New Year stampede at India religious shrine kills 12

KATRA/OCCUPIED SRINAGAR: Twelve people were crushed to death in a stampede at an Indian religious shrine in the early hours of Saturday as tens of thousands of pilgrims massed to offer prayers, officials said.

The disaster unfolded in darkness at around 3:00 am (2130 GMT) on the packed route to the Vaishno Devi shrine in Indian Illegally Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IIOJK), visited by millions every year as one of Hinduism’s most revered sites.

“People fell over each other... It was difficult to figure out whose leg or arms were tangled with whose,” survivor Ravinder told AFP by phone.

“I helped pick up eight bodies by the time ambulances arrived after about half an hour. I feel lucky to be alive but am still shaking with memory of what I saw,” he said.

Video footage showed terrified pilgrims clinging onto metal rafters to escape the rush and the blue lights of small minivan ambulances flashing in the darkness as they tried to rush to hospitals through huge crowds. Officials sought to blame an alleged altercation between two groups of youths and a rush of people for New Year’s Day. “Police and officials... were quick to respond (after the altercation), and the order within the crowd was immediately restored,” local police chief Dilbag Singh told the Press Trust of India news agency.

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“But by that time, the damage had been done,” he said.

But witnesses said that the authorities were badly organised, something denied by the shrine’s management.

Around a dozen people were also injured.

Millions of shrines dot Hindu-majority India’s cities, towns and villages as well as remote sites in the Himalayas and jungles in the south.

Some are hugely important pilgrimage sites, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government has invested heavily in improving infrastructure to ease access.

Before the pandemic, every day about 100,000 devotees would trek up a steep winding track to the narrow cave containing the shrine to Vaishno Devi. Authorities had capped the daily number to 25,000 but witnesses and press reports said that this may have been exceeded several times over. “There were at least 100,000 people there. No one was checking registration slips of the devotees,” said Ravinder, who only gave one name.