From June last year, Manoj Kumar Singh would stride out each morning to the banks of the Ganges and wish the holy waters were to recede soon. The clock was ticking. In six months, the floodplains where he stood would be the site of the largest human gathering in the world, probably ever.

As the rivers emptied of the monsoon rains in subsequent months with autumn and then winter setting in, the bureaucrat got into action, engaging thousand of Indian authorities and putting very large teams into action, reclaiming the riverbed and laying the skeleton for a temporary city that at  39 square kilometers would be around two-thirds the size of Manhattan and will claim to be the place for the largest congregation of humans on Earth since it’s existence for a few week,s till the river claims it back again.

Crowd Management & Public Safety

Pilgrims at this Unesco-listed festival will traverse a temp-pop-up city of more than 300 kilometers of temporarily riveted steel plated roads, nearly two-dozen pontoon bridges, a hospital, 40 police stations, 120,000 toilets, more than 40,000 street lights, free wify, tens of thousands of tents, Integrated Command and Control Centers to monitor and manage lost and found, stampede, drowning, fire, epidemics, security, land and water rescue and all other emergencies, with thousands of trained personnel in uniform on duty ensuring round the clock disaster management in the horizon filled temporary tented city build just for a few weeks for few weeks before the river claims back the land.

Apart from building toilets, and deploying an army of more than 9,000 night sweepers to collect or treat waste, authorities are  also trying to keep the river flowing at an optimum speed of at least 200,000 litres a second, fast enough to avoid stagnation, but not too quick that it washes away bathers.

The key to public safety is to keep the mammoth crowds moving, says Atul Chaturvedi, the chief public servant who organised Prayagraj’s last Kumbh Mela in 2013. ‘Even if the water is 500 metres away, we have a system where the pilgrims can be moved for another three or four kilometres. People won’t worry about how much they have to walk. But after five or six hours of walking they should finally get their dip.’

One pilgrim, Om Prakash walked hundreds of miles by foot from his village in Bihar to bathe in the confluence of the Ganges and the Yamuna. A few more hours on foot is no trouble, the 63-year-old adds – ‘If you want to get close to God, you have to walk.’ That’s the sort of spirit pilgrims visit sangam with.

How Many and Who is Attending ?

A whopping 15 crore people is attending the Kumbh this year. The figure sure looks mindboggling when compared. It’s more than the populations of 222 countries individually- For example Germany at (81,914,672), UK (65,788,574), France (64,720,690), South Africa (56,015,473) and Australia (24,125,848) among others gives you an idea of Kumbh’s sheer size. The number of people attending this year is also more than the population of over 100 countries combined.

The core of the festival is the estimated 200,000 Hindu saints in attendance, many of whom emerge from seclusion in forests and mountains to take up residency in the tent city, where they perform prayers, administer blessings and lecture on Hindu scripture.

Many belong to one of the 13 major sects represented at the fair, first formed as militant defenders of Hindu temples, and who in the past have turned their fire on each other to determine who bathes in the holy river first.

They have physically fought over the order and thousands of people have died in Kumbh Melas through history. However now they’ve worked out treaties saying this is the order in which we do it, and if there’s any change, there has to be big discussions.

Also delegates from seventy countries including Afghanistan, the US, Canada, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Argentina, Costa Rica, Venezuela, Cuba, Trinidad & Tobago, Mexico, El Salvador, Paraguay, Turkey, Tunisia, Sri Lanka, Belgium, Malaysia, South Africa, South Korea, Gambia, Gabon, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti, Indonesia, Angola, Egypt, Cambodia, Dominican Republic, Burkina Faso, Libya, Malaysia, Palestine, will be coming for the major event.

Hindu Religious Significance

According to one set of Hindu holy books, the Puranas – Anyone who bathes in the bright waters of the Ganga where they meet the dark waters of the Yamuna during the month of Magh(Jan/Feb) will not be reborn, even in thousands of years. Hindus believe every soul passes through different lives (better or worse depending on your karma in the previous life) but the highest point is breaking out of the cycle, transcending it and achieving salvation/emancipation from the earthly life with its suffering and desires.

But the Kumbh Mela is also a vast market, meeting place and centre of learning, where people can attend spiritual lectures or take blessing from some of the country’s most-revered gurus, and Hindu saints are ordained.

How Old Is It ?

Hard to say. A Chinese monk named Hiuen Tsang described something that resembles the Kumbh Mela on the river banks at Prayagraj in 643 AD. Festivals are thought to have been held at the confluence of the Ganges and Yamuna since ancient times, but historians have more recently argued the Kumbh in its modern form may have started around 1870, emerging from a power struggle between the Hindu clergy and the British colonialists.

Mythological Relevance

Legend tells a tale from the bygone days of the universe when the demigods and the demons conjointly produced the nectar of immortality. The demigods, because cursed, were crippled of fear that eventually made them weak. The task being too sturdy for them alone, the demigods made a mutual agreement with the demons to complete it in full and share the nectar of immortality in half. It is said that the demigods and the demons assembled on the shore of the milk ocean that lies in the celestial region of the cosmos. And it began !

For the task of churning the milk ocean, the Mandara Mountain was used as the churning rod, and Vasuki, the king of serpents, became the rope for churning. With the demigods at Vasuki’s tail and the demons at his head, the churning began. At first, the churning of the milk ocean produced a deadly poison which Lord Shiva drank without being affected. As Lord Shiva drank the poison, a few drops fell from his hands which were licked by scorpions, snakes, and similar other deadly creatures. Also, during the churning, the Mandara Mountain began to sink deep into the ocean, seeing which Lord Vishnu incarnated as a great tortoise and supported the mountain on His back. Finally, many hurdles and 1000 years later, Dhanwantari appeared with the Kumbh of immortal nectar in his hands. The demigods, being fearful of the demons ill intent, forcibly seized the pot with its safety entrusted onto the four Gods – Brahaspati, Surya,  Shani and Chandra.

Demons, after learning that their part of the agreement has not been kept, went after the demigods and for 12 days and 12 nights, the chase continued. Wherever the demigods went with the pot of nectar, fierce fighting ensued. It is believed that during this chase, a few drops from the Kumbh fell at four places – Allahabad, Haridwar, Ujjain, and Nasik. There is also a prevalent legend that it was actually the demons that were being chased by the demigods for 12 days and 12 nights, during which the drops of elixir of immortality fell at these four places. These four places are since believed to have acquired mystical powers. Because 12 days of Gods are equivalent to 12 years for humans, the Kumbh Mela is celebrated once every 12 years in each of the four places – banks of river Godavari in Nasik, river Kshipra in Ujjain, river Ganges in Haridwar, and at the Sangam of Ganges, Yamuna, and Saraswati in Allahabad, where the drops are believed to have fallen. Millions of devout, come together to partake in ritualistic bathing and ceremonies to cleanse themselves of all sins.

Relevance for 2019 Indian Elections

This is the first Kumbh Mela in Prayagraj since the city’s Mughal-era name Allahabad was changed to Prayagraj. No Kumbh Mela has ever been so well funded, or so heavily promoted in the media and on billboards, invariably alongside the face of Narendra Modi, India’s Hindu nationalist Prime Minister. With an election looming more earthly matters are also under contemplation. For India’s Hindu nationalist government, the Kumbh’s message of unity across the religion’s castes and innumerable deities dovetails nicely with the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s goal of consolidating Hindu votes.

Political parties have often sought to exploit the Kumbh Mela, though they have to be subtle – it is primarily a spiritual event after all. But no Kumbh Mela has ever been quite so widely marketed as this one, with advertisements often featuring small pictures of the Indian Prime Minister and the Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister. The fairgrounds are also plastered with billboards promoting his government’s social welfare programmes.

Modi’s Hindu nationalist party aims to unite Hindus behind a single political platform, something adherents have historically been reluctant to do, given how driven the religion is by caste and regional differences. But the Kumbh Mela is indisputably moment of unity for Hindus, and that dovetails nicely with Modi’s political project, and so it can’t hurt to have such a giant iteration of the festival in an election year – especially if his picture is all over it.