THE KUMBH MELA, a Hindu pilgrimage festival held every 12 years, was slated to be a mammoth event drawing millions of visitors. It was held at Uttar Pradesh’s Prayagraj from 13 January to 26 February this year and, for the Bharatiya Janata Party, it was of vital importance. The state government, helmed by Adityanath, had allocated nearly Rs 7,500 crore to it. The last Kumbh in the city had been held in 2013, when the Samajwadi Party was in power and Manmohan Singh was the prime minister, heading the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance. The city was called Allahabad then. Given that this would be India’s largest public gathering, planning logistics was crucial.
On 30 January, the Kumbh administration released a series of directives announcing that routes for devotees would be made one-way. There would be vehicular restrictions, and, most notably, all VIP passes were to be cancelled on important days of the Kumbh Mela. The directives came a day after a stampede killed at least thirty people at the Kumbh. The disaster occurred on Mauni Amavasya, a key ritual that attracted over 76 million pilgrims this year. This was the first stampede to occur at the Triveni Sangam area—considered a sacred confluence of the rivers Ganga and Yamuna, and the mythical river Sarasvati—since 1954.
The stampede occurred between 1 and 2 am, as the crowd swelled beyond control. According to official data, nearly 55 million had taken dips in the waters the night before, with the numbers continuing to grow overnight. The Adityanath government stated that a pile-up of pilgrims formed on Akhara Marg, one of the main roads heading towards the Sangam Nose—the peninsular sandbank at the meeting point of the Ganga and Yamuna. As pressure mounted, the wooden barricades separating the pilgrims gave way, and the crowd pushed through, crushing the devotees waiting to take a dip on the other side. Once the chaos subsided, the Uttar Pradesh government set up a judicial commission to probe the incident. The panel is headed by Harsh Kumar, a retired judge of the Allahabad High Court, alongside the former bureaucrat DK Singh and VK Gupta, a former director general of the state police.
While the full extent of the administration’s failures may take time to emerge, the series of directives released less than twenty-four hours after the tragedy make one thing clear: no matter the immediate trigger, the disaster had been looming over this Kumbh from the start. The tragedy could have been prevented if the authorities had followed a decades-old crowd management plan—formulated after the 1954 stampede, which killed 316 people. Like this year’s pre-dawn tragedy, that stampede also occurred early on Mauni Amavasya.