Take Two

Why a stampede does not register in India

Madhavankutty Pillai | 14 Feb, 2013

If you look at stampedes that have occurred across the world in recent times, most can be connected to one of these three—football, music and God. Deaths at football matches and rock concerts are egalitarian; they do not discriminate between the First World and Third World. Death by suffocation and trampling in a religious place, though, is the poor man’s burden. It is intriguing that God should rival football and rock on such a list. The only thing common is the frenzy they evoke. That is the base psychological condition that needs to be fulfilled before other stampede-causing factors come into question.

In Sabarimala, a stampede during the pilgrimage season is a recurring event. It often happens on a day when a divine light is said to shine over the hills. In 1999, 52 people were killed on that day. In 2008, the state minister in charge of the temple trust revealed that the light was actually lit by human beings. For long it had been suspected that tribals did it at the behest of the temple. The minister’s statement was a government stamp on the non-existence of the miracle. It didn’t dissuade anyone. In 2011, 106 people died on that day.

In India, stampedes at temples are common and have large casualties. In 2008, 162 were killed at the Naina Devi temple in Himachal Pradesh. The same year, about 250 were killed at the Chamunda Devi temple in Jodhpur, 63 in Kunda, Uttar Pradesh, in 2010… and the list goes on. When 36 Kumbh Mela pilgrims died in a stampede recently, it should not have come as a surprise to anyone. It was almost a given that such a tragedy would happen. The only question was how many it would kill and what form it would take. As it happened, this time it was at Allahabad railway station.

According to a PTI report, 700 people have been killed in temple stampedes over the past eight years. The Kumbh is not a temple, and the stampede happened at a station, but still, the religious connection is self-evident. What is interesting is how we react—or rather, don’t—to stampedes. Imagine what would have happened if the same number of people had been killed in a terror attack. After Mumbai’s 2007 serial bomb blasts in local trains, for months you could see commuters look with suspicion at luggage racks even though the probability of terrorists targeting these trains again was negligible.

A stampede, on the other hand, is a perpetual danger at any religious gathering with overwhelming numbers. It is all the more dangerous because there is no one planning it. It is, if you pardon the phrase, an act of God with some involuntary contribution by humans. Yet, if someone were to go on a pilgrimage to Sabarimala, no one advises the person to stay at the edge of the crowd or choose a day that is not ‘special’. The possibility of death in a stampede is not something that crosses the pilgrim’s mind. And that is also peculiar because he is, after all, in search of liberation and so dying is a question he is dealing with at a spiritual level at least.

Stampedes do not register in the Indian mind because we do not find anything dangerous about crowds. These are part of our routine existence. From joining the throng of daily commuters to shoving our way forth in a market, we are always squeezed and adept at making a little space for ourselves. It is not easy to associate death with a habit.

This is an age of short attention spans, but even by that measure, the Kumbh stampede is already old news by now. Normally, tragedies are humanised in the media by reports on the people who died and the suffering of their relatives. None of that is evident in much measure this time (as against every victim of the 26/11 terror attack becoming a story by itself). Mostly, the only thing you see now in newspapers are stories of which government agency to blame. That is a pointless path to pursue. Of course, it could have been prevented. There are huge gatherings at political rallies but you don’t see people getting trampled to death there because the entire machinery of the State is thrown in to maintain order. But governments are dull and lazy creatures. They will move once in a while on being kicked, but otherwise their nature is only to react to tragic events. You might find a bigger overbridge at Allahabad railway station soon, but 12 years from now, at the next Kumbh Mela, there will still be another stampede.