THE TELEGRAPH (Calcutta, India) 05 August 08 Reptiles, insects worry police (Gautam Sarkar)
Deoghar: Besides safeguarding the sea of pilgrims — a daily chore for the police ever since Shravan mela started — the police had an added task at hand today.
Many pilgrims brought snakes and poisonous insects to offer the deity and the security personnel had to keep a sharp watch on such devotees.
More than two lakh pilgrims offered water to Baidyanath at his mythological home turf today amid chaos. But, except for some minor clashes between the police and pilgrims, in which the former resorted to mild lathicharge, no major incident was reported.
“It was an incident-free day. No one sustained injuries,” said inspector-general of police H.K. Mishra and deputy inspector-general of police, Santhal Parganas, M.M. Ojha.
One Ramesh Kumar Mohonwala, a businessman from Uttar Pradesh, entered the sanctum sanctorum of the temple with three 8-foot-long poisonous cobras wrapped around his belly. “Besides offering water, I presented the snakes to the lord,” he said.
Mohonwala and his friend Binoy Agarwala, along with 28 devotees, said that for the past decade they regularly brought snakes and other insects. Binod later showed some poisonous scorpions kept in their wallets. We have been keeping such things with us. They never harm us and are very auspicious, group members claimed.
Manoj Kousik, the superintendent of Deoghar police, expressed his concern with such practices. On July 28, he had nabbed a devotee from Madhya Pradesh with a black cobra. “The devotee said he had purchased the snake at Sultanganj and brought it here to offer to the lord,” he said.
Reptiles, insects worry police