What the three stampedes in just 127 days of 2025 tell us about what it is to die (and live) in a polarised India
The elastic empathy of politicians, media and audiences in an ideologically supercharged ecosystem
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There is no classier way of saying this: if dead bodies could speak, they might offer a more objective overview of the state of India, and the state of its democracy and its institutions, than their clinically alive countrymen and women drawing breath from ventilators connected to WhatsApp.
Those who didn’t reach the top of the queue after Demonetisation; those who couldn’t walk to their home-state during Covid; those whose journeys abruptly ended because their train met another; those carved up to examine the source of their protein… all carry a more believable tale of the lived reality.
Ditto and likewise the 100 or so whose screams were silenced under the soles of their excitable brethren in Bangalore (June 4), New Delhi (Feb 16) and Allahabad (Jan 29) in the first six months of this year. They could have a better sense of how transparency and accountability have taken a dip in the Mahakumbh of Majoritarianism.
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Macabre as it may sound, where you die today, i.e. under the benign gaze of which political dispensation, makes a world of difference. There is nothing like ‘One Nation, One Death’ any more.
Not if you make the cardinal error of deciding to suddenly depart with hordes of others at the same instant.
Suddenly, this ancient civilisation which invented the zero loses all ability to keep track of it. You might be among the 15 followed by five zeroes they couldn’t count, or among the 47 followed by five zeroes. Or, you might just not have been.
Suddenly, the Teleprompter can’t run the right word for your anubhav. Was it a crowd crush? Was it a stampede, or a stampede-like situation? Was it an “unfortunate incident”, a mishap or an accident? Or, was it just a natural calamity, an “act of fraud”?
Suddenly, the credit-jeevis whose lust for publicity you so kindly underwrote with your taxes and cesses and surcharges, and proudly forwarded with your thumb, can no longer find the way to your hospital or home.
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Suddenly, those who extol the virtues of cashless transactions, slyly hand out Rs 10 lakh in compensation to the next of kin in cash, like shady real-estate brokers, or drug dealers under the overbridge.
Suddenly, strange people can land up at your doorstep and offer Rs 5 lakh in brown envelopes while the official announcement was five times more. Or you might not get any of it for months and have to be reminded by the courts.
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Suddenly, depending on your state of departure, depending on which party is in power, the news can be made to disappear from the front pages and TV screens, or it can be made to linger on.
Suddenly, anchors and editorial writers who couldn’t name those responsible for the deaths in incidents in one part of India or demand that heads roll, can find their thundering voice in another.
Suddenly, newspapers which urged you to “look for the right perspective” in a massively promoted event because “some disorder is almost inevitable”, come around to believe that a spontaneous tragedy was an “entirely preventable one”.
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Show me the man and I will show you the crime, was the boast of Joseph Stalin’s ruthless secret police chief Lavrentiy Beria. Democracy in India has come to such a pass that show me the state and I will show you how elastic my empathy can be.
