Stop romanticising India's cattle class

We're tired of commenting on India's abysmal implementation of crowd control norms. But last week's Rath Yatra tragedy in Puri that claimed two lives has gone down the same rabbit hole of charge-counter-charge without the needle moving one bit. The Odisha government has denied the deaths were caused by a stampede or crowd mismanagement. This may well be true, something that needs proper investigation. But deaths and injuries, never mind the sheer discomfort of crushing crowds, isn't nit-picky about what causes them.

Year after year, mass gatherings - secular and religious - devolve into utter chaos that are so normalised that they seem curated to 'fail'. This is amplified by such gatherings, especially at religious sites, locked in a fierce competition over who can draw the bigger crowd. Sacred spaces turn into high-stake arenas where human lives are routinely risked for the optics of a massive turnout of devotees. With SOPs in place and their daily experience of handling crowds, police should by now be pros at predicting bottlenecks and managing sudden surges. That hasn't happened. This systematic failure is compounded by the utter lack of civic sense of citizens who don't think twice about breaking lines, breaching barricades and ignoring safety protocols.

The romantic notion that self-punishment is part and parcel of worship hardly helps. Lack of basic safety and comfort protocols are dismissed as 'first world problems', validating life-threatening environments as spiritual endurance tests. India needs top-down implementation, heavy penalties for administrative complacency and civic non-compliance. To keep perpetuating crowd chaos as par for our cultural course is the very opposite of the still-mystical notion of being 'viksit'.