Stranded in Ayodhya amid Covid-19 lockdown, religious tourists blame govt apathy

Tourists allege they haven’t received any medical or other help from authorities, while Nishads say they’re barely making ends meet under lockdown.

Meera Devi (front) of the Nishad community outside Ayodhya has given shelter to Ram Krishan Maurya and his wife Ila during the lockdown | Photo: Praveen Jain | ThePrint

Ayodhya: “I had flu-like symptoms, after I took a bath in the Saryu river after travelling from Gorakhpur to Ayodhya in the sun. But the doctor in the emergency room of the government hospital refused to check me,” 32-year-old Ram Krishan Maurya alleged to ThePrint.

Maurya and his wife Ila Devi, residents of Baijnathpur village near Gorakhpur, have been stranded in Ayodhya since India was placed under a lockdown to fight the outbreak of Covid-19. They had come to visit the Ram Janmabhoomi site, but weren’t able to find refuge anywhere, until they went to a Nishad community settlement outside the main entrance gate to Ayodhya city, where they were given shelter by Meera Devi.

The Mauryas are not the only religious tourists stuck outside Ayodhya due to the lockdown. Mattu and Sheela Singh, a couple from Nayagaon, Bihar, have their own tale of woe to narrate.

Sheela suffers from chronic asthma and her medicines have run out. The couple have been unable to reach the city’s Shri Ram Hospital on their own, and allege that the police and ambulance services have refused to help out.

Mattu Singh and his wife Sheela are from Nayagaon, Bihar, and had come to visit the Ram Janmabhoomi in Ayodhya | Photo: Praveen Jain | ThePrint

“My wife cannot walk much, and there is no help from the authorities of the city. When I went walking to the hospital, the doctors turned me away and asked me to purchase the medicine from outside,” Mattu told ThePrint.

“When we don’t have the money to eat, how we can afford to buy such expensive medicines?”

Mattu is just glad that they found Parvati Devi, an 87-year-old widow in the Nishad settlement who has no other family, who gave them shelter when they needed it the most.

No sewerage, water, rations or cooking gas

The Nishads are a community who earn their living through fishing and boating. But since the river Saryu changed course a few years ago, they were displaced, hampering their livelihoods and income drastically.

The Nishad settlement is located at Ramnagar halt, bang opposite Ayodhya’s main gate on the Lucknow-Gorakhpur highway. The settlement consists of around 30-40 huts with thatched roofs. All the houses are in a dilapidated condition, with no sewerage, sanitation or water supply. The residents are also left without ration under the lockdown, have no cooking gas, and depend on food donation drives conducted by passers-by every two or three days.

Urmila Devi lives with her family of five in a thatched-roof hut that’s barely 30 yards wide, so it’s pointless to ask her about social distancing.

She has an LPG cylinder and a twin-burner stove, but she has to cook the food on a wood-fuelled chulha as she cannot afford the cylinder refill anymore. She said: “I bought this cylinder set for Rs 8,000, but there’s little money left to refill it now.”

Urmila now collects wood for her chulha from a log that the entire settlement is rationing as cooking fuel. “There is very little ration available now, but the children won’t listen to us,” she said.

Saraswati Nishad and her husband collect wood for cooking | Photo: Praveen Jain | ThePrint

Saraswati Nishad, another resident, told ThePrint: “We used to make our living by selling wooden crafts, fuel wood, and sometimes by begging. But everything has been closed since the lockdown, and we are surviving on God’s will now.”

Facilities provided on paper

Parvati Devi, who has given shelter to Mattu and Sheela Singh, is also struggling to make ends meet.

“I have not received my pension for the last four months, and I don’t have any family or children. How will I survive now?” she asked, saying the pension she received four months ago was Rs 1,500.

Parvati Devi washes utensils as children run past her on the outskirts of Ayodhya | Photo: Praveen Jain | ThePrint

Ram Chandra Jha, who runs a grocery shop nearby, added that he hasn’t been able to open his shop for over a week, because the police doesn’t let him. “All the facilities provided by the government to the people are only on paper… Nothing on the ground,” he said.

Jha also pointed towards Ram Krishan Maurya and said the police also doesn’t let the tourist buy anything from anywhere else, and that he was beaten up by the police one evening after buying some rations with whatever money he had left. Asked if this was true, Maurya said it was.

The official version

ThePrint spoke to Anuj Jha, district magistrate of Ayodhya, about the plight of the stranded pilgrims.

“We don’t have knowledge of any stranded religious pilgrims in the city so far, but if there are some, we will take adequate care of them,” Jha said.

Ayodhya Senior Superintendent of Police Ashish Tiwari’s office, when contacted, denied the allegations of Ram Krishna Maurya being beaten up by cops and claimed the police wasn’t resorting to any violence amid the lockdown.