NEW DELHI - Barely two months after an horrific temple stampede crushed 162
people to death at a famous Hindu shrine in India's northern state of Himachal
Pradesh, comes yet another temple tragedy. This time at the 15th century
Chamunda Devi temple in Jodhpur Rajasthan, famously known as the "Blue City" in
the tourist state of Rajasthan.
In the wee hours of Tuesday, 147 devotees were trampled to death there by
fellow pilgrims clamoring to enter the temple to mark the start of the Hindu
festival of Navratras. Disaster struck when a wall in the labyrinthine alley
that leads to the Medieval temple collapsed, triggering panic among a
25,000-strong congregation. The situation was aggravated by people slipping on
the temple floor, which was awash with coconut milk after
thousands were smashed as offerings to the deities. A power outage acted as a
fatal last straw.
Stampedes are hardly uncommon in Indian temples, where hundreds of thousands
regularly assemble to pray during festivals and police are often unable to
control the surge of worshippers. The Jodhpur incident is the third of its kind
in India this year, coming close on the heels of the Himachal Pradesh tragedy
and another at Kota, Rajasthan which left two dead and 250 injured when a
temple staircase collapsed.
In 2005, 340 died in a human crush at the hilltop Mandra Devi temple in western
India, where more than 300,000 had gathered for a religious festival. In 2003
all hell broke loose at Nasik in Maharashtra state when a tsunami of Hindu
pilgrims - waiting to bathe in a local holy river - surged over a flimsy bamboo
fence triggering a stampede that killed 39 and injured 125.
"While we are highly sensitive to the menace of terror," said Mahesh Dhow, an
erstwhile senior police officer, "avoidable disasters like stampedes which kill
more people than bomb blasts often escape our attention."
This is all the more unfortunate - even foolhardy - considering cultural and
religious pilgrimages are an integral part of Indian life with most Indians
undertaking at least one such journey during their lifetime. These trips may
even involve millions, like in the case of the Kumbh Mela festival which is
held at the confluence of the Ganges and Yamuna rivers in India's most populous
state of Uttar Pradesh.
Apart from the Kumbh Melas, there are major temples like Tirupati and
Guruvayoor in the south, Vaishno Devi in the north and Kamakhya in the
northeast, and lesser-known ones like Naina Devi in Himachal Pradesh and
Chamunda Devi in Mehrangarh Fort in Jodhpur which attract hordes of devotees.
Major pilgrim destinations are relatively more adept at dealing with large
crowds and disaster usually strikes at smaller ones, according to experts. In
other words, larger congregations are somewhat better managed, while smaller
ones often lack simpler measures such as the holding areas, trained marshals
and public address systems needed to manage crowds.
In most cases, crowd management measures at such gatherings are rudimentary -
or even non-existent. To top it all, police action often exacerbates panic when
things go wrong.
An official at New Delhi's famous Akshardham Temple said that temple
authorities often miss a cardinal rule of crowd control - that of sending the
worshippers to the temple in batches. "This fundamental lack of organization or
plain common sense results in massive tragedies at pilgrimages undertaken by
hundreds of thousands of ordinary Indians every year," he said.
District administrations also usually plan to manage crowds based on turnout
estimates from previous gatherings, failing to factor in sudden surges. It is
usually this miscalculation that catches the administration off guard and leads
to stampedes.
Perhaps the Indian administration could take a leaf out of the Chinese
authorities' book. Despite the crowds which each day visit Lhasa's Potala, the
erstwhile palace of the Dalai Lama, only a set number of visitors are allowed
in each day, and to protect the ancient wooden structure visitors are assigned
to holding areas if numbers do spill over.
In Chennai's Devikarumari Amman temple at Tiruverkadu and the Kamashi Amman
temple at Mangadu, the shrine authorities have made arrangements to prevent a
stampede. At Tiruverkadu, there are two exit gates, apart from the main
entrance, through which devotees walk in and after entering the temple, the
devotees progress towards the sanctum sanctorum in single file and then
exit through another gate. In the event of a melee, the two exit gates on all
sides can be opened to let the crowd out.
At the Akshardham Temple there is always police outside the temple, and during
festivals additional forces and student volunteers navigate the crowd. A
medical booth is also set up outside the temple with doctors and medical staff.
After the Jodhpur tragedy, the Rajasthan state government has responded with
the quintessential tokenism of ordering an "official probe". But how many such
probes in the past in India have yielded anything worthwhile to prevent future
tragedies? On the contrary, even as hapless relatives wailed over the dead
bodies of their near and dear ones in Tuesday's tragedy - politicians scrambled
to extract political mileage from the incident.
The Congress-led government in New Delhi started accusing the main opposition
party - the Bharatiya Janata Party (which is currently in power in Rajasthan
led by chief minister Vasundhara Raje Scindia) - of negligence. Ironically,
with elections looming large on India's political landscape, it is not grief
over the loss of human lives in Tuesday's tragedy that is on the politician's
mind, but vote grabbing.
Neeta Lal is a widely published writer/commentator who contributes to
many reputed national and international print and Internet publications.
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