A few days ago, I went to Mathura and Vrindavan. I had visited in early 2023 last. I thought something should have changed, but I was left disappointed.The dust on roads, the garbage on the street and spilling drains, foul smell, mosquitoes, everything was the same. The same ghats, steps worn smooth by centuries of water flow, now dirty and unmaintained. There was garbage on the steps which led down to water that no one should be asked to touch, let alone take a dip in it. Stray cattle and dogs were on every lane. Autos and e-rickshaws (the beloved Tirri) drove as roughly as possible, endangering road safety. There was no decent public transport, no sign of anyone managing the crowds in order to actually prevent a mishap. It felt more like a staged practice of crowd management. The crowd arrived by the thousands, looking for a queue, a toilet to relieve themselves and wash up, or a bench to sit, or even a glass of clean water. But did not find any of this. Three years is not a short time. Cities can change in three years.The river arrived already brokenI live in Delhi, I know very well what the Yamuna looks like before it reaches those ghats in Vrindavan. It is a black, foaming water body that has supreme sanctity in Hindu religion. CPCB has classified the 22-kilometre stretch of Yamuna River (from Palla to Asgarpur) passing from Delhi as one of India’s most severely polluted Priority-1 river segments. By the time the Yamuna leaves Delhi, it is less like a river and more like a drain carrying sewage and industrial effluent.The same water flows on to Mathura and Vrindavan, where it picks up more of the towns’ own waste. The devotee performing a ritual dip at a ghat is bathing in dirty water that Delhi, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh have together declined to fix, across decades of action plans and thousands of crores in spending.So, the dirty ghat is actually not a local lapse, rather it is one of the links in a chain of failures. No single municipality can clean its own steps when the river arrives like this, and the ones who can fix it are the governments that share power across the whole stretch.The devotee as the business modelMathura and Vrindavan are among the holiest places in Hindu life. Millions come, very often old, many time travelling on life savings, making this journey once in a lifetime.I keep asking this question when I visit the popular Hindu holy places – what do they get in return? Very little in my opinion. An economy has grown around their faith and it runs only on their willingness to put up with this discomfort. The pilgrim who steps over filth to reach the holiest temple that they have wished to visit once a lifetime does not complain, because the destination matters more than the path. That patience is treated as a resource, and it is being spent. It is a remarkably convenient arrangement for everyone except the pilgrim.Ten years is not a short periodThe Bharatiya Janata Party has governed India since 2014 and Uttar Pradesh since 2017, and today it also runs Delhi and Haryana, the other states the Yamuna crosses. This is a party that built its identity on Hindu pride and the protection of sacred spaces, and it has asked for votes in the name of faith repeatedly and quite successfully. Whatever one thinks of its ideology, it can no longer plead inheritance or the sins of predecessors.Fairness requires an honest admission. These failures did not begin in 2014 or they did not started with BJP rising to power. Governments of every leaning have presided over the Yamuna’s decline and dirt, and municipal neglect is not unique to one party’s cities. But a party that wins on the promise of honouring Hindu sacred places invites the most direct test here: the condition of those places. By that measure, what I saw was a failing grade.Basic civic management is not glamorous. It means a working drainage, regular waste collection, clean public toilets, enforced traffic rules, safe transport and crowd management systems. We have seen enough stampedes at religious places to learn a lesson and improve. None of it is ideological. A toilet serves the devotee and the sceptic equally. It simply has to exist in a good condition for people to use, so that it does not spoil the holy place. Believers and non-believers both travel through the same road, it has to be clean and paved, they share the same neighbourhood, it has to be clean and free of garbage.Varanasi, the showpiece that tells the same storyI have been to Varanasi twice in the last three years as well. If any city in India was going to be transformed by political will, it was this one, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s own constituency. There is indeed a visible investment: the corridor, the ghat works, and a ropeway construction that will cost several hundred crores.But take a step away from this showpiece and the old problems still wait. Congestion that makes movement exhausting, waste in the lanes. A river that is ritual more than resource. A ropeway is being built to lift people above the chaos, while the chaos below stays as it is.Also read: Modi’s Month-Long Birthday Spectacle in Varanasi Hides the Reality of a ‘Smart City’ in ShamblesThis reflects a choice about what counts as development: the visible over the functional, the inaugurated over the maintained. An inauguration makes a headline but a working sewerage system does not. Any government is tempted by the former. A party that claims to speak for these cities has a particularly higher moral duty to resist the temptation.The state will point to investment, and some of it is real. Crores are being committed to roads, hostels and even a training centre for municipal staff in Vrindavan. But pilgrimage infrastructure is judged at peak load, and money announced is not equal to the service delivered. The test is at the ghat on a long weekend or during festival season.What religious politics hidesThere is a quiet bargain at this work. Faith is asked to or often substitute or used as an escape for performance. A leader who says the right things about the temple, the river and the civilisation is forgiven on the potholes, the dirt and the stampede risk at or around the same temple. The emotional register of politics does the work that municipal budgets should be doing.It works because devotees, quite reasonably, do not see themselves as consumers filing complaints for not getting good amenities and service in a holy city. They see themselves as pilgrims and to a Hindu pilgrim raising a grievance about a civic failure at a religious place can feel disloyal to the faith. That is the precise gap through which the system’s accountability slips away.I think this is the opposite of respect. If a place is sacred, it deserves to be kept clean. If devotees matter, their dignity, safety and comfort matter. Treating holy cities as backdrops for political messaging, or as dependable crowd-pullers that need no upkeep, is the real disrespect.What fixing it would look likeNone of this is mysterious or should come as a shock to anyone. Every item below exists in cities across India and the world.Treat the river as one system. Delhi, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh should be held to a shared, publicly reported target for sewage treatment and water quality along the whole stretch.Fix the basics at every major site. That means daily waste collection with penalties for dumping, clean public toilets and drinking water.Manage crowds by design. Festival days need capacity limits, queuing and clear exits.Regulate transport and traffic. Affordable, safe public transport and real enforcement against rash driving.Plan for stray animals. The plan has to be humane and has to work.What it takes is attention, budget and the willingness to be judged on boring things.The question I am left withI am not writing as an enemy of faith, I am a devout Hindu who expected a lot of attention to the religious cities beyond political rallies and podiums. I am writing as someone who walked those lanes and saw that the people around me, many of them elderly and exhausted, deserved far better.If a party built on religious identity cannot clean the steps of the most sacred places in the country after more than a decade in power, we should stop asking whether it is devoted. We should ask whether it is competent, and whether it is serious. Devotion deserves a clean ghat. Voters deserve an honest answer.Siddharth Dhodapkar is a development sector practitioner with eight years of cross-sector experience spanning education, air pollution, public health and governance. He writes on governance, institutions and system design.