically motivated excursions, unwarranted accidents, senseless violence, antiquated crowd management techniques - that's the way we, urban-English-speaking folk, react. But such thoughts are antiquated because they explain or resolve nothing. While the truth is, the phenomenon persistently demands an explanation.

The phenomenon is colossal. More than five lakh Kanwarias passed through Delhi this year! Prem Singh Negi, District Information Officer at Haridwar, says: "We had drawn up plans for 60 to 65 lakh Kanwarias converging at Haridwar between July 18 and July 30 this year. We started diverting traffic July 24 onwards." Holy water is collected at one of the four places: at Gomukh where the Gangotri glacier becomes Bhagirathi, at Haridwar where the Ganga enters the plains, at Baidyanath Dham in Jharkhand and Dhar in Madhya Pradesh. It adds up to 80 lakh Kanwarias for the entire country! An activity of such colossal proportions demands huge infrastructural support.  

The activity not only requires roads and policemen to prevent traffic jams, it requires food, resting places, sanitation facilities and medical aid for 80 lakh people in transit. The elementary infrastructural unit is the Kanwar-camp. These camps are free, temporary walk-in shelters that provide cooked food, bathing/toilet facilities, beds, medicines and hot water to wash tired, blistered feet. The loudspeakers pump 10,000 watts of bhajans mostly parodied on popular Hindi tunes, with little regard for melody.

Kanwar-camps dot the entire route, beginning at the water collection point and extending till the local Shiv Mandir where the holy water is finally offered. They start functioning at least a week before Shiv Ratri (literally, Shiva's night), the last date for offering holy water. Some camps are operational more than a month before Shiv Ratri. Even a geographically small state like Delhi has more than 500 such camps.

Do these Kanwar-camps spring up spontaneously - like greenery during every monsoon? 

Durga Colony (Malak Nagar) on GT Road at Sahibabad in UP is a poor locality. Every year the residents constitute a samiti, collect money and organise a week long camp for Kanwarias. According to Satya Prakash, a samiti member, "This year the budget is Rs 2.5 lakh."
Walk four kilometers down the road, into Delhi, and you will find Kanwar-camps whose budget could be as high as Rs 70-80 lakh. Activists of the Hindutva network (front organisations of the RSS-BJP) are the organisers of these camps. Says Rajender Pankaj, kendriya mantri of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), "The food we provide at these camps is better than at marriage parties."

Apart from diligent organisation at the grassroot level, the saffron brigade has created a ‘special purpose vehicle' at the national level. Closely identified with Hindutva fronts, it is called the ‘Dharam Yatra Mahasangh (DYM)'. This organisation was founded in 1995. Names of Atal Bihari Vajpayee and VHP supremo Ashok Singhal are flaunted as patrons. The Mahasangh organises four excursions every year: the Kanwar yatra, the Amarnath yatra, the Kailash-Mansarovar yatra and the Sindhu Darshan Yatra.