Anxiety and survival: Breaking down India’s stampedes

With three months still to go for the new year, 2025 already seems like an unfortunate year for stampede deaths in India. 

Since January, at least 114 deaths have been reported in stampedes across different states and events in India, including those at the Maha Kumbh Mela, New Delhi railway station, IPL victory celebrations in Bengaluru, Odisha’s Rath Yatra festival, and, most recently, at actor-politician Vijay’s rally in Tamil Nadu’s Karur district. 

It isn’t unusual to recall how often the rush of anxious crowds in this country has trampled over the stranded, mauling some, squeezing the breath out of others, or shocking a few to their end. But this year, they refuse to have a long enough pause.

The chain of events leading to such calamities is usually traced to poor preparedness, sluggish administrative response overwhelmed by the surge of people, and a lack of anticipation by organisers. That seems as the one thread connecting the varying factors behind these absurd losses of human lives. That’s a valid dissection, and it’s needed for ensuring accountability. Yet, this explains only part of the anatomy of such recurring tragedies.

There, in plain sight, is another thread running through these incidents. It might not be systemic, but it comes more from how individuals in a crowd see other individuals in the crowd. One may ask: What is the interplay of anxieties in public space in a moment of shared panic? And why are responses the way they are?

Much of the commentary on such tragedies overlooks some elements of crowd psyche, particularly in moments of stress and threat. In a country where the clichéd teeming millions morph into a crowd in public spaces and events, the deluge of masses isn’t an aberration. That’s why the affluent and the elite find ways to avoid the crowd. That has also meant a lack of understanding among the few of how the crowd breathes, reacts and moves in packed trains and buses, gatherings, processions or other types of crowds in cramped spaces.  

From a detached distance, the crowd appears to be a physical phenomenon in itself. 

As the writer VS Naipaul describes a political procession in Bombay in his work India: A Million Mutinies Now, “Such a torrent of people swept across the road.. it seemed that some kind of invisible sluice-gate had been opened, and if it wasn’t closed again, the flow of road-crossers would spread everywhere, each at the centre of a human eddy”. 

That sees a crowd as an entity subsuming a landscape. But the important thing is how the “each” is thinking and reacting at the centre as well as on the sidelines of the “human eddy”?

Stampedes, by their very nature, are triggered by panic reactions of the crowd. But in many ways, that panic is also an offshoot of a different set of everyday distrust among people facing everyday heat and dust. That means that a range of daily encounters of people in shared space also shape how they respond to public settings of panic and danger. It’s an anxiety of being outpaced, where everyone else is a rival for the same spot. It’s a setting where people are ready to believe the worst of situations, lending power to rumours, one of the reasons for some of these incidents. But more significantly, many of these reactions mirror the desperate expression of people responding to their everyday insecurities in life. It’s not different from their believing in a setting where “all is against one, and one against all”, a life that is “nasty, brutish and short”.

In those desperate bids to cling to their lives, or merely their spot to stand on in a crowded bus, they are convinced of their insignificance. It’s a type of insecurity which makes jostling a reflex action in any space filled with people. A conditioned response which makes you push at the only person at the gate of a Metro coach, hoping to have a few inches to stand or even the privilege of a seat. It’s a space where everyone is a competitor, a co-claimant on things you know have a fleeting and unsure ownership. No one is welcome, all suspects.

This isn’t to downplay the suddenness of the threat that triggers panic or lack of administrative foresight in preparing for such scenarios. However, how people handle it is also partly shaped by how they look at other constituents of the “mass” in their daily negotiations with public space. 

Such attitudes and reflex actions against being outdone or outpaced in crowded spaces have been largely reinforced by the disdain with which they have been treated in “cattle class” public space. They are nothing more than a moving head among a sea of faceless heads, perhaps a number or sometimes a ticket in the crowd count. The rich and the elite have bought their peace out of it, and largely shielded themselves from the absurdity of being crushed under the weight of a heap of human bodies or a falling wall or tossed around a staircase. 

There is nothing that the individuals in the crowd trust more than that they are on their own to survive; that’s the only individuality they can have in the deluge of mass. The rest can always count them as casualties in the crowd.  In doing so, they can be understood as trusting in the worst of their fears, and gearing up to mount their defence, and in turn, viewing every other constituent of the crowd as a competitor for survival, if not the aggressor against their own being.

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