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.