As cremation costs soar, India's COVID dead keep washing up along holy riverbank

The Ganga (Ganges) riverbank in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh where bodies have piled up during the second COVID wave in India. Photo by Anoop, who goes by one name.

SRINAGAR— In June, a shocking video surfaced on Twitter showing the body of a COVID victim flung into a river in Uttar Pradesh, a state in north India. Before the recording, Indian social media and Whatsapp groups were flooded with thousands of images of corpses wrapped in saffron shrouds and buried in shallow graves along the riverbank of the Ganges, a river holy to Hindus and often a site of funeral rites. 

Those who can afford cremation scatter their loved one’s ashes into the water, while the poor often wrap bodies in muslin and release them floating on planks. But during the months-long surge of deaths, cremation expenses soared along with unemployment, and many more of India’s poor are burying bodies in the sand despite the Hindu custom to cremate.

India has officially recorded 341,000 COVID deaths and 26.6 million recoveries out of a total of 28.6 million cases reported as of June 4, but observers say the real figure is likely several times higher. 

As deaths surged, the Uttar Pradesh (UP) police chief claimed that only 39 bodies were recovered along the banks of the Ganga (the local name for the Ganges), negating media reports that at least 2,000 bodies washed up on the banks and the discovery of dozens of unmarked graves.

In UP, bodies also washed ashore in places like Unnao, Kanpur, Prayagraj, Varanasi and Kannauj. Locals at Unnao said 15 to 20 bodies have shown up on the riverbank daily since April. In Kanpur, eyewitnesses said 100 to 150 bodies washed ashore each day for about two weeks after the second wave struck in April.

“I have never seen such a situation in the last 12 years, what used to be 25 bodies daily, became 50 after the eruption of the second wave,” said Raj Narayan, a local in Kannauj.

Most families are hesitant to risk infection by cremating their loved ones with Hindu rituals that involve touching the bodies. 

 READ: In India, Muslims Are Performing Last Rites For Hindus Who Died Of COVID-19

In Varanasi, the electoral constituency of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, crematorium staff and volunteers like 25-year-old Deepak have been risking their lives to help families of COVID victims follow religious customs to send off their loved ones into the afterlife.

The family members of some of the dead do not touch the corpses. They hold flowers in their hands and stand at a distance as volunteers perform the last rites in their place. 

“Volunteers step in when people stop following the mandatory Hindu practice of carrying their dead on their shoulders for cremations,” Deepak said. “We believe that the final rites must be performed according to the Hindu practices for the liberation of the soul from the dead.”

The volunteers between 20 to 25 years of age don’t traditionally perform the last rites but urgency and sense of service toward humanity motivates them. While most cremations are performed free of cost, they are paid around $27 for each cremation by those who can pay.

“We do free cremation for six out of 10 bodies, and we don’t charge for those who can’t pay,” Deepak said.

But even as they do selfless service, they say they face discrimination in public. Some crematorium staff are boycotted from businesses and ostracized by their families.

“I face mistreatment by my family members and others,” said Om Yadav, a volunteer. “They don’t come close to me just for the fear that I perform the last rites of the COVID victims.” 

Others said social discrimination and stigma is rooted in poverty and class bias.

“We are being discriminated against. People don’t touch us because we carry corona bodies,” said Bharti, a volunteer. “It feels very bad, but we don’t mind because we understand that God will be pleased by our actions.” 

But even as abandoned bodies continued to haunt the rural hinterland of Uttar Pradesh with mass shallow graves, the government did not initially acknowledge the problem. The Uttar Pradesh’s Administration in Prayagraj, one of the sites where bodies had piled up, later removed the shrouds used on the burial sites alongside the river.

Critics say the move was a damage control exercise after visuals from the banks were widely circulated in the media.

While bodies are being washed up along the river banks, observers ask whether the truth will ever be known about the number of corpses found buried, or the credibility of the government’s COVID data that experts say is vastly undercounting infections and deaths.

In Varanasi, Ramgopal, 32, has been grief-stricken for the last two months. He lost two family members, most likely to COVID: his uncle, 50, and grandfather, 70. 

Both men suffered flu and fever symptoms and were hospitalized, his uncle for one week and grandfather for 15 days. Each of their oxygen saturation levels sharply dove at the hospital. 

“Both died, we couldn’t get oxygen on time for them,” Ramgopal said. 

Neither his uncle nor grandfather are listed in the government’s official COVID deaths because they did not undergo official PCR tests.  

“People are dying in this area,” he said. “40 people have died in the village already.”

Zaffar Iqbal is a journalist based in Kashmir, India. He has reported for 18 years on armed encounters, environmental issues, crime, politics, culture and human rights. He’s formerly the bureau chief of Jammu and Kashmir for NDTV.