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Solution for Sabarimala

On Makara Sankranti night, January 14, 52 Hindu pilgrims died in Sabarimala when a small hillock they stood on collapsed. They were there to watch the Makara Jyoti (the light -- believed to be of divine origin -- that appears deep in the forest on just that night). It was a blow to the faithful that this sacred spot that has been holy for several thousand years was sullied with the blood of pilgrims.

In a column almost two years ago I expressed the fear that the area was exceeding its carrying capacity. I suggested that whenever two million people gather in one place, the chances of an accident spiralling into a disaster are always high. Alas, my words were prescient -- it is estimated there were 2.5 million Ayyappans at the hill shrine that night.

There is no way Sabarimala can handle so many people -- and the point is, it shouldn't have to. The simple solution that the Devaswom Board and various others have proposed is to cut down the surrounding forest and turn it into a hill version of the innumerable shrines that dot the nation, with hotels and hospitals and all the paraphernalia of the pilgrim tourist business.

I beg to disagree. The pilgrimage to Sabarimala should not be viewed as a pleasure trip. It is supposed to be a rigorous penance. That is part of the attraction of this most democratic of pilgrimages, with its black or blue or orange-clad Ayyappans with their beards and their vigorous chants of "Swamiye saranam Ayyappa", with all class and caste distinctions made superfluous.

No, I don't think the answer is to vulgarise and commercialise Sabarimala. The right solution is to manage the crowds. The main reason there is such a crowd there at this time is because of the nature of the shrine -- it is basically only open in the Malayalam months of Vrschikam (Scorpio) to Makaram (Capricorn). Therefore the pilgrims have to come then and pretty much only then.

I have no idea whether it will change the nature of the pilgrimage profoundly, and indeed if there are religious proscriptions against it, but why not have pilgrims go at other times? In fact, the shrine is open for a day at the beginning of each Malayalam month, roughly the 15th of each Gregorian month. Of course, the infrastructure (such as it exists -- tea shops and community toilets and all the rest) of the season will be absent, but it is not so much of a problem.

Only a handful comes then, and it is a wonderful experience to be there practically alone and to gain darshan of the deity for as long as you wish. Many Malayalis, tiring of the exhausting crowds, have taken to this route, but others from out-of-state find it difficult to get public transport there, I suspect. I personally have been several times thus, off-season.

Once I made the four-kilometre-or-so trek through the silent, mysterious and still forest entirely by myself -- perhaps I crossed paths with two or three others who descended as I climbed. I carried the prescribed two-enclosure bag on my head with the ghee-filled coconuts and other offerings.

It was during the monsoon, so there were leeches, and I carried a cigarette-lighter to apply to their loose ends to force them to let go. I wondered if the Buddhists who went this way once, centuries ago, might have allowed the leeches to stay on until they dropped off, sated. I was too much of a coward to suffer them silently.

I walked barefoot, and the uphill climb wasn't too bad. Later, downhill would be more treacherous for lack of good footing. There were only small animals like squirrels to be seen in the virgin evergreen forest, but now and then I heard a bird; and once I thought I saw an ape-shaped form, brown and large, swinging through the branches. But it may have been my imagination.

A century ago, when the pilgrim trek was not the mere 4 kilometers from the River Pamba, but a much more difficult 50 miles from Erumeli, there were tigers and elephants at large. Those who had not obeyed the rules of the 41-day penance of forswearing meat, alcohol, sex and tobacco, they say, were at risk of being punished by the animals for not being pious enough.

My ancestors went the long way; may be they walked all the way from the village, may be two hundred kilometres. They must have taken supplies, set up camp, met up with others: a holy caravan, unchanged for centuries. Perhaps some of them rode bullock carts until the rough country roads ended and the forest began. A hundred years ago, Kerala was 50 per cent forested; alas, it is now only 3 per cent forest!

Anyway, off-season pilgrimage might be part of the solution -- to encourage more people to come then so that the area gets a little respite from the enormous mass of humanity. How this might be done, I am not so sure, but surely it is worth trying. Another, concurrent, solution may be to ration access to this precious good, demand for which exceeds supply. To compare the sacred to the profane, the issue is similar to what has been faced by National Parks in the US, notably the major attractions such as Yosemite and Yellowstone -- crowding, traffic jams, inadequate facilities, pollution with human waste.

I would recommend the same measures that the US National Park Service has taken: the issuance of a limited number of permits -- say 250,000 a day -- to enter the environs of the temple during the season. This, of course, assumes some reasonably fool-proof mechanism to prevent those without permits from coming in. That may well be where this scheme fails, as the infrastructure to enforce the rules may not be in place.

If it can be enforced, the permit system can be a simple lottery: anyone who wishes to go has to register; those who win the lottery will be issued an identifying pass, which they will have to display to any security authority in the area. This permit will also help to streamline medical/ evacuation and other emergency services.

The Sabarimala Lottery Scheme could well be one of the first projects undertaken by Kerala's newly minted plans for e-governance and the resulting benefits for the masses.

Something clearly needs to be done for crowd control at Sabarimala. It has become one of the largest pilgrimages in the world in terms of numbers of people gathered in a short time. And we all remember the various problems of stampedes and fires that have plagued the much-better funded Haj ($18 billion spent on infrastructure) in recent years as the numbers of pilgrims rose.

I, too, have stood in line at the six-hour-long queue at the summit of a hill, waiting for my turn to get a rushed 1-second darshan of the Lord Ayyappan as those behind me pushed me out of the way. I know what it feels like; but I also know the feeling of religious ecstasy that this outpouring of human faith brings -- it pervades this spot.

The decent and simple pilgrim, who often has travelled hundreds of miles from remote Andhra Pradesh or Tamil Nadu villages, deserves better treatment. These pious folks contribute scarce money they can ill afford, because they believe. And that adds up to billions of rupees. Alas, today the government-controlled Dewaswom Board takes the money and uses little to help the pilgrim. It is time some of the money was spent to benefit the pilgrim.

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Rajeev Srinivasan