Hindu faith bottled and home-delivered
Gangotri, India - High in the Himalayas, where the mighty Ganges is still a frigid glacial stream, labourers fill jerry cans
with its holy waters to be distributed to Hindus all over India.
Buyers sparingly use the precious liquid to bless important occasions, from births, wed
dings, and funerals to festivals such as Diwali or the purchase of a new car.
“This is for every faithful Hindu who can’t get here per
sonally,” said one of the workers in the pilgrimage town of Gangotri, giving his name as Ramesh.
“It feels blessed to be part of a project that reaffirms our Hindu faith and delivers this di
vine water to all corners of the country,” he told AFP.
The scheme is run by the Indian postal service and is one example of a raft of initiatives,
from the symbolic to the gargantuan, launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi promoting Hinduism in the country 75 years after independence.
The water is considered purest closest to its source so is collected in Gangotri, where the Ganges starts its roughly 2,500km journey across India, and trucked to a bottling plant 100km downstream. After being left to settle for three or four
days, it is filtered in tanks before workers decant it by hand into 250ml plastic bottles.
Bought over the counter at post offices around India, they cost just 30 rupees (US$0.37) each - customers can also order them online for home delivery at 321 rupees for a pack of four.
Millions of the little containers have been sold since the scheme launched six years ago.
Since winning elections in 2014, Modi has put Hinduism front and centre of his government in the officially secular nation of 1.4bn.
The core tenet of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and its militaristic ideological parent the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, is that Hinduism is India’s original religion.
This worries India’s 210mn Muslims and other minorities. Social media is rife with hate speech and attacks on Muslims and Christians have risen, activists say.
Modi’s biggest religious construction project is a grand temple being built in the ancient city
of Ayodhya.