The Sunday >fire tragedy at the Puttingal Devi temple in Kollam , Kerala, which claimed more than 100 lives, raises several questions with regard to public safety management and the role of the district administration in ensuring safety during occasions such as major religious festivals. The chief issue is whether the Kollam administration — mainly the police — was incompetent or merely negligent because of external pressure. A >gargantuan Kumbh Mela that attracts several millions passes off without incident. But a Kollam festival that draws just a few thousands ends in a colossal mishap. How do you explain the contradiction? Is it that the Uttar Pradesh civil set-up is more sensitive and efficient than its Kerala counterpart? Or is it a case of government reluctance to be tough on the eve of Assembly elections?
One of the most complex tasks the Indian administration has to perform is the handling of massive religious congregations. Both of us have supervised a large number of festivals. On all these occasions we have had to encounter devotee indiscipline of the worst order, particularly the desire to be the closest to the sanctum sanctorum. Devotee exuberance is usually compounded by the lack of control over the event by the organisers, normally a local committee of citizens, some with a dubious reputation for managing finances and some with high political connections. Public safety, for them, is often low priority. If we have had only as few accidents as have happened over the years, it is because of sheer chance rather than professional crowd control.
R. K. Raghavan
D. Sivanandhan Festivals and fireworks The distinctive feature of many >Kerala festivals is that they cut across religions, and are looked upon as more of a social event. The fireworks display is the most exciting feature of religious festivals in Kerala. In fact, it is a huge draw for foreign tourists. While it began as a Hindu phenomenon, over the years, a few Christian groups also started emulating it. The practice usually is of simultaneous release into the skies of dazzling high-decibel firecrackers by rival teams. Each of the competing groups is finally assessed by the variety of fireworks they are able to assemble, the colour of their display, the number of layers they are able to climb in the sky and the intensity of the sound produced. Many who have witnessed the >Thrissur Pooram (to be celebrated in the next few weeks) and the Thiruvambadi festival would vouch for the excitement that the display generates.
In the Kollam horror, there are reports that the local administration had turned down the request for a fireworks competition between groups which are regular participants in the festivities and come from various other temples in the region. If this was so, why was the order not implemented?
The site of the temple was a heavily built-up residential locality, and most of those who lived in the immediate neighbourhood were stoutly opposed to an excessive use of fireworks during the annual festival. Reports suggest that a local resident — an elderly woman — is known to have appealed to the district collector against allowing fireworks because they posed a threat to her house nearby every year. There is therefore reason to believe that the festival organisers were least sensitive to local feelings, and their only concern each year was to do better than the previous occasion.
This exuberance is not peculiar to the Kollam temple or to Kerala. All over the country such mindless enthusiasm to expand the scope of a festival every year is a feature that the local authorities have to contend with and bitterly oppose, but not always successfully. Any stern order limiting the festivities is always resisted, sometimes with the support of the local ruling party. The overruling of a district collector or superintendent of police is a common occurrence. The administration in Kollam eventually permitted a mere display of fireworks instead of the competition.
No State government in India would like to antagonise even the smallest of religious denominations. This is the tragedy of our polity. There are no signs that this appalling situation will change even in decades.
Lessons not learnt Both stampedes and fireworks at festivals have caused a large number of casualties in our country. Perhaps these account for far more than what we have suffered at the hands of terrorists. The stampedes at the Mahamaham Festival in Tamil Nadu (1992; 50 casualties), the Nashik Kumbh Mela (2003; 39 casualties) and Mandher Devi temple in Satara, Maharashtra (2005; nearly 300 casualties) come readily to mind. Consider these along with the fire accidents in Delhi’s Uphaar cinema (1997; 59 deaths) and >Kolkata’s AMRI Hospital (2011; over 90 deaths) to convince yourself that we either do not have a uniformly stringent fire safety policy, or the wisdom and courage to enforce it if we ever had one.
We have learnt only few lessons from these gory happenings. The routine appointments of commissions of inquiry and suspensions of police personnel are a knee-jerk response to what is becoming a human rights violation by the state in neglecting fundamentals to regulate religious assembles and to strictly implement safety measures on public occasions or inside public buildings. You have to watch movies at the so-called multiplex cinema houses in our principal cities to understand the dimensions of potential horrors. Many of these premises have narrow, steep staircases to substitute for lifts and escalators in the event of a fire. Also, they have entries and exits solely on one side of the auditorium, enabling conditions for a classic stampede. Local authorities are grievously callous on such matters and are known to give licences to cinemas and restaurants for an unspecified bribe that is shared by many at the top and in the lower rungs of the administrative hierarchy.
The tragedy is there is hardly any open debate in the country on safety at our public premises and gatherings in open spaces. There is a near paralysis in the civil administration on such vital matters, attributable mainly to acute political interference. The situation is so bad these days that an organiser of a public function can go to a government official to either flaunt his religion — minority or majority — or his proximity to the ruling party in order to browbeat the official concerned into permitting even the most objectionable event. The Kollam tragedy is a manifestation of this disease that afflicts our polity. Such tragedies will continue to occur if public safety policies are not delinked from religion and politics, and the greed which dictates the response of many public officials, both petty and senior.
A final word about police practices and accountability. Many senior law enforcement officials continue to believe — wrongly — that throwing in a large number of policemen at a temple or a public meeting addressed by celebrities is a guarantee against chaos or disaster of the kind we saw at Kollam. Numbers deployed can help only to an extent. It is the quality of deployment, combined with the severity of adherence to the standard operating procedure which would eventually win the day.
R.K. Raghavan is a former CBI Director and D. Sivanandhan is a former Commissioner of Police, Mumbai, and former Maharashtra DGP.
