Heartbreaking, unthinkable, horrific, apocalypse… Several Bollywood stars, including Farhan Akhtar and Parineeti Chopra, have expressed their anguish at scores of bodies found floating in the Ganga and other rivers and demanded accountability for the lapses that led to it.

Their responses came after reports of corpses washed up along river banks from several parts of the country, including Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. In Bihar, for instance, the state government said 71 bodies were found in the Ganga, leading to suspicion that they might be those of COVID-19 patients.

Also read | Bihar puts net across Ganga to catch bodies of suspected COVID victims

In a tweet, Akhtar on Wednesday said the pandemic cannot be done away without making the “system” accountable for its failure.

“The news of scores of bodies being discovered floating in rivers and washed up on its banks is absolutely heartbreaking. The virus will be defeated someday but there has to be accountability for these failures in the system. Until then, the pandemic chapter is not closed!” the actor-filmmaker wrote.

The pandemic seems to have brought out the worst in humanity, said Chopra.

“Those bodies floating in rivers were lives lived; they were somebody’s mother, daughter, father or son. How would you feel if you were on that riverbank and saw your mother floating by?? UNTHINKABLE. Monsters,” she wrote on the microblogging site.

Actor and Shiv Sena politician Urmila Matondkar referred to the act of dumping bodies in the Ganga as tragic and inhuman.

“Over 100 dead bodies of suspected Covid fatalities dumped in Ganga. Tragic… brutal.. inhuman beyond belief. Om Shanti #IndiaCovidCrisis,” she wrote on Tuesday evening after a news channel report from Buxar district.

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Actor-filmmaker Pooja Bhatt shared a stinging comment on the current state of affairs as she regrammed a news report on the issue. “You can fudge the data.. how do you hide the bodies? This will haunt us for generations to come,” the “Bombay Begums” star captioned her Instagram post on Tuesday night.

Actor-comedian Jaaved Jaaferi summed up the worrying situation succinctly.

“This is tragic and horrific,” Jaaferi wrote as he tweeted a news article on the COVID-19 panic caused when 40 bodies were discovered on the banks of Ganga at Buxar earlier this week.

Shekhar Suman said the horrifying visuals from his home state mirrored the “Apocalypse”.

“We don’t deserve this. We don’t. Frightening ,horrifying to say the least. God plz save us from this cataclysm (sic)” the Patna-born actor tweeted.

“Mirzapur” star Divyenndu said the country was in a “state of emergency”.

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“Dead bodies found floating in Ganga!!! Yeh kahan se kahan aa gaye hum.. (Where have we come?) Now, Uttarakhand is going through crisis, like most of our states!! We are in a State of EMERGENCY,” he wrote.

India saw a record rise in COVID-19 deaths with 4,205 fresh fatalities taking the country’s death toll to 2,54,197, while 3,48,421 new coronavirus infections were reported, according to the Union Health Ministry data updated on Wednesday.