Bodies are being discovered floating down the Ganga at a new place by the hour, with local bureaucrats and ministers scrambling to claim the corpses came from elsewhere up the 2,500km river.
After Buxar on Monday and Ghazipur on Tuesday afternoon, corpses were found in the Ganga at three places in Ballia district of Uttar Pradesh on Tuesday night, local accounts suggesting a combined tally of about 40 bodies.
“Bodies were found in the Narahi area under the Ballia-Buxar bridge and were many days old,” Ballia district magistrate Aditi Singh said.
Her statement implied the bodies had been thrown into the river further upstream — a claim also made by officials in Buxar (Bihar) and Ghazipur (Uttar Pradesh) and buttressed by a Bihar minister on Wednesday.