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India Today, April 5, 1999
April 5, 1999

FIFTH COLUMN
Mourning in Banaras

Save India's most scared city before it's too late.

By Tavleen Singh

When Atal Bihari Vajpayee quoted -- at the governor's reception in Lahore a month ago -- Ali Sardar Jafri's beautiful line about the morning light of Banaras it had special meaning for me, gone as I had almost directly from Banaras to Lahore. The verse itself is about friendship between India and Pakistan: "Tum aao gulshan-e-Lahore se chaman bardosh, hum aayen subh-e-Banaras ki roshni leykar, phir uske baad yeh poochein ke kaun dushman hai." Loosely translated it means: You bring with you the scents of the gardens of Lahore and we will bring the morning light of Banaras, and then let someone ask who the enemy is.

The prime minister could not have chosen a more beautifully appropriate bit of poetry to express the mood on that first day after his Wagah crossing. But it made me wonder, reluctant though I am to be a spoilsport, when it was that he had last seen the sun rise over the Ganga in that oldest and most sacred of India's cities.

The morning light is still as beautiful as ever but have any of our political or religious leaders noticed what we have done to Banaras? To the Ganga? The previous time I was in Banaras was to cover a riot so I had little time for aesthetics. This time I went with a friend who has the keys to a secret India -- keys that open the doors to the magic and beauty that make this land so special. So it was my aesthetic rather than political senses that were at work.

I watched, mesmerised, the ceremonies at the Vishwanath temple on Shivratri, wandered through narrow streets into tiny rooms filled with fabulous brocades, silks and satins, listened in awe to professors at Banaras Hindu University and breathed deeply in the peace that still pervades Sarnath. But try as I did to not notice the filth, pollution and terrifying congestion of the streets of Banaras, I failed.

Those who live with the filth every day say that the secret of enjoying Banaras is to rise above it. You have to exist at a spiritual plane, they say, and ignore the dead rats, the open drains, the swarms of flies, the human excrement at every corner and the fact that the Ganga is terrifyingly polluted. I mentioned to senior officials and policemen that traffic in the city was fast reaching a stage where it would not only become impossible to move but even to breathe because of the automobile exhaust that fills the air.

The senior police officer in charge of traffic smiled complacently and told me that in India things only start to improve when they hit rock bottom. "It will have to get much worse," he said, "before people start demanding that it get better." The same answer applies to cleanliness. It is only when the city decays completely and the Ganga becomes a sewer that those who celebrate the "morning light of Banaras" will wake up to the reality that the city -- and perhaps even the river -- is in its death throes.

Banaras is believed to be not just the oldest city in India but the oldest city in the world. In another country it would be regarded as a national treasure and everyone would join the effort to save it. But here, despite there being Hindutva governments ruling Uttar Pradesh and India, nothing at all is being done. True, there was the Ganga Action Plan but the end result of it appears to have been that crores and crores of rupees have disappeared into unseen pockets.

The river remains almost as polluted as it was before the plan got started in 1985. Mainly because you cannot clean the Ganga unless municipalities in towns and cities along its banks are forced to stop dumping raw sewage into it.

Once the government does its bit, it is time for others to do theirs. Instead of worrying about conversions, why are organisations like the RSS and the VHP not using their vast armies to help clean Hinduism's most sacred city? Where are the shankaracharyas? Why is not one of them able to stand up and announce that any good Hindu guilty of using the banks of the Ganga as a toilet is making seriously bad karma for himself.

And where pray are those noisy environmentalists? Instead of making doomsday prophecies from the relatively safe environs of Delhi and Mumbai, instead of worrying about some building in Mumbai breaking a few building bye-laws that are usually unreasonable in the first place, why are they not sitting in Banaras and setting up a Save Banaras Society? Vast funds have been collected for Venice in this way. They have been spent on preventing the city from sinking and on preserving its unique beauty. Why not Banaras?

Where are our Hindu businessmen who spend fortunes on building ugly, modern temples? Why are they not concerned about spending some money on cleaning the Ganga? The first business group to show some initiative in this area is, ironically, Parsi. Godrej is re-launching its Ganga soap next month with an advertising campaign that promises not only that the soap is made from Ganga jal "collected from the pure and pollution-free heights of the Himalayas" but that part of the profits will go towards cleaning the Ganga. All we need is a few more big business groups to join the effort and perhaps not just the Ganga but even Banaras may be saved.

Nothing will happen, though, until the prime minister personally takes an initiative and starts the Save Banaras, Save the Ganga campaign. Not a single political party will object. More important, future generations of Indians may also have a chance to celebrate the special light that illuminates their most sacred city at dawn.

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