India Continues to Hold Religious Gatherings Despite Surging Numbers of COVID-19

UPDATE 23/06/2020: A previous version of the article said India had reported 15,372 cases on Tuesday, which did not reflect official figures. We have now updated our piece to reflect the latest data, which says 14821 new COVID-19 cases were reported on Monday, June 22.

An Indian state is struggling to enforce social distancing rules at a high-profile temple festival after the nation's top court allowed the event to go ahead.

The annual seven-day Rath Yatra festival typically sees millions of devotees gathering at the Jagannath temple in Puri, in the eastern state of Odisha, to collect idols representing Lord Jagannath and his family. Traditionally the idols are then transported via hand-drawn chariots to other temples across the state.

Last week the Chief Justice of India announced a ban on this year's festival, citing the possible spread of COVID-19 and noting that “Lord Jagannath won’t forgive us if we allow it". Then, on Monday, the day before the festival was set to commence, the court reversed its order and allowed the event to go ahead with the caveat that devotees were banned from attending.

But even that turned out to be wishful thinking. While a tweet from the Odisha Chief Minister on Tuesday showed him watching the procession remotely on a television, the screen itself showed huge crowds gathering outside the Jagannath temple.

Traditionally, each of the 14-metre high temple chariots is pulled by more than 1,000 people—but among the Supreme Court’s many instructions was the condition that the number be limited to 500. Among the Supreme Court's other conditions was an order that only priests involved in the ritual were allowed to take part, as well as calls for a curfew throughout the state.

Video footage from Tuesday showed the temple premises being sanitised before the event began, followed shortly thereafter by crowds chanting and dancing to the sound of traditional instruments. In one video, hoards of people pressed together can be seen mounting the chariot, and many on social media criticised the apparent lack of social distancing. According to temple officials, more than 1,000 priests involved in the rituals were tested for COVID-19 to comply with the Supreme Court’s order, one of whom tested positive and was placed in quarantine.

Multiple parties were involved in ensuring the festival went ahead in spite of the global pandemic—many of them citing freedom of religion as their primary cause for concern.

An appeal filed by Janardhan Pattajoshi Mohapatra, the chief priest of the Jagannath temple, states that "it would indeed be unfortunate if its practices are broken in modern independent India which constitutionally recognises and guarantees freedom of religion."

Mohapatra pointed out that the festival had been cancelled only 32 times in 425 years, and that the last time it could not be held was when Mohammed Taqi Khan, the Naib Nazim (deputy governor) of Odisha, attacked the Jagannath temple in the 1730s.

His petition further claimed that the festival had gone forward even when India was faced with the deadly 1918-19 Spanish flu outbreak, during which an estimated 12 million Indians died.

A study on the Spanish flu's impact on India, however, noted that “the week of October 13, 1918 shows the early regional peaks in the western province of Bombay, the south-eastern province of Madras, and a small area on the eastern coast of India near the important Hindu pilgrimage site of Puri"—prompting some people to believe the festival may have been responsible for the spread of the disease.

Puri and the chariot festival have also been linked to repeated cholera outbreaks in the past. A book titled "Local Self-government in British Orissa, 1869-1935" claims Scottish historian William Hunter called Puri a “valley of death” for the unsanitary way in which the 5,000-odd lodging houses of the town housed 90,000 pilgrims.

Sujit Mahapatra, an academic who works at Odisha-based educational foundation Bakul and has written about Puri’s history with cholera, notes that festivals can indeed accelerate the spread of disease, although the risk is often weaponised to vilify entire communities. By way of example, he points to the recent vilification of Indian Muslims by governments, bureaucrats and media after the attendees of a gathering of the Islamic evangelical movement Tablighi Jamaat was later identified as the source of 4,000 COVID-19 cases.

“Hunter’s quotes show how the British and Europeans viewed Hindu and Muslim pilgrims as rogues and criminals," he says. "We saw it happening with the Jews during the Black Death in Europe, and now with Muslims during COVID-19.”

Nonetheless, Mahapatra feels that the precautions taken on Tuesday strike a fine balance between honoring tradition and being safety-conscious.

Meanwhile, the High Court of the Western State of Gujarat cancelled Ahmedabad’s Rath Yatra festival, ending its uninterrupted 143-year run. The COVID-19 situation in Gujarat is far riskier than that in Odisha, which the Supreme Court claimed had a “good record of having controlled the pandemic with very little loss of life.”

Other countries are observing similar precautions, with Saudi Arabia announcing this week that it would be hosting only a limited number of people for Hajj: the holy pilgrimage that people from across the world take to the city of Mecca.

On Monday, India recorded nearly 15,000 new COVID-19 cases. The Indian Council for Medical Research maintains that there is no community transmission in the country, which has reported more than 440,000 cases and 14,000 deaths.

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