A devastating crowd crush at a religious ceremony in the Hathras district of Northern India has taken the lives of 121 people, mainly women and children. Thirty-five others have been reported injured.
Around 250,000 people had gathered at the Hindu religious congregation on Tuesday, with a police report saying this was triple the capacity permitted.
The crush is one of the deadliest incidents India has seen in recent years, and police are investigating the organisers, accusing them of culpable homicide not amounting to murder, wrongfully restraining a person, causing disappearance of evidence or providing false information.
In the state of Uttar Pradesh, hundreds of thousands of devotees gathered to see Bhole Baba, a popular self-styled guru. At the religious function known as a satsang, authorities say the crowd attended to offer prayers to the baba, whose real name is Narayan Sakar Vishwa Hari. Authorities have been on the hunt for him since the incident.
Witnesses of the deadly crush say the crowd surged forward in an effort to touch the feet of the guru and the ground he’d driven away on, which is deemed holy by his devotees. It’s also been said that organisers used force to prevent people moving off the roads to safety.
“When the sermon finished, everyone started running out,” a woman named only as Shakuntala told the Press Trust of India news agency.
“People fell in a drain by the road. They started falling one on top of the other and got crushed to death.”
In the days leading up to the satsang, there’d been heavy rain, and as the event was held in a large tent in agricultural fields, many people slipped and fell in the wet mud.
A police report filed after the event stated that “due to the uncontrollable crowd leaving the venue, devotees sitting on the ground were crushed”.
The report added: “On the other side of the road, the crowd running in the water- and mud-filled fields was forcibly stopped by the organising committee with sticks, due to which the pressure of the crowd kept increasing and women, children and men kept getting crushed.”
Many of the families of the dead and missing gathered at the hospital and morgue in Hathras on Wednesday, seeking answers and trying to recover the bodies of their loved ones.
Local health authorities have identified 72 bodies so far, and dozens of injured people are still being treated.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi expressed his condolences in a parliamentary address.
Crowd crushes at religious events in India have been an ongoing problem in recent years.
Rajesh Kumar Jha, a member of parliament, questioned why fatalities kept occurring, stating that “people will keep on dying” if authorities did not start taking safety protocols more seriously.