New Delhi: Maha Kumbh 2025 kicks off in Uttar Pradesh today and global media has taken notice. In a way, it’s the quintessential ‘India story’—a heady cocktail of religion, culture, spirituality, and sheer numbers.
Over 400 million people are expected to visit Prayagraj over the next 45 days—a spectacle so large that it can be seen from space, BBC reports in ‘Millions start bathing in holy rivers at India’s biggest Hindu festival.’
High-profile visitors are already marking their attendance. Indian media can’t get enough of Laurene Powell, wife of Apple co-founder, the late Steve Job, arriving at the Maha Kumbh to take a dip in the Ganga.
10 million people will have joined her in the Ganga Monday and the number is expected to rise to 20 million on Tuesday, the BBC reports. But, the report said, the preparations in Prayagraj seem inadequate so far.
“On Sunday, just hours before proceedings were due to begin, many parts of the sprawling grounds in Prayagraj still appeared to be a work in progress. Some of the camps set up by saints and other worshippers had no water and intermittent power supplies. Thousands of toilet cubicles were still yet to be set up and many already installed were unusable because of missing water connections,” the BBC reports.
The Guardian strikes a more political note. The scale and grandeur of this year’s festivities are not only because it’s a rare, once-in-12-year occurrence, it is even more significant because it takes place every 144 years. The festival this year has taken on a more political significance this time around.
“The festival is viewed by many as a potent – and politically advantageous – symbol of Hindu unity and power, and this year’s celebrations are expected to be the most expensive on record, backed by vast state resources and a huge PR campaign,” The Guardian writes in ‘India’s Maha Kumbh Mela festival gets under way for first time in 144 years.’
It’s also one of the “most polarised”—authorities have reportedly banned Muslim vendors and Muslim taxi drivers are being sidelined.
The article offers insight into the digital revolution brewing inside the Kumbh Mela: an official app will help pilgrims navigate the “maze of temples, bathing spots, food stalls, medical tents and missing persons booths,” while an AI chatbot that speaks eleven languages will answer any logistical or spiritual questions over WhatsApp.
Pilgrims will also be handed radio frequency wristbands that can be used to locate them if they get lost, and thousands of underwater and aerial drones will be deployed for security.
In Bloomberg, scholar and author of ‘Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of Modern India,’ Ananya Vajpeyi offers a more personal, philosophical insight into the Kumbh Mela. On a recent visit to her local temple in Delhi, she observed the fervour around the Kumbh, which she uses it to explain how it offers an opportunity for the BJP government to double down on religiosity.
Organising such a huge festival is no small feat, writes Vajpeyi in the ‘The World’s Largest Pilgrimage Is a Stage for India’s Hindu Right.’ During the first Kumbh to take place in independent India—February 1954—hundreds of pilgrims died in a stampede, after which governments had to provide facilities on a mind-boggling scale.
“No previous administration has embraced this task with as much gusto as the current federal government, led by (PM Narendra) Modi and his Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party and the BJP-ruled state government of Adityanath,” writes Vajpeyi in the dispatch.
“For both men, the Maha Kumbh represents an opportunity to burnish religious and political credentials, as much as their administrative capabilities. To that end, they have hyped up the event to an unprecedented degree, projecting a cumulative attendance of over 400 million—equivalent to a third of India’s population.”
And political parties across the world can only fantasise about this kind of reach, writes Vajpeyi. The Maha Kumbh will give the BJP extraordinary access to a significant proportion of its voter base.
But it comes with dangers, the article cautions. BJP rule has transformed the syncretic cultures of cities like Prayagraj and Ayodhya into “sanitised monochrome Hinduism,” happening alongside the takeover and erasure of small and large mosques alike.
Vajpeyi writes about a temple priest’s innocent question to her: would she be making the trip to the Maha Kumbh this year?
“To him, as to most of the temple’s congregants, it is merely a question of devotion,” reflects Vajpeyi. “But to Modi, Adityanath and the Hindu Right, the Maha Kumbh is yet another opportunity — this time, on a monumental scale — to flatten out India’s cultural diversity with an overwhelming show of majoritarianism. I didn’t have the heart to explain to the solicitous manager that this is why I will not be joining the pilgrimage.”
The reflection calls to mind a recent article by contributing writer Robert F. Worth in The Atlantic. The reported article is a deep dive into Modi’s India—it opens with the consecration of the Ram Temple in Ayodhya, arguably a crowning moment for the Modi government, and then revisits Ayodhya to find it a city full of disenchantment with demagoguery.
“India has been living on hype,” Worth writes in the article ‘Narendra Modi’s Populist Facade Is Cracking.’
“Its leaders manufacture bigger promises every year: India as an economic titan, a spiritual leader, a world power capable of standing alongside China, Russia, Europe, and America. Modi’s enablers describe him as a ‘civilizational figure’—someone who stands above politics, who will use his country’s demographic weight to rewrite the rules of the global economy.”
But the 2024 general elections “cracked upon Modi’s populist facade”, amid “spreading discontent with his economic and political record. India’s growth has been heavily weighted toward the wealthy, who have become exponentially richer on Modi’s watch.”
India is an experiment, the largest such experiment in the world, Worth writes. And the Modi years have been a testing ground for this question: “What, in the long run, exerts greater sway on the electorate—the lure of demagoguery, or the reality of deteriorating living conditions?”
By the end of the article—which also talks about Hindutva and the RSS, H-Pop, the spectre of unemployment and the desperate hunger for jobs, the fast and awesome infrastructural development, the advancements in digital technologies, and the rise in intolerance and lynchings—Worth arrives at an answer.
The chest-thumping will never be louder than the very real problems of unemployment and underdevelopment. “Modi’s legacy may be decided by those who no longer chant his name. Indian democracy will face its most important test in the small towns and villages where the bulk of the population still lives,” he writes.
We don’t need certificate
Foreigners writing trash about India does not bother us at all. We do not seek or need their stamp of approval.
It’s our own, like Ms. Ananya Vajpeyi and others of her ilk, that bother us. Despite being Indians, they leave no stone unturned to defame and denigrate this great nation and civilization. It’s really sad and disappointing.