Following Fish: Travels Around the Indian Coast Read Online Free PDF Page B

treatment. The opposition has been led by two organizations—the Jana Vignana Vedika, an NGO that was born of, but no longer resides with, the Communist Party of India-Marxist; and the Hyderabad chapter of the America-based Center for Inquiry, a non-profit that promotes reason and science over superstition.
    In the early 2000s, this opposition began to hotly question everything about the treatment—its efficacy, its secrecy, its potential for harm, and its promotion by the Andhra Pradesh government. When I met Harinath, it was a couple of weeks before a public-interest litigation came up for hearing in a Hyderabad city civil court, challenging five government departments and the Gouds. Two years earlier, in the face of such contention, the government had felt compelled to put up a banner at the treatment’s venue, stating that the ‘medicine’ had no curative properties. ‘Ha! That had no effect on attendance at all,’ Harinath said, with a snort.
    Innaiah Narisetti, a former journalist and the chair of the local Center for Inquiry chapter, is a dignified, articulate man, with a track record like the back of a porcupine, bristling with sharp needles of attack against irrational belief and superstition. ‘This is a cult organization,’ he said. ‘The doctors say it isn’t scientific. It isn’t hygienic. No patient records are maintained; there are no follow-up visits. But still they claim a cure! That is bogus.’ I mentioned to him Harinath’s tic, of labelling it a ‘prasadam’ instead of a cure, and Narisetti laughed. ‘The courts won’t get taken in by that. They’ll see through it, they’ll see that it’s just a strategy.’
    Part of Narisetti’s harangue included the understandable grievances of the wronged taxpayer. Until 1997, the Gouds had conducted their event, at their own expense, in their ancestralhome in the old Doodh Bowli quarter of Hyderabad. ‘People would sleep in the alleys near our house, on the sidewalk, just for this,’ Harinath remembered. ‘You’d get tears in your eyes just listening to them cough all night.’ In 1997, though, following some communal turmoil, a curfew was imposed in Doodh Bowli. N. Chandrababu Naidu, then chief minister of Andhra Pradesh, started to allow the Gouds free use of larger public spaces—for a year, the Nizam College’s football fields, and subsequently the Exhibition Grounds in Nampally, its new home.
    Eleven years later, when I attended, there was even more evidence of government support—eight ambulances, 1,100 police personnel, six closed-circuit televisions, and an assured power supply of 1,000 kilowatts. Navin Mittal, the district collector, did some rough mental arithmetic and told me that the government would spend roughly Rs 60 lakhs of taxpayer money in manpower and resources for the event. Which only proves that Milton Friedman was right: There is no such thing as a free lunch, or even a free snack of nutritious murrel fish.
    But that’s not all, Narisetti hastened to point out. ‘There are huge losses because the state supplies the fish as well, selling them to the crowds for Rs 10 each,’ he said. ‘All these fish are ordered, but word has spread that this treatment is not working, so the crowds have come down. Last year, there were thousands of wasted fish.’
    But, I feebly ventured, my boyhood bubble quivering some more, ‘Harinath said there were four lakh attendees last year?’
    ‘Not at all,’ Narisetti said. ‘There were twenty thousand.’

    The next morning, I hunted down the Department of Fisheries to clarify this number. V. Raghothama Swamy, the joint director there, was in the midst of aggregating, from various ponds and tanks in Andhra Pradesh, thousands of murrel fingerlings,remotely monitoring their journeys to Hyderabad like an anxious chaperone.
    ‘So how many fish, exactly, did you distribute last year?’ I asked.
    ‘Forty-five thousand,’ Swamy said.
    Again, I mentioned Goud’s figure of four lakh