As Banaras Has its ‘Maja Aawat Ho’ Moment, Ganga Gasps for Breath

A popular Banarasi variant of a story in which a jackal is stung by a scorpion when the four-legged intruder seeks to greedily eat the ripe mangoes in an orchard, goes like this:

Phir phir khaibe
Par khet na jaibe,
Khet pe jaibe
To amua na khaibe

Generous with their ready wit and sterling one-liners, Banarasis double up in pejorative laughter at this Aesop’s fable-like story, which has unmistakable similarity with what they say is their VIP parliamentary representative Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s current predicament.

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Amid Chants of ‘Vikas’, Ganga and Banarsis Caught in a Trap

“Banaras ke log to paan khaa ke mazey le rahein hain (People of Banaras are eating paan and enjoying),” says Dr Vijaya Kumar Mishra, Professor of Neurology at the Institute of Medical Sciences under the Banaras Hindu University, who also runs the Swachh Ganga Research Laboratory at Tulsi Ghat on the north bank of the Ganges.

A blackboard outside the sanitised laboratory, with its glass beakers, test tubes and electronic gadgets, presents alarming statistics: The water quality of the Ganga on 3 February reached critical levels, in which the reading for biochemical oxygen demand (BOD) stood at 6.4 mg/dl, whereas the permissible limit is 3 mg/dl and the presence of fecal matter was 82,000 per 100 ml.

Even as much is tom-tomed of the Modi government’s Namami Gange programme of cleansing the river that daily receives tons of sewage and other solid waste, Banarasis sit in throngs in this clangorous city, sipping sugary-syrup tea and chewing paan, and with winks and broad grins proclaim that “Modi yahan jhoot mein phans gaye hain (Modi has been caught in a web of lies)” or “Banaras se PM ko jitwa ke Banaras-waale phans gaye hain (After electing Prime Minister Modi from Banaras, people in his constituency are now paying for it)”.

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As we set off in a mechanised country boat upstream the Ganga, the stench of sewer gets overwhelming as we drift westward on the river. Dr Mishra points towards a set of grim parallel walls built to conceal the Nagwa naala (drain) from public view as it disgorges the town’s frothy sewage into the river.

As Aakash Nishadh, the 16-year-old saareng, cuts off the engine and navigates the boat with an oar, Dr Mishra’s students on the boat instinctively reach for their handkerchiefs or kerchiefs to shield their nostrils from the noxious fume that wafts out from the huge drain’s edge, the frothy effluent mingling with the river as the brackish liquid gushes down into the river with a roar.

Sharp-eyed eagles swoop down to pick morsels of flesh from the gushing froth. By the naala, buffaloes take a late afternoon dip in the Ganges, while a few other burly quadrupeds lounge on the pockmarked bank even as a couple of men rush down the bank’s gradient, pull down their kachhas (undergarments) and coolly empty their bowels.

“You will find a similar sight at the Khirkiya naala downstream, where the BOD content has been found to be 40 mg/dl,” Dr Mishra said, revealing that 350 million litres of sewage goes into the Ganga everyday even as the Namami Gange programme hasn’t been able to come up with any feasible alternative plan to stop the river from further pollution.

As many as 37 drains disgorge the over-populated town’s sewerage into the Ganga. Dr Mishra and his lab assistants said that 92 percent of the Ganga pollution is caused by sewerage, while 8 percent is from solid waste, including rituals.

A year ago, the Akhilesh Yadav government stepped in to checkmate Modi by a move marked by one-upmanship: it released several thousand kachhua – tortoises – into the Ganges, marking off a certain portion of the river a “tortoise sanctuary”.

“Ab yeh kachhua palo abhiyan ne Ganga safayi per rok laga diya hai, (Now this tortoise campaign has stalled the Clean Ganga project),” says Dr RP Singh, a former BHU employee, who spends time with friends in adda sessions twice a day at the Assi chauraha. Today, no one really knows whether the tortoises are alive in the Ganga, though Singh believes that most may have swum to Bengal.

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Banaras, Modi and a ‘Pious Addiction’

Local senior journalist Amitabh Bhattacharya is subtle about his fellow townsmen’s perception of and support for Modi. “It is all a pious addiction,” Bhattacharya, who runs news operations for the Allahabad-based Northern India Patrika, said, adding that since Modi became Banaras’ MP, there have been “gimmicks and magics galore, which have held the town’s inhabitants in their thrall.”

“What Banaras is witnessing today could be summarised in Bhojpuri: maja aawat ho,” says septuagenarian Bhattacharya, adding: “par kispe aur kismein aa raha hai, yeh pata nahin (But who and what is enjoying is unknown)” Modi, he says, is “pumping in a lot of money” to “dress a 6,000-year-old town in a bikini”.

Bhattacharya, who has spent his entire lifetime so far in Banaras, says that “this Banarasi way of life is difficult to assess because people here are in the grip of two opposing world views.” The first is that the townspeople as well as the tourists who visit it believe that “Banaras is a place for worthy death”. And secondly, since Banaras is the “only developed town in eastern UP which is bustling with activity, people also want to live”.

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Critique of BJP Flows In

Banarasis are “seriously casual” as they are “carelessly carefree” even as infrastructural development is not important. But it is “mental satisfaction” that drives them to the extent that they will vote for any person or any party that gives it to them. But the BJP’s choice of candidates for the eight assembly seats in Banaras district has not just bewildered its voters, but has also caused consternation among them.

“They are the black spots on Modi’s otherwise white kurta,” Bhattacharya says, making it clear that the “choice” of some of the BJP’s nominees could go against the party. “Not all the BJP’s candidates are like well-sculpted idols. In fact, most are like the faceless Egyptian goddess Anubis,” says Bhattacharya, who hastens to add that the denial of ticket to the seven-time BJP MLA, Shyamdeb Roy Chowdhury, for the Banaras seat, hasn’t gone down well with the townspeople.

With Banaras and its inhabitants caught in the throes of an urban strangle, which leaves little or no scope for development other than what already exists, Bhattacharya says that “relief can usher in if and only if four separate satellite townships are built over the next few years.”

For hardcore Banarasis such as Dr Mishra, Dr Singh and Bhattacharya, who love their couple of hours of leisure in the warren of crowd-choked ghats on the Ganga’s bank, the ‘e-boats’ that Modi launched with much fanfare last summer constitute the starkest example of dysfunction. With no tourist interested in taking a ride on the e-boats, they idle away by the river bank, bobbing in the gentle ripple of the waves.