In India, few symbols command as much reverence or as much rhetorical opportunism as the Ganga. To millions of Hindus, it is not merely a river but a civilisational artery, imbued with sanctity and myth, woven into rites of passage from birth to death. Recently, when a group of minority community youths boarded a boat on the Ganga in Varanasi, consumed non-vegetarian food, and flung the remains into waters regarded as sacred, what followed was less a sober reckoning than the