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| Religious fanaticism has taken roots in India | | 'Tolerant' Hindus encourage intolerant acts | |
B L KAK
NEW DELHI: Idols of Hindu deities 'drinking' milk offered by devotees! Irritating kind of mass hysteria swept across Delhi and other parts of India since Sunday, as rumours spread like wild fire of yet another 'miracle'. The 'miracle' of idols of Hindu deities 'drinking' milk offered by devotees. Ironically, these devotees also included teachers and professors.
In a replay of a similar hysteria that swept across the country in September 1995, thousands of devout Hindus gathered outside select temples in Delhi and elsewhere in the country, offering milk to the idols of deities. The 'miracle' or blind faith did have the country in its grip. Faithfuls rushed to the temples when it was rumoured that idols of Ganesh, Durga and in some cases Shiva started 'drinking' milk.
Nonetheles, there were hundreds of Hindus who, while ridiculing such intolerant acts, refused to see the episode in the light of God's 'glory'. Indeed, they rubbished the idea completely. On the other hand, at the same time, thousands of other equally awestruck residents of Mumbai continued to throng the Mahim beach, consuming ‘sweet water’ that they claim appeared ‘miraculously’ in the midst of a cesspool, and had ‘curative properties.’
The police have virtually given up controlling the frenzied mobs that have gathered at the beach since Saturday, and men, women and children could be seen consuming seawater, certified as poisonous by a top government laboratory. Hawkers have been selling ‘bottled’ seawater at hefty premiums to visitors who could not enter the sea. Hundreds of tonnes of industrial affluent, human waste, and gooey chemicals are washed into the Mahim bay every day. Unfortunately, thousands of gullible Mumbai residents have been drinking this deadly cocktail for the past three days. The Bombay Municipal Corporation (BMC) has issued a health alert, fearing an outbreak of an epidemic of waterborne diseases.
But even as the authorities were trying to bring about some semblance of order in Mahim, reports of idols of Hindu deities drinking milk in Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat and other States flashed across the television screens, leading to similar claims from many localities in India's financial capital. Large crowds gathered outside temples dedicated to Hindu deities Shiva and Ganesh, and even idols of Sai Baba. People stood in long queues outside some of the temples, and carried milk along with them.
Some television channels also added to the mania, by extensively quoting people claiming to have fed the idols with milk. Streams of milk poured out of most temples across Uttar Pradesh as long queues of devotees as well as the curious offered the liquid to the stone idols in the wake of a rumour that the deities were ‘sipping milk’.
The superstition caught hundreds of towns and cities acros the country in a big way. In 1995, millions of Hindus ‘offered milk’ to deity Ganesha in temples across India and even abroad. The current incident is suspected to have been prompted by reports of seawater around a dargah in Mumbai turning ‘sweet’. However, experts term the ‘milk-sipping’ phenomenon a ‘hoax.’
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