Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav on Wednesday joined a chorus of voices commenting on a video from Gujarat’s Ahmedabad – a video that shows men gleefully covering themselves in cow dung and urine in the belief it will protect them against COVID-19.
A bemused Mr Yadav tweeted: “Should we cry or laugh over this…”.
Attached to his tweet was a video from a report by news agency Reuters that identified a school called the Shree Swaminarayan Gurukul Vishwavidya Pratishthanam, where some people go once a week to slather cow dung and urine over their bodies, hug cows and practice yoga.
The video showed a group of about a dozen men squatting shirtless in a field with buckets of liquified cow dung in front of them. Each man dug his hand into the buckets and smeared handfuls of the dung all over their body and head, before standing in a circle and praying.
