Dozens Killed in Stampede at Hindu Festival in Northern India

At least 30 people were killed in northern India on Wednesday when a stampede broke out at the Maha Kumbh festival in Prayagraj.

Maha Kumbh is an important Hindu event that has become the largest religious gathering in the world, far outstripping the massive Hajj pilgrimage made by Muslims each year to the Saudi Arabian cities of Mecca and Medina.

India anticipated over 400 million participants in this year’s festival, including many guests from other countries. The site of the ceremony is only about 15 square miles in size, and the participants only have six weeks to complete their bathing rituals. The tent city built to accommodate them boasts thousands of kitchens, a dozen hospitals, and about fifty thousand security personnel.

The Maha Kumbh involves ritually bathing in sacred waters in the Ganges River, rotating between several holy sites each year. The waters near Prayagraj are considered the most auspicious location, and the alignment of stars and planets is particularly favorable, so a truly massive turnout was expected.

The Maha Kumbh has a political dimension as well, since the governing party of India is the Hindu nationalist BJP. Having just come through a rough election where it lost many seats, and came fairly close to losing the prime minister’s office, BJP was eager to demonstrate both its Hindu pride and its ability to manage a huge event.

Wednesday brought a much-feared stampede that crushed some worshipers beneath the feet of others. When the top BJP official in the Uttar Pradesh province, who also happens to be a major religious leader known as Yogi Adityanath, arrived to participate in the bathing festival, hundreds of pilgrims tried to climb over the barricades in a frantic effort to see him.

“Suddenly there was pushing in the crowd, and we got trapped. A lot of us fell down and the crowd went uncontrolled. There was no chance for escape, there was pushing from all sides,” an eyewitness told Indian media.

Foreign journalists covering the event reported seeing huge numbers of victims sprawled on the ground and being carted off on stretchers, many of them covered by ominous shrouds. Most of the victims were sitting or lying on the river bank when the stampede rolled over them. Some of them were evidently asleep when they were trampled.

“It was around 1.45 a.m., and people were getting flattened in the melee, and I could see this crush of humanity surge forward. Many women and children were asleep when the tragedy happened. I was numb seeing such a crowd, and an hour later, I saw lifeless bodies lying on the ground,” another eyewitness said.

Adityanath estimated that 90 to 100 million people were packed into the holy site when the stampede broke out. About a third of them had taken the sacred bath on Wednesday morning by the time he arrived.

Reuters counted 39 bodies in the local morgue 12 hours after the stampede and said more corpses were still arriving.

Adityanath expressed his condolences to the victims, pledged state benefits of around $29,000 per victim, and promised a full investigation of how the stampede occurred. None of these promises satisfied the political opposition, which slammed BJP for mismanaging the pilgrimage and attempting to downplay the horrific scale of the stampede. It took almost half a day for officials to make a public statement on the number of dead and wounded.

“Mismanagement and the administration’s special focus on V.I.P. movement instead of common devotees are responsible for this tragic incident,” declared Rahul Gandhi, a leading figure in the opposition India Congress Party.

Gandhi criticized BJP for parading political and entertainment celebrities through the Maha Kumbh to generate favorable media coverage. The nature of the stellar and planetary calendar that determines the timing of the pilgrimage made Tuesday and Wednesday the most auspicious days to take the sacred bath, so the number of V.I.P. guests on those days was especially high.

Another problem was that one particular area of the Ganges river, where it meets the Yamnuna and Saraswati Rivers, is regarded as exceptionally sacred. The point of the exercise is to bathe on the exact spots where the gods are said to have spilled drops of a precious immortality elixir during a battle with demons at the dawn of time.

Yogi Adityanath urged worshipers to spread out across the entire designated region and use its dozens of platforms to bathe, but many of them insisted on pushing for the sacred river confluence.

“This tragedy could have been easily avoided if there was better crowd control and the presence of adequate police. But the administration blocked over 28 platoon bridges leading to the river, which were reserved for VIPs, leading to the chaos,” an angry pilgrim told Deutsche Welle (DW).

The Maha Kumbh has suffered deadly stampedes before, as has the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, whose management is often criticized in the same way as Maha Kumbh’s organizers. This year’s Maha Kumbh security was augmented with advanced technology — including A.I.-boosted video surveillance, swarms of drones, and electronic tracking bracelets for all attendees — but none of that helped to prevent a stampede from breaking out.

“In almost all religious stampedes, overcrowding, poor crowd management and rumors and panic have resulted in horrific tragedies,” a private security consultant sighed to DW.