Jammu: In an unprecedented first of its kind tragedy, 12 devotees were crushed to death and 16 were injured in a stampede near the Vaishno Devi shrine. The disaster happened around 3 am on New Year’s Day while it was still dark on the route to the Vaishno Devi shrine, one of the area’s most revered Hindu sites.
The Shrine Board, chaired by the Jammu and Kashmir lieutenant governor, who also nominates its members, has put the blame on “a scuffle between two groups of pilgrims”.
It has also countered charges of overcrowding by saying that as against the National Green capacity” at 50,000 people per day, only 35,000 were allowed to proceed on 31st and 1st, as a Covid precaution. In this version, the board, the local administration, police and CRPF all did their job well. But widely available visuals and witness accounts tell quite a different tale. Forget social distancing, queues entering and exiting the shrine were swelling into each other, out of control, and the shrine was also filled beyond the brim.
The J&K government has set up a high-level probe. Officials said authorities responded quickly, order within the crowd was restored and the pilgrimage resumed after nearly four hours of the early morning tragedy.
One of the witnesses, Ravinder said the crush happened at a point where huge crowds of people coming down from the shrine meet those going up. He estimated that there were at least 100,000 people. “No one was checking registration slips of the devotees. I have been there many times but never seen such a rush of people,” he said. “It was only when some of us managed to lift a dead body up with our hands and made space for moving the bodies out,” he said.
And while people, especially young people, flocking to the cave shrine to celebrate New Year is a new trend, Vaishno Devi is actually quite accustomed to crowds growing big on special occasions like Navratri and schools’ summer holidays. But if accountability is not fixed, it’s like saying to the dead that it was just their fate. It must instead be pinpointed exactly how crowd management failed. So that in the future crowds’ flow paths stay smooth – and bottlenecks get cleared before lives are lost.