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At around 11 pm on October 17, I reached the Chorbagan Sarbojanin Durga Puja pandal in North Kolkata. An intense spell of rain had washed the lane clean, lending the place an eerie stillness. Only a few hours earlier, the area had witnessed what Bengali television channels were calling a Mrityu Michil — a procession of death. A stampede at the pandal had killed at least 19 people.
The lane was in shock. So were its people.
Some eyewitnesses had already recounted their ordeal to reporters and YouTubers several times over. Others had retreated into a weary distrust. “You will not tell the truth,” one person told me, dismissing the very possibility that speaking might make a difference.
At a sharp turn leading to the pandal’s entrance lay a heap of discarded shoes, possibly belonging to those caught in the stampede. A television reporter, speaking into the camera, invoked the tagline of a popular Bengali footwear brand: Pujoy chai notun juto — I want new shoes for Pujo. The advertising slogan, ordinarily an innocuous expression of festive aspiration, had acquired a terrible new meaning. Shoes bought for a night of celebration lay abandoned at the scene of a mass tragedy.
Over the course of that night, I spoke to people at Chorbagan and at Calcutta Medical College, where the injured and dead had been taken. I spoke to relatives of the victims, to visitors returning from other pandals, and to people trying to piece together what had happened. Their accounts differed, as eyewitness accounts invariably do. But one sentiment cut across the conversations: “We cannot believe this is happening in Kolkata.”
I had said much the same thing to myself when I first heard the news. It was an instinctive response, almost a reflex. But the more I thought about it, the more I wondered: Why should we find it so difficult to believe?
To an outsider, Kolkata during Durga Puja should look like an accident waiting to happen. Millions take to the streets, often through the night. Narrow lanes become bottlenecks. Crowds converge on pandals whose elaborate entrances and spectacular installations have become attractions in their own right. People push, negotiate, cajole and manoeuvre their way forward. The crowd becomes a restless, shifting organism, governed as much by collective impulse as by individual intention.
And yet, year after year, the city manages to sustain this extraordinary exercise in mass celebration. Not perfectly, not without incidents, but with a degree of organisation that its apparent chaos tends to conceal.
Those who know Kolkata’s Puja understand that there is a method to the madness. There is an informal hierarchy of crowd management. Young volunteers in matching T-shirts form the first line of control, directing people with whistles and gestures, regulating entry and trying to prevent bottlenecks. Police personnel — affectionately referred to as police kakus by some visitors — monitor the flow and decide when gates must be closed or access restricted. Behind them are the organisers, responsible not merely for the spectacle but also for managing tempers, resolving disputes and keeping the machinery of the festival running.
This arrangement is hardly a substitute for professional crowd-safety planning. But it is a recognisable system, built through years of experience, local knowledge and collective effort. It depends on people knowing their roles, recognising danger and having the authority to act before a situation becomes uncontrollable.
The accounts I heard at Chorbagan raised a disturbing possibility: That this system had failed, or was not functioning adequately, when it mattered most.
A stampede is rarely explained by the mere presence of too many people. Crowd density, restricted exits, sudden movements, poor communication and failures of coordination can interact to turn congestion into catastrophe. The decisive question is not simply how many people gathered, but whether those responsible understood the risks and had the means to manage them.
The writer is editor, East and news videos for indianexpress.com. premankur.biswas@indianexpress.com
