The biggest holy crush

by Steve Cunningham

�

ON A stretch of riverbank in India�a crowd is gathering half the size of the British�population. This is the largest gathering on the planet in history.

Over�the next six weeks, 70 million Hindus will purify their souls at Allahabad, the confluence of the Ganges and Yamuna rivers for Maha Kumbh Mela, the biggest festival in the Hindu calendar.

��Press Association

�

The Allahabad fair is the largest because it is near the two streams and the mythical river Saraswati.

An auspicious heavenly alignment of Jupiter and Saturn, combined with a moonless night, occurs on 24 January. The most recent equivalent day - 6 February, 1989 - drew an estimated crowd of 15 million. That, according to The Guinness Book of Records, was the 'greatest recorded number of human beings assembled with a common purpose' in history.

This is one holy nightmare. Organising a tented city for the millions on the dry, sandy bed of the constantly shifting Ganges is an exercise that takes years to formulate.

A total of 18,000 police are being deployed; 15 pontoon bridges have been built across the two rivers and a 100-bed emergency hospital put in place.

Authorities are also providing 6,000 toilets, 75 miles of water pipes, 47 miles of temporary roads and 29 water wells.

Arvind Misra of the state government says: 'We have made sure the sewage from Allahabad has been filtered more than usual over the last six months to maintain the purity of the river.'

It is on the main bathing days that problems are likely to arise, as crowds stream across the pontoon bridges. The holiest spot is a one-mile stretch where the rivers merge. Only 20,000 can fit on the sandbag-reinforced banks at any time, so the authorities are limiting each visitor to an 11-minute bathe, although there is no way of enforcing this.

The Allahabad festival is the biggest recorded, and here are some close competitors:

• About 10.2 million attended the funeral of Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini in June, 1989 - that's one-sixth of Iran's population.
• Eight million Sikhs met at a Punjab temple for the 30th anniversary of the Sikh Khalsa order in April 1999.
• The biggest crowd to turn out for the Pope was 4.5 million in Manila in January, 1995.
• The largest gathering of women in the world is every February, when more than 1.5 million gather at a temple in Kerala, India.
• Nearly a million mourners witnessed the funeral procession of Diana, Princess of Wales, in London.
• More than 500,000 men advanced on 1 July, 1916, in the Battle of the Somme. More than 58,000 were killed or wounded.
• About half a million people were at the Woodstock pop festival in the summer of 1969.�