The Conspirituality Report
Modi’s COVID Constellations
Hindu Nationalists follow astrologers into disaster
The Indian government is cracking down on harrowing news about the country’s COVID catastrophe, demanding that Facebook and Twitter delete posts about oxygen shortages, underestimated casualties, and infrastructure collapse. Nonetheless, independent journalists are managing to report something extraordinary about how Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has approached the crisis that now light up major cities with mass cremations, and that may claim as many as 1.2 million lives by August. They are reporting that astrologers have influenced crucial aspects of COVID policy.
In a stunning display of institutionalized conspirituality, Modi’s Hindu Nationalist government ignored the pleas of epidemiologists and public health officials, deferring to the advice of clerics and astrologers who insisted that the largest religious gathering in the world, the “Kumbh Mela”, scheduled for the spring of 2022, be moved up to 2021. The schedule change was first proposed in June of 2019, but was reaffirmed throughout 2020, even as the pandemic surged. Officials kept the new date, as Shuddhabrata Sengupta wrote in The Wire, “knowing fully the dangers of the pandemic — because some astrological mumbo-jumbo told them that this…
