A few IIT alumni have formed a forum called “IITians for Holy [my emphasis throughout] Ganga” demanding “suspension of the Loharinag Pala hydro-power project in Uttarakhand.” They are demanding “uninterrupted flow from Gangotri to Dharasu.”
A personal note here. I have motored along the banks of Bhagirathi River in this stretch about five years ago on my way to Gangotri from Dharasu and it is indeed an awe inspiring sight, especially with the background thought that the flow has sustained a civilization for thousands of years.
What is the disclaimer I started this piece with? The reference to the river being holy or its holiness in the news item is in the expansive sense, in the secular sense. It is holy in the sense of environmental reverence that is due it. The sentiment conveyed is one of universality, of how rivers are to be revered and the utility derived from them has to be bounded by a sense of scale, an expanded one in time and a curtailed one in physical dimensions. The river is not there for humans to exploit in the here and now, to the exclusion of the future. It has been a natural asset to our forefathers and should be allowed to sustain our descendants. If the extent of exploitation endangers the river beyond the immediate now, such efforts should be stopped forthwith. While this is the explicit tenor of the article as related to Bagirathi I contend that the message is applicable everywhere and at all times.
But I suspect that the sprinkling of the words like holy – starting with the name of the forum, “The Ganga is a sacred river”, “worshipped by millions of Indians”, “damage being caused to the holy river”, “free this holy river from bondage” – will be suborned by the rabidly religious to claim exclusivity to a religion and its exceptionality. The forum and the effort do not deserve this fate and hence the disclaimer.
How holy is the Ganga? As holy as the Nile is, the Mississippi is, the Yangtze is, the Brahmaputra is, the Shat al-Arab (downstream of the confluence of Euphrates and Tigris) is, the Amazon is, the Olympic is, the Thames is, the Danube is, the Seine is, the Palar is (on whose northern bank my ancestral village stands). Each to his own. There is no gradation in secular holiness. A rivulet is no less holy to the small band of humans who derive sustenance from it than the mighty river to its teeming millions.
This idea will be undermined by referring repeatedly to the Ganga as holy. There indeed is a statement, by no less than the Magsaysay Award winner the “Waterman” Rajendra Singh: “We need to sensitize the masses about the damage being caused to the holy river by treating it like an ordinary one …” I take exception to this differentiation. The masses should be sensitized to the essential equality of the ordinary and the holy rivers.
This is the disclaimer.
Raghuram Ekambaram
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