Mud Packs For Taj Mahal Ahead Of Trump’s Visit

US President Donald Trump makes his first official visit to India on Monday and work has been going on around the clock to spruce things up — to the annoyance of some locals as well as monkeys.

The photo opportunity highlights of the 36-hour trip include a rally of 1,00,000 people at the world’s largest cricket stadium and watching the sunset with First Lady Melania at the Taj Mahal.

A long wall has been hastily built, along the route in Ahmedabad to the new Sardar Patel Stadium in order, locals believe, to hide a slum, although officials deny it.

Sardar Sarania, a resident of the slum, is disgusted at what he sees as Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s attempt to conceal reality.

“So Modi has supposedly made everything good and there’s development everywhere, right? But he’s hid us behind here,” Sarania told AFP.

“We’re made invisible. So the gutter we live in, he (Trump) won’t see us. That’s why they’re building this.”

Scores of banners and hoardings with pictures of Donald Trump, PM Modi and Melania Trump have been put up across the city, projecting the “Namaste Trump” rally as a historic event in US-India relations.

The route will be lined with thousands of people — well short of the 6-10 million President Trump says he has been told will attend — as well as stages for performers and images of Mahatma Gandhi.

Ahmedabad officials are also keen to avoid a repeat of when then-US secretary of state John Kerry’s cavalcade hit one of India’s ubiquitous stray dogs during a 2015 visit.

The Cattle and Dog Nuisance Control Department (CDNCD) has constituted a crack team to remove dogs and cows in a three-kilometre radius of the route.

A local NGO and the state forest department have also been roped in to keep birds and bands of monkeys out of Air Force One’s way on the runway at Ahmedabad airport.

“In the past 10 days, we have caught 45-odd monkeys. They come in search of food,” Raag Patel from the Nature Conservation Foundation said.

The captive monkeys are put in cages with food, sent to a “distant location” and released, Mr Patel said.

Make Agra great again

Next stop for the Trumps will be sunset at the Taj Mahal in Agra, and here too workers have been busy making the mausoleum more beautiful still.

Time, and also air pollution, have taken their toll, turning parts of the Taj Mahal yellow, necessitating several rounds of treatment with coatings of mud packs that are then peeled off.

For the Trumps, the replicas of the graves of Mughal emperor Shah Jahan and his wife Mumtaz Mahal — for whom the Taj Mahal was built — are getting the beauty treatment too, and for the first time.

“We completed the mud-pack treatment on Thursday,” Vasant Swarnkar from the Archaeological Survey of India told AFP.

“It was already planned but the treatment was brought forward for Trump’s visit.”

Authorities have also released vast volumes of water into the Yamuna river flowing adjacent to the Taj Mahal in order to lessen the usual whiff of raw sewage and industrial effluent.

“This move may not make the Yamuna’s water fit for drinking, but could reduce foul smell from the river,” said Arvind Kumar, an engineer from UP Pollution Control Board.