The New Delhi Station Stampede Rush Hour or Crush Hour?

 

In the deafening din of religious fervour for the holy dip at Kumbh, amidst railway stations teeming like anthills, crowds jostling like marbles in a shaken jar, and Indian Railways (IR) indulging in self-congratulatory chest-thumping over the number of trains and passengers ferried, an uncomfortable truth lurks in the shadows: our approach to passenger safety is not just archaic but a tragedy waiting to unfold. If IR’s assurances were a suit of armour, then the recent New Delhi stampede has exposed it as nothing more than rusted chainmail, riddled with gaping chinks. It is a bitter pill to swallow, but swallow we must, for the calamity has once again laid bare failures that stem not from financial drought but from a callous indifference to the fundamental tenets of safety and convenience.

The first question stares us in the face: Was the stampede at New Delhi station on February 15th avoidable? The answer is as glaring as the midday sun—yes, it was. Yet, amidst the cacophony of blame-shifting and bureaucratic hand-wringing, certain half-truths demand scrutiny, for it is in the unseen halves that disaster often germinates. The basics of crowd control are no arcane science—smooth, unidirectional movement, elimination of bottlenecks, robust barricading, and adequate security personnel. Yet, all these fundamentals were cast to the wind, leaving chaos to run amok like a wild bull in a china shop.

IR, with a straight face, maintains that no platform changes were made. Yet, the eleventh-hour announcement of a special unreserved train to Prayagraj on platform 12, even as a sea of unreserved passengers already swarmed platform 14 for the Prayagraj Express, was akin to a platform change, throwing a lit match into a powder keg. A report by an RPF inspector, which has gone viral even suggests that the special train was to be placed earlier on platform 16 but it was changed to platform 12; if true, this would have further compounded the problem of cross movements. The result? A desperate, confused surge—human waves crashing into each other in desperate, conflicting motions. It is also learnt, though unverified yet, that the control room, despite having the all-seeing eye of CCTV, failed to stop the escalators, which in such situations morph into blockages. Meanwhile, the RPF presence was as thin as gruel, security arrangements as flimsy as a house of cards.

As for IR’s claim that such an overwhelming crowd was unforeseen—one wonders if they expect anyone to swallow this with a straight face. The Ministry proudly boasted that over 15 lakh passengers travelled in nearly 350 trains in February, a simple back-of-the-envelope calculation revealing that this translates to roughly 300 unreserved passengers per coach, packed like sardines in a tin. New Delhi, a pivotal transit hub for North India, has seen crowds of this magnitude time and again, particularly on major religious occasions. To feign surprise at a surge in evening ticket sales is not just weak; it is laughably disingenuous.

And then comes the age-old bureaucratic sleight of hand—blame the passengers. They congregated in large numbers, they purchased unreserved tickets en masse, they failed to heed announcements. Yet, this is no new phenomenon. Festival seasons always bring such crowds, and Indian Railways, which runs special trains with predictable regularity, has well-established protocols for managing them. The Delhi division of IR simply needed to dust off the tried-and-tested crowd management playbook they have wielded effectively during Chhath Puja for years.  This business of "Train on Demand" feels like an afterthought, a term bandied about by the IR irresponsibly —trains are not like buses that can be summoned by the hour as rakes need to be prepared and inspected, indicating that strategic planning of departure times to diffuse crowding was done in a cavalier manner. But alas, as Shakespeare put it, through Cassius in Julius Caesar. “…The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves…”.

Predictably, the post-tragedy scramble to implement basic crowd control measures—deploying additional security personnel, setting up holding areas, intensifying CCTV monitoring, halting platform ticket sales—is a classic case of locking the stable door after the horse has bolted. Were it not for the grief of bereaved families, this entire episode would have the trappings of a grotesque satire. Here was IR, grandly hawking a product it did not possess—dignified travel for devotees—while failing spectacularly in the simple safety measures.

For almost a day, IR flailed about like a ship caught in a tempest, oscillating between denial, dilution, and obfuscation, its narrative shifting like sand dunes in the wind. Spokespersons tripped over themselves with conflicting statements, culminating in the surreal spectacle of disbursing ex gratia payments to victims’ families before the final death toll was even confirmed. As if this wasn’t enough, murmurs of a probe into alleged conspiratorial “fake news” triggering the stampede surfaced—an old, cynical game to shift attention away from institutional lapses. It is a pattern as predictable as the monsoon; do we not know that every mishap or near-disaster is swiftly ascribed to “sabotage,” though never once has such a claim been substantiated.

History, if nothing else, is a stern schoolmaster. Yet, IR—be it the current regime or its predecessors—remains the incorrigible pupil who refuses to learn. The pages of the past are inked with similar tragedies—the stampede at Elphinstone Road in Mumbai (2017), the crush at Allahabad station during Kumbh (2013). But, as the Bard would have Antonio from The Tempest remind us, “…What’s past is prologue...” if one has no wisdom to heed its lessons.

And what of the much-vaunted accountability? The so-called “high-level” inquiry is set to be conducted by the very officials who preside over the departments potentially at fault—a spectacle of the accused moonlighting as the judge. Contrast this with railway accidents where even a single casualty warrants an independent inquiry by the Commissioner of Railway Safety (CRS), an entity detached from the Ministry’s influence. This, though not categorized as a train accident, cries out for an impartial probe. Instead, IR has donned the prosecutor’s robe while holding the gavel in the other hand.

This reminds one of this classic couplet:

वही क़ातिल वही शाहिद वही मुंसिफ़ ठहरे 

अक़रबा मेरे करें क़त्ल का दावा किस पर

(Vahī qātil vahī shāhid vahī munsif Thahre, aqrabā mere kareñ qatl kā da.avā kis par: They themselves be the murderer, the witness and the judge, on whom should my relatives purse indictment for my murder?)

At its core, the question looms larger than this one incident: Is there an inherent malaise within Indian Railways, an unshakable inertia that ensures the more things should change, the more they resolutely remain the same? Until IR confronts its chronic myopia, tragedies like this will continue to be brushed aside as unfortunate, instead of what they truly are—preventable, foreseeable failures that stain the conscience of a nation.

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