NEW DELHI: Some blamed authorities’ mismanagement and a sudden change in platform, while many faulted India’s population, lack of travel etiquette and misunderstanding railway announcements for the New Delhi station stampede. A few others were busy posting their ‘holy dip’ pictures!
Social media was flooded with posts trying to fix the blame hours after at least 18 people died and many were injured in the stampede on Saturday night at New Delhi railway station where a large number of people had gathered to board trains for Maha Kumbh alongside a sizeable number of other passengers travelling elsewhere.
Several people claiming to be aligned with the ruling dispensation’s ideology posted that India, being the world’s most populous nation, should learn basic crowd management rules, and people should listen to public announcements carefully.
Responding to a widespread theory that the commotion and the subsequent stampede occurred due to a sudden change in the platform for a train bound for Prayagraj, some officials claimed no platform change was announced for any train.
They claimed that passengers misunderstood the announcement for a Prayagraj special train as a platform change for a regular express train headed for the home to the ongoing Maha Kumbh already attended by crores of people.
Social media posts of people aligned with the ruling dispensation also talked about people not having basic etiquette of travelling light, following queues and reserving tickets in advance.
Some such posts talked about an immediate need to bring out a population control bill in Parliament and to stop the politics of appeasement. They also claimed that such stampedes, road traffic and crowd management are impossible to handle till India controls its population.
Some even talked about the need to teach basic etiquettes to “dehatis” (rural population) rather than blaming the government, saying the rural folks “easily believe in rumours and start a stampede”.
Those on the other side of the spectrum, especially those aligned with the opposition ideology, talked about lapses on the part of railways and other authorities in terms of no warning bells being sounded out when thousands of people were being issued unreserved tickets in an hour, security personnel allegedly being almost absent to control the crowd and no special efforts being made to provide correct information to passengers.
They said stampedes were clearly the government’s failures as it was their duty to arrange sufficient resources for events like Maha Kumbh.
Opposition parties, including the Congress, demanded the immediate resignation of Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw, while BJP leaders posted pictures of the situation having returned to normalcy and said the top ministers were keeping a constant watch.
Amid all these blame games, various official handles kept on posting pictures and the number of people who had taken the “holy dip” at the confluence of three rivers in Prayagraj.
Individually too, people posted their ‘holy dip’ pictures and these included Indian and foreign diplomats, ministers, MPs, businessmen and sportspersons, among others, besides the new breed of social media influencers flocking Prayagraj in large numbers for their Maha Kumbh reels.
In the meantime, conflicting details continued to emerge about the national capital stampede from the railways, police, general public and political parties.
The railway ministry, on its part, was yet to give an official death toll after initially denying last night that there was any stampede and then accepting hours later that some lost their lives. It has also ordered a high-level enquiry. PTI
