Editorial - All in the Name of God | Papri Sri Raman

My NRI brother sent me a cryptic message from Boston last week, ‘Hathras-e Hahakar’. Of course, he could not resist the Bengali propensity for assonance. And he did not like my answer. This is India, land of the devout. The country is headed by a godman who claims non-biological birth. The State of Uttar Pradesh is ruled by a ‘saffron-clad yogi’, Adityanath, from the Gorakhpur sect. The 121 deaths in a stampede at a ‘satsang’ are not considered deaths by the administrations here. It is considered ‘Mukti’, liberation from earthly bondage, in consonant with India’s philosophical traditions. My reply ended with the message that this will happen again… and again. Just wait for a few more years. A new godman will appear, he will again have a huge following in some remote, underdeveloped region of the country. There will be a different satsang and several hundred deaths again.

On 2 July, some 250,000 people had gathered for the darshan of a ‘baba’ I had not even heard of in a village called Mughal Gahri, in Mainpuri subdivision, under a make-shift tent in a muddy field, the police FIR says. A police officer responding to the tragedy died of heart attack. The FIR says, the exit to the enclosure was narrow. The crush began when people surged forward to pick up the ‘dust of the ground’ on which the baba stood! The baba’s coterie held back the crowd until he exited. When an investigation was ordered, the police searched the baba’s ashram and told the media, the baba ‘was not in the ashram’. In other words, he had fled. That was expected.

Six government and police officers have now been suspended for ‘mismanaging’ the event. As if that or the government’s monetary compensation will make up for the lives lost. But in a country of 1.4 billion, the value of 123 lives is not even peanuts. The UP government has said, senior government and police officials were not notified about the event and a Hathras senior district official had permitted the event to run without inspecting the venue. A lawyer of the so-called baba told the media it was a ‘conspiracy’, note conspiracy, to discredit him. The baba was not at the venue. A few days ago, a Special Investigative Team has submitted its report to the government of UP. This 855-page report from a 2-member team has not named the baba in its submission, such is the baba’s influence. The Team also said, it does not rule out a ‘major conspiracy’ behind it. Now it is no longer the baba, it’s a ‘conspiracy’ against the administration, the government, against Hindu-Hindutva-Hinduism itself. Chief Minister Adityanath had sniffed at a ‘conspiracy’ even before the investigation; he would, now that he has lost much turf in UP and the Mainpuri MP is Samajwadi Party’s Dimple Yadav. It is natural again that Additional Director General of Police (Agra Zone) Anupam Kulshreshtha and Divisional Commissioner (Aligarh) Chaitra V, the SIT investigators, too concluded ‘a larger conspiracy’. Bahujan Samaj Party president Mayawati has on 10 July alleged that the SIT report presented on the Hathras stampede ‘seems politically motivated’ and is an attempt to give the baba, a policeman-turned-godman called Narayan Sakar Hari, a clean chit. My readers should not be surprised, if this powerful man is a member of our parliament or UP’s chief minister one or two decades later, like Odisha’s Pratap Chandra Sarangi, the man involved in the gruesome Staines killing.

At least two persons died and over 130 were injured in two different incidents during Jagannath’s Rath Yatra in Odisha on this 8 July. A resident of Bolangir died due to suffocation in a stampede-like situation during the Rath Yatra in Puri, a health official said.

On my mind has been the several such incidents that have occurred in independent India in the last 75 years. on 14 January 1952, 66 Ayyappa pilgrims were burnt to death when two fireworks sheds caught fire, while on the same day in 1999, 52 pilgrims were killed following a crowd crush during their return after witnessing the Makara Jyothi at Pamba. The 14 January 2011, the Sabarimala stampede at Pullumedu also happened during the annual pilgrimage, killing 106 pilgrims and injuring about 100 more.

There is an interesting list of temple stampedes on the net. It gives dates as long ago as the 1820 Kumbh Mela at Haridwar, with 430 dead and more than a thousand injured. In Allahabad, 1840, there were 50 dead. In 1954, again the Allahabad fair, 500-800 people died in a crowd crush and about 2,000 were injured. In 1986, there were 50 dead and 200 injured. One can argue, these numbers are from British times and India was taking baby steps at development in the 1950s.

Nothing much seems to have changed with the turn of the century. In the Mandher Devi temple, Sitara in 2005, 291 people died and more than 600 were injured. At the Naina Devi temple in 2008, 146 people died and 150 people were injured. At Vaishno Devi, on 31 December 2021 and the New Year 2022, 12 pilgrims were killed, and more than two dozen injured in a deadly stampede. It was later said, ‘senior officers of the shrine board stopped pilgrims from entering the shrine to facilitate the visit of a top J&K officer, due to which a large crowd had built up outside’. Seventy-five years is a long time in the life of a ‘Hindu rashtra’. This is India and the Hindu faithful die in stampedes even today; only the language of the investigations has turned political. I am happy though to end this week with the news that ISRO, India’s ace space agency, has mapped the underwater natural rock formation of Adam’s Bridge, ending the long-drawn controversy that Ram built Ramar Sethu. So much for our godmen of yore and now.