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Temple stampede kills 146 as India
refuses to learn
crowd control
WSN Bureau
 NAINA DEVI
SHRINE: More than 140 devotees of Naina Devi, including scores of
women and children, died at a temple of the goddess near Anandpur
Sahib in a stampede on Sunday that seemed to be clearly caused by
panic and total lack of crowd control mechanisms. Most people termed
it a tragedy that was waiting to happen but Indian response remained
limited to VIP visits to hospitals and announcement of ex-gratia
grants. Nearly a 100 of the dead were from
Punjab.
Police put the final figure at 146.
Tens of
thousands had thronged the Naina Devi shrine, technically in
Himachal Pradesh, to attend the week-long religious festivities when
the rumour of a landslide triggered panic among devotees.
Reports also
said police could only think of raining some batons on the rushing
devotees to restore order and check the commotion, but this only
created further panic. Clearly the public address systems were
inadequate, the route too narrow, the crowd control gates missing,
the police presence minimal and the railings undependable.
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Temple
crushes are common during festivities in
India,
where crowd control management is often rudimentary at best. |
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Many fell to
their deaths when the railings could not take the load and gave way.
Indian media did not even look into the aspect as to who had put the
railings, who had designed these, who had conducted the survey of
the route, who had paid for it and who was responsible for such
shoddy pieces of metal pipes.
C rowds
of 20,000 plus are normal for the shrine and nothing that happened
on Sunday could have been unforeseen.
The bodies of
devotees were strewn along the steep four-kilometer (2.5-mile) path
leading up to the temple.
Hundreds of Sikh
devotees from the nearby town of
Anandpur Sahib
rushed to help the injured and console the families that had
suffered the loss. Most families were from Punjab.
Punjab's chief
minister Prakash Singh Badal rushed to the site the next day.
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Death Stats
Ninety-nine of the 146 victims killed in the stampede at Naina
Devi on Sunday were from Punjab. These include 54 men and 45
women. The maximum number of deceased, 73, were from different
parts of Patiala.
Twenty-one of the deceased were from Haryana, nine from Himachal
Pradesh. Five people from Bihar died in the accident.
In Haryana, 17 members of a family were killed. |
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Typical of the
Indian psyche of bravado, the pilgrimage continued hours after the
corpses were cleared and the media made much of the resilience of
the devotees, ignoring the fact that human lives continued to be at
stake.
The temple,
devoted to goddess Naina Devi, is located at a hilltop in the
Himalayas
and visitors have to climb a narrow stairway to access it. The
shrine has been the site of previous deadly accidents.
In the early
1980s, more than 50 people died in a similar stampede. After that
incident, authorities constructed separate passages for entry and
exit.
Temple crushes
are common during festivities in
India,
where crowd control management is often rudimentary at best.
In one of
India's
deadliest stampedes, 257 people were killed during a Hindu
pilgrimage in western Maharashtra state in January 2005.
6 August, 2008
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