The Ganesha "Milk Miracle"

Accounts differ on which New Delhi temple reported it first, but contemporary accounts place the event before dawn on Thursday, 21 September 1995. Hinduism Today told of a New Delhi man who dreamed that Lord Ganesha wanted milk. He hurried to the nearest temple at dawn. A priest let him offer a spoonful to a small stone image. Both watched as it "disappeared, magically consumed by the God."

Other names surfaced. Radha Krishna Bharadwaj, priest of the Shree Durga Vishnu temple in New Delhi, was there when the rumours first emerged. Internal reports pointed to a temple in Jhandewalan Park, near RSS headquarters. At the Birla Mandir, a priest heard temple bells at midnight and woke the neighbours.

By mid-morning on 21 September it had swept north India. By noon it had reached the UK, Canada, Dubai and Nepal. Then the USA, Trinidad, Kenya, Fiji and Australia. It spread from Ganesha to Shiva, Nandi and Durga. Hinduism Today counted tens of millions at temples in India.

Queues stretched over a mile. "I held the spoon out level, and it just disappeared," said Anila Premji. In Edmonton, barrister Aran Veylan watched the milk "wick" up from the spoon to the stone, sometimes as quickly as one could count to three. In Nairobi, Naina Shah offered milk to a three-inch wooden image in a home shrine and saw "the milk disappear."

Milk sold out within hours. New Delhi sales rose more than 30 percent. Delhi traffic stayed gridlocked until late evening. Schools and colleges closed. A Gateway store in England sold more than 25,000 pints.

In India it lasted about 24 hours. At Siddhivinayak in Mumbai, it stopped at about 12:30 and the gates closed. Abroad it went on for several days.

On 21 September a team from the Ministry of Science and Technology went to a New Delhi temple. They added food colouring to the milk. Once it left the spoon, the coloured milk was seen coating the statue beneath. T. Jayaraman of the Institute of Mathematical Sciences called it "a play of surface tension and capillary action." CSIR scientists demonstrated the siphon effect. Sanal Edamaruku of the Indian Rationalist Association showed milk coating idols and pooling at their bases.

Not everyone was convinced. Aparna Chattopadhyay, a senior scientist at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute, wrote to the Hindustan Times questioning capillary action. Col. P. C. Bhardwaj, a retired army engineer, insisted: "No milk was seen flowing out of the body." In Fiji, Alvin Singh put it plainly: "If it was surface tension, it would still be happening till today." Psychologist Udayan Patel saw something else: "The point at which the milk disappeared is the point when the mind ceased to function."

Then came politics. Congress minister Sitaram Kesri called it a BJP ploy ahead of the Lok Sabha elections. He cited "an organised barrage of late-night telephone calls to Hindu temples all over India and the world." In 2020, P. Raman argued in The Wire that the Sangh Parivar had organised it. Similar reports followed. In Singapore, a Virgin Mary statue was said to accept milk. A Gandhi statue was said to accept alcohol.

It came back. Bareilly, August 2006. Princes Town, Trinidad, September 2010. Yash Pal called the 2006 episode "mass religious hysteria." For many who held a spoon in 1995, the meaning stayed simpler. Romanee Kalicharan, 15, put it this way: "I think it's a sign from God."