How the Kumbh Mela Helps Hindu Nationalists and Polarizes Indian Elections

🔍 What this study asks

Mass ritual gatherings like pilgrimages are central to religious life worldwide. This study asks whether participation in India's Kumbh Mela—the world's largest human assembly—translates into electoral gains for religious parties by heightening religiosity and by giving parties opportunities to organize and campaign around the events.

🔎 How the study isolates the Kumbh's effect

The analysis exploits the Kumbh Mela's astrologically determined timing combined with variation in districts' proximity to festival sites by rail to generate plausibly exogenous differences in exposure to the festival. This identification strategy separates the festival's influence from other local trends.

📊 What was measured and how

• Election outcomes: vote shares for Hindu nationalist and secular-leaning parties across districts.
• Exposure: districts' rail-distance proximity to Kumbh sites timed by the festival's dates.
• Indicators of religiosity: behavioral shifts toward Brahminical dietary practices.
• Party capacity and mobilization: evidence of on-the-ground organizing and campaign activity associated with the event.
• Communal outcomes: measures of communal conflict and the geographic concentration of religious minorities.

📈 Key findings

• The Kumbh Mela increases vote share for Hindu nationalist parties in exposed districts.
• Two mechanisms are supported:
• Increased religious orthodoxy, observable in the adoption of Brahminical dietary practices.
• Strengthened party capacity—organizing and campaigning tied to the event.
• Effects on communal conflict are mixed and do not present a uniform pattern across locations.
• The events are electorally polarizing: the country's main secular-leaning party performs relatively better in areas with denser concentrations of religious minorities.

🧭 Why it matters

These results offer a new account of how confessional parties make inroads in multiethnic democracies: mass religious events can reshape local religiosity and party organization in ways that alter electoral outcomes and deepen political polarization.