When Our National Spectacle Crushes Its Own

Hathras in 2024 at a religious satsang, where followers stampede in a rush of blind devotion, while the state machinery busies itself trying to control the narrative. Even at the greatest of religious festivals, the Kumbh Mela, where millions gather, crowd-related deaths occur with horrifying regularity, often covered up and casually dismissed as a ‘logistical inevitability.’

- Anand Neelakantan

The count has been updated, the names read out, and the compensation checks prepared.

This is the grotesque choreography of Indian public life: Forty-one people crushed to death at a political rally for a Tamil superstar and wannabe politician in Karur. It is a number that should shame us, but which will, within the week, become just another footnote in the nation’s vast, un-audited ledger of preventable deaths.

This tragedy is not an isolated incident. It is a symptom of a deep, systemic sickness—a national fetish for spectacle that is consistently prioritised over the sanctity of human life. The stampede is not an act of God; it is the inevitable outcome of a system that buckles under political or religious pressure and laughs in the face of safety regulations. This is the Republic of the Stampede, where administrative incompetence is our most enduring national characteristic.

The sheer, sickening irony is the geographical spread of this failure. The tragedy travels seamlessly across the map, proving that no region or event is immune to this fatal negligence. In the North, 121 people—mostly women and children—perish in Hathras in 2024 at a religious satsang, where followers stampede in a rush of blind devotion, while the state machinery busies itself trying to control the narrative. Even at the greatest of religious festivals, the Kumbh Mela, where millions gather, crowd-related deaths occur with horrifying regularity, often covered up and casually dismissed as a ‘logistical inevitability.’ We don’t even have the actual number of people who were killed in the last Kumbh, as the numbers could hurt the image of certain politicians and political parties.