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When Kumbh Mela comes to God's Own Country in poll season
A grand religious gathering planned in Tirunavaya, Kerala, facing unexpected challenges with a stop order for a temporary bridge. This controversy, however, generated massive free publicity. Local support emerged from various communities, including Muslim merchants and the state government.
Tirunavaya: Early Saturday morning, an organiser walked down to the Bharathapuzha riverbed to check on preparations for what was being billed as Kerala's answer to the Kumbh Mela. He found just three swamis milling about, and a few men around them. One of the main visiting holy men from the North was nowhere to be seen, reportedly catching up on sleep after days of exhausting travel.
This, he thought to himself, is not exactly how grand religious spectacles are supposed to unfold, said the organiser, requesting to be not named.
At the centre of this unfolding enterprise is Swami Anandavanam Bharathi, a Mahamandaleshwar - a senior spiritual leader - of the Juna Akhara, one of the most influential monastic orders associated with the Kumbh Mela. Before saffron robes, though, there were red flags. The swami was once P Salil, a firebrand Students' Federation of India leader at Kerala Varma College in Thrissur, famous for his oratory skills. His old comrades still joke that if he hadn't swapped Marx for mantras, he'd probably be a top CPI(M) leader by now. Whether revolution or ritual, the man knew how to work a crowd.
After journalism school and working briefly as a reporter, Salil left Kerala for the Himalayas. There's been a heartbreak and unrequited love in between, though he now treats it as incidental, and those around him follow his lead in not dwelling on it. He spent years along the ghats of the Ganga, particularly around Varanasi and Kashi, where he stood out for being young, articulate and fluent in Hindi and southern languages. He became the go-to person for southern pilgrims heading to Kumbh Melas, coordinating logistics and accompanying public figures. His elevation as a Mahamandaleshwar brought national visibility and formal authority.
When he returned to Kerala with his new title, he grappled with what to do next. For a period, he focused on temple land encroachments, describing it all as a mission to "awaken Hindu consciousness" in the state.
Stop Order for Temporary Bridge
After his elevation, he travelled across Kerala being felicitated at multiple centres. One stop was at Tirunavaya, where this Kumbh Mela project found him. “They contacted me asking if it could be held as a bigger event. I agreed,” he said. “I honestly didn't know how it would become this big, or controversial.”
When first invited, the swami imagined something on the scale of a regular temple festival. He had years of experience organising pilgrimages to the Kumbh Mela in the North and knew exactly what preparations events of this scale demanded: the pandals, the food, the bio toilets, the sheer logistics. But the project snowballed beyond anyone's control.
Something planned with a budget of a few lakhs has become a crore-costing affair. The pandals are being erected on loan. Bio toilets have been arranged with only an advance paid. Free meals for thousands per day over nearly a month will run into serious money. Unpaid bills are escalating by the day. At one point, the swami laughed that he might have to escape back to the Himalayas as soon as the event wrapped up. A cook has been hired to manage the free meals, though nobody seems sure how many people will show up, and the cook is not happy about the uncertainty.
And then the whole thing exploded last week. Permission for a temporary bridge across the river had been requested two months earlier. Just when everything seemed set, local officials issued a stop order citing unauthorised construction and environmental violations on the riverbed. Such memos are rare in cases like this, where compromises are usually worked out quietly to avoid public confrontation.
This time, the dispute spilled out into the open, and what happened next explains how pan-Indian religious projects land in Kerala.
The stop memo went viral. Some national television channels framed it as Hindu practices coming under threat. Hindutva groups began mobilising. Influencers started calling about paid collaborations. Small donations began trickling into the swami's Google Pay account, ten and fifty rupees at a time, many accompanied by messages invoking Ram.
On the ground, though, the response looked entirely different. K Moideen, the Muslim League legislator from the area, backed the event and criticised the stop memo, arguing the issue could have been sorted out through conversation. The communist state government quietly helped smooth things over after organisers contacted P Sasi, the chief minister's political secretary, who assured them of help after receiving an intelligence report flagging potential for large crowds. Informal clearance was conveyed, and work resumed.
To the organisers' surprise, the state-run KSRTC bus service told them they would be running special services from every depot to the site. Muslim merchants in the nearby markets have stocked up on festival goods worth lakhs of rupees. Everything is ready to welcome the fest, except perhaps the conflict some people anticipated between Hindutva forces and the rest.
The swami appears conscious of keeping the event from being absorbed into the Hindutva ecosystem. In Kerala, many temple organisations remain wary of such alignment, concerned about political implications and losing autonomy. A media professional working with the event summed up the dynamic by reaching back to an old EMS Namboodiripad formulation from the early 1960s, when the communist leader maintained the Indian unit's distance from both the Soviet Union and China during their split: it is neither ours nor theirs.
Free publicity
Thanks to the controversy however, publicity has been enormous and free, which organisers acknowledge as helpful, but it has created headaches too. Emotionally charged supporters with little media experience can escalate situations. Had police intervened at the bridge site, organisers believe, the whole thing could have spiralled and provided ground for mobilisation politics.
One of the most striking aspects of this episode is the dissonance between the conversation in Delhi television studios and what is unfolding on the ground. On prime-time news, the event is easily framed as a large Hindutva mobilisation in Kerala, no less in Malappuram. On the ground, however, it looks far more like an everyone's event, stitched together through habit, proximity and mutual interest rather than ideology.
Malappuram is routinely described as a Muslim-majority district, but Tirunavaya sits amid a dense cluster of Hindu temples lining the riverbank, often barely a kilometre apart. The local economy reflects this overlap.
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Source: EconomicTimes
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