‘The immediate reason for last year’s floods in this region may have been excessive rain,’ [India's] water resources minister Uma Bharti told a committee meeting of the Himalayan Institute of Glaciology and Forest Research in Dehradun (northern India), ‘but I know the real cause. The underlying reason was defecation and urination by atheists near to the shrine of Kedarnath. Human excretory activities have been forbidden within the area around the shrine since 1882, and for a century all was well. But in recent years, non-believers started coming here for business purposes, and they used the area as a toilet. This angered the Gods and resulted in nature’s fury at Kedarnath in 2013’.
Despite protestations that her comments defied scientific logic, Bharti explained that ‘I am here to discuss the reconstruction of the Kedarnath shrine. I intend to restore the status of no-man’s land around the shrine, and have already reinstated the ban on human excretion. And as you can see, the Saraswati river has since reduced to a mere trickle’.
- Hindustan Times, 16 September 2014, spotted by Tim Poston & quoted in Private Eye 1377, 17-30 October 2014
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