Even after keeping devotees indoors, managing a people’s festival is a big task. Will Odisha lay template for similar events?
Faith and wisdom, both are God-gifted virtues and do not need to be in collision with each other. In fact, we need both of these ennobling faculties even more during the pandemic for the sake of our spiritual and holistic well-being. That is the larger purpose of religion. Practitioners and devotees do not need to follow rituals if they pose a threat to humanity itself like congregations and mass gatherings would at this point. Most world religions, ours included, have adapted to the times where assembly of the faithful at a shrine could itself become a super-spreader of the disease, considering no filtering is possible without recording a COVID-free status of each seeker. Be it online prayer services, no-touch rituals or diverting contribution to pandemic management, temples, churches and mosques around the world have redefined the way divine will can be translated on earth. But the row over the Puri rath yatra, where the idols of Lord Jagannath, brother Balabhadra and sister Subhadra are taken out in chariots for their annual vacation to their aunt’s place, thereby allowing the masses to avail divine benediction for the last 300 years, has again posited reason before a collective heave of emotion. Though devotees regularly seek audience before the Lord at his shrine in Puri, the rathyatra has been a sort of divine endorsement of a massive public spectacle and celebration that has become a socio-cultural icon of Odisha and fuelled the economy of the temple town. Each year, a group of specialist craftsmen are hired to carve the three chariots. The very act of taking out a procession would expose the temple administration and the State Government to an unprecedented logistical challenge of conducting ceremonies with clinical precision and crowd management. It was foreseeing a possible public health and safety crisis that the Supreme Court had called for a total prohibition of the festival last week. “Lord Jagannath will not forgive us if we allow it,” Chief Justice SA Bobde had ruled. But following protestations by Puri seer Shankaracharya Swami Nischalananda Saraswati, who claimed he was not consulted about the cancellation, the court has now left it to the temple administration and the State Government to manage the yatra on a limited scale. Servitors believe that stopping the yatra, which is considered a transformative moment in nature’s cycle, would not be apt when humanity was suffering the most and that once broken, it could not be held for the next 12 years. Of course, the temple authorities depend on this yatra and its fervour to plan their calendar of activities and some servitors singularly dedicate themselves to preparations. Much money has already been spent and more so for testing all the 372 labourers engaged in building the chariots in isolation. Temple authorities also claimed that thousands of people in Puri municipality had gathered on the road connecting Puri Jagannath temple to Gundicha temple on May 30 by maintaining social distance for singing the state anthem. So they now want the yatra to be performed by 500-600 servitors, maintaining a social distance on the 3-km road stretch, and the temple police to ensure discipline and provide back-up. They won’t allow congregation of devotees who can watch the procession live on TV. Would this mean that the servitors themselves will have to go through testing and screening protocols before being in close proximity to each other while pulling the chariot and taking turns on the rope? Would the police be able to hold off an unexpected swarm of devotees, given the emotional surge the event inspires each year? Let us not forget the stampedes associated with the event each year, when even the most meticulous drill has not been able to tame devotees wishing to pull the chariot for a few moments. Also, given that a minimum of 4,000 people are required to pull the three chariots, even a scaled down number could be big enough to monitor on the ground.
The Naveen Patnaik Government, which has its hands full with arresting the spiral of COVID-19, has quite a challenge in conducting a crowdless yatra. According to data, around six to seven lakh people gather on the first day of the festival. On the return journey, the crowd swells to almost double, numbering well over 10 lakh people. The State Government’s challenge will be to keep people indoors on the day by way of an administrative curfew of sorts if it wants to uphold tradition and set an example of how festivals can be managed in the post-pandemic era. Certainly Patnaik would not want to risk a protocol which has aggressively contained the virus. Odisha is a low incidence State thanks to his proactive containment measures and preparedness in setting up COVID facilities even before the predictive figures came in. So he certainly would not want to spill water on the hard work he has done until now. Or he could well lay the template for the mass festivals that will follow, like the Ganesh Utsav in Maharashtra. Indeed, community festivals need a new common protocol in the post-pandemic era that shouldn’t be seen as being in competition with religiosity or diluting faith itself. It should be about treasuring God’s creation called life.
