Hundreds of bodies found buried along Indian riverbanks

[speak easy]

Source: Associated Press

RAYAGRAJ, India (AP) — Police are reaching out to villagers in northern India to investigate the recovery of bodies buried in shallow sand graves or washing up on the Ganges River banks, prompting speculation on social media that they were the remains of COVID-19 victims.

In jeeps and boats, the police used portable loudspeakers with microphones asking people not to dispose of the bodies in rivers. “We are here to help you perform the last rites,” police said.

On Friday, rains exposed the cloth coverings of bodies buried in shallow sand graves on the riverbank in Prayagraj, a city in Uttar Pradesh state.

Navneet Sehgal, a state government spokesman, on Sunday denied local media reports that more than 1,000 corpses of COVID-19 victims had been recovered from rivers in the past two weeks. “I bet these bodies have nothing to do with COVID-19,” he said

Read more: https://apnews.com/article/india-coronavirus-pandemic-health-88f11eb66e0f505fe941793c291bc946

---

I bet these bodies have nothing to do with COVID-19.

Here's my bet -

The BJP has as much contempt for the truth as TFG.

[SunSeeker]

1. What horror show.

[Warpy]

17. Mass graves are next

because cremations can't keep up and many of the poor can't afford even that.

This is if Modi and his goons can get even that much together.

[mopinko]

3. hard to believe india could get more horrible.

i was there about 10 yrs ago, and couldnt believe the poverty. and the denuded environment.
w all the marble temples, built w the rupees of the poor, why is this happening?

i fear the whole place might collapse.

[Botany]

4. The virus should have been stopped in China but Trump just had to get rid of the people, ...

... the protocols, and the materials that were in place when he came into the White House.
And he did that because they were "the black guy's ideas."

[speak easy]

5. There was no way to contain it.

The next major outbreak was in Italy, and that may have been transmitted in December.

Trump and cronies were responsible for the U.S. responding no better than a third world country. Hundreds of thousands of lives could have been saved with effective testing and contract tracing. Hospitals were overwhelmed. Then states like AZ, FL, and TX put money before people.

[Botany]

7. I think the virus' history is different then we think

I should have been tested if I had had it from around New Years 2020 until late Jan. 2020.
It was a dry cough, low grade fever, a sense of malaise, being tired, and body ache. I know
that the first diagnosed case in America was supposedly in Seattle in mid Jan. 2020* but I
think it was here before that. A neighbor and friend who was in the sciences has told me
that she has some friends who are flight attendants and they told her that they knew of cases
in 2019.

Why I think a lot of the pandemic in America and worldwide rests on Trump's head. This off
the top of my head so I might be wrong on some of my facts and figures.

> In 2017 he disbanded our Pandemic Task Force.

> In 2018 he fired the CDC's epidemiologist who was on the ground in Wuhan, China
looking for potential dangerous viruses in particular the sars corona viruses.

> In 2019 he pulled us out of international group (I think they were in China too) called
PREDICT that was looking for potential dangerous viruses.

> In November of 2019 our intelligence people told Israel of the C-19 virus and Trump
should have been told about that or in his PDBs (which would mean he would have had to
read it ). Supposedly it wasn't long after that Trump and Kushner invested into
Hydroxycholoroquine and their own C-19 test kit (instead of the one produced by the W.H.O.)
both of which turned out to be useless.

> In Feb. of 2020 Kushner and Pompeo sent 18 tons of our PPE to China .... supposedly Trump
and Kushner owed them money .... which left the medical personal and 1st responders on the
east coast w/out the needed PPE so they had to make their own masks, wear garbage bags,
and make their own face shields. Many of them got the disease some died and 1 E.R. doctor
got the disease, became depressed and took her own life.

> Trump pretty much refused to work with the W.H.O. on the international pandemic and
left it up to individual states in America to respond to the disease instead of having a unified
national response and a plan of action.



* The White House told the University of Washington & Seattle's health department not to talk about it.

But in good news Joe Biden put together a truly great team to take on this nightmare. Dr. Fauci, Dr.
Walensky, Dr. Mike of the University of Minnesota, David Kessler, and so are the best of the best.

sorry to

Link to tweet

Biden and Harris leaving the White House Rose Garden 5/13 after announcing a major win in our war against the C-19 pandemic.

[FSogol]

21. Awesome post. n/t

[Worried2020]

22. I wouldn't be, and am not inclined to put this on Trump's head

.

It's our North American/European mentalities.

We keep opening up while the virus is still raging

Eastern Asia, especially China - got it right.

Brutal lockdowns and social restrictions . . . .

THEY HAD THIS BEAT A YEAR AGO . . .

(sigh)

W

[former9thward]

24. "It's our North American/European mentalities."

Well, yes, its called freedom. China does not have that. I don't want their system.

[COL Mustard]

6. BJP?

Not familiar with that. However, I bet no one has more contempt for the truth than TFG.

[PatSeg]

9. Me either

[speak easy]

11. Bharatiya Janata Party - Modi's racist Hindu national party

TFG - the former guy, or The fucktard gangster if you prefer.

[COL Mustard]

16. Thank You

I knew about TFG but thanks for explaining BJP. They seem to be PIP (Peas In Pod).

[PatSeg]

19. Thank you

I would have never figured that out.

[h2ebits]

10. Neither BJP or TFG mean anything to me. . .

[speak easy]

12. See 11 above

https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1014&pid=2744356

[speak easy]

13. BJP - Bharatiya Janata Party - Modi's racist Hindu nationalist party

[IronLionZion]

20. Modi's hard right wing Hindu nationalist party

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bharatiya_Janata_Party

Their platform is for India to be a Hindu country, all other minorities can GTFO or die. They have stripped citizenship from people whose families came to India as war refugees decades ago. It's pretty shitty.

[melm00se]

8. An observation

Disposal of remains (usually cremains) in the Ganges River, due to the holiness of it, is central to Hindu death rituals.

[speak easy]

14. Images of corpses drifting down the Ganges river, which Hindus consider holy,

have shocked a nation reeling under the world's worst surge in infections.

https://news.yahoo.com/covid-dead-indias-rivers-govt-105607518.html

[melm00se]

15. I didn't suggest that

my point is remains in the Ganges were the norm for centuries

[SunSeeker]

23. Cremains were deposited in the Ganges, not bloated decomposing bodies, right?

I can see how it became a tradition to sprinkle ashes from a funeral pyre into thd Ganges. I can't imagine it was ever ok to dump rotting bodies into Ganges.

From reading the article, it appears these bodies ended up in the Ganges when stormwaters washed them out of their shallow graves in poor villages that don't have the resources to dig adequate graves or have funeral pyres.

The Indian government needs to get backhoes to these villages to build adequate mass graves

[former9thward]

25. When I was in India in 1994 I was on a boat on the Ganges.

Two bodies floated by us. Nobody thought anything of it.

[SunSeeker]

26. As a tourist/foreigner, I don't think you can assume what they were thinking.

As the article states, the tradition is to have a funeral pyre, then sprinkle the ashes in the Ganges. Bodies floating down the Ganges is not something people in India today think is no big deal. As the article states, Indians are horrified by it; the Ganges is sacred. Filling it with rotting human flesh is not what Indians normally do.

The problem is, the crematoriums are overwhelmed, and funeral pyre services have tripled in costs because of the onslaught of covid deaths. Desperate poor people have taken to burying their deceased loved one's bodies in shallow graves along the banks of the Ganges. Unfortunately, rains wash the bodies into the Ganges.

It is horrific. Downplaying it is abhorrent.

[former9thward]

27. I was there and you say I can't know what they were thinking.

BTW they speak English if you didn't know. Yet in your posts YOU claim to know what they are thinking. Ok, got it....

[SunSeeker]

28. I am restating what is reported in the article.

Most humans would be horrified, as the OP article reports Indians say are, that there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of decomposing bodies floating in the Ganges. It's not a stretch to believe that. Your suggestion, that they think nothing of it, is quite a stretch, and not based on any current evidence. Indeed, why would you even say that in this thread? It is an incredibly callous comment.

[former9thward]

29. YOU were the one who said it was cremains not bodies.

That was in response to OTHER posters who ALSO reported bodies in the Ganges. You did not engage in personal attacks on them as you did me when I simply reported what I have seen. When did you visit India?

[SunSeeker]

30. The ARTICLE says it is cremains that are traditionally put in the Ganges.

The article indicates these bodies are ending up in the Ganges not because of any tradition of dumping bodies in the Ganges but because people can't afford funeral pyre ceremonies, whose cost has shot up due to exploding demand because of covid. So people are burying their dead loved ones in shallow graves along the Ganges, and those bodies get washed out by rain.

You weren't just "reporting bodies in the Ganges." You, unlike other posters in this thread, challenged the reporting on how horrific this is for Indians by asserting that you went to India once in 1994 and came away believing Indians "think nothing of" bodies in the Ganges. It is not a "personal attack" to state your comment is callous and wrong.

[former9thward]

31. You need to visit India and stop reading articles by Western journalists.

From a publication in India on pollution in the Ganges:

Dead bodies are also a huge pollutant to the already dirty water. 35,000 bodies are estimated to be discarded into the river yearly (Dhillon). This is a disgusting amount of dead people to be floating around in an important source of water for hundreds of thousands of people around it. While someone was touring the filthiness of the Ganges River, they ended up rowing down from the crematoriums into other portions of the river. There, they found the remains of a dead person on the sand, along with a rancid smell that wafted over the area around it. His fisherman guide pointed out the body of a young child floating in the water, saying the following, “It’s been rotting there for a month.” All of this still persists, even after the government outlawed the dumping of dead bodies in the river decades ago (Hammer). In conclusion, the religious practices over the dead in India poses an unusual pollutant to the Hindu’s Mother Ganga.

https://gangapollution.weebly.com/death-rituals.html

I know, now the Indians are lying about it....

[SunSeeker]

32. That blog you're citing to confirms it's CREMAINS that are traditionally put in the Ganges.

Last edited Mon May 17, 2021, 01:32 PM - Edit history (1)

And it does not support your callous assertion that Indians "think nothing of" dead bodies floating in the Ganges.

Yes, the Ganges is badly polluted with the ashes of the dead. Yes there is the occasional corpse seen floating down the Ganges. But the huge amount of rotting covid corpses floating in the Ganges right now is not the norm. And Indians are horrified by it, as all humanity should be.

Your comment suggesting that Indians "think nothing of it" is callous and wrong.

[former9thward]

33. NO. It is cremains AND bodies.

"Because of this, many people’s bodies and ashes are placed in the river"

The first paragraph is about cremains. The second, which I reprinted, is about bodies. There would be no way to estimate the amount of cremains. They can estimate (35k) the amount of bodies since it is countable.

You just are in total denial.

Visit India, it will be an experience!

[SunSeeker]

34. OFFS. I'm not denying there's bodies in the Ganges. I'm denying "Indians think nothing of it."

You want to argue over the number of bodies normally found in the Ganges, when the issue is with your callous comment that Indians "think nothing of it."

You are simply wrong.

Here is a non-Western Hindu paper confirming that Indians are shocked and horrified:

"Images of corpses drifting down the Ganges river, which Hindus consider holy, have shocked a nation reeling under the world's worst surge in infections." https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/bodies-of-covid-19-victims-among-those-dumped-in-ganga-river-govt-101621165753886.html

[TomDaisy]

18. they are going to find this everywhere