One hundred and fourteen Indians have died this year. They died not in floods, earthquakes, or wars, but under the crushing weight of their fellow citizens. Men, women, and children were trampled in temples, rallies, and film events. The founder of the Srikakulam Venkateswara Temple, after nine devotees were killed in a Diwali crowd surge, dismissed the deaths as “God’s will.” It was not. It was ours.
Guidelines exist: the National Disaster Management Authority has published norms for crowd management, bottlenecking, exit routes. Yet every time permission is granted for tens of thousands of people to gather at a venue that can safely hold only thousands. In Srikakulam: capacity 3,000, crowd 20,000 plus. From the Kumbh Mela of the 1950s to Sabarimala in the 1990s, to Srikakulam in 2025, the story repeats itself: the same hysteria, the same overreach, the same indifference to mortality. Historically, India understood crowd psychology better than it does today. In temple architecture manuals like Vastu Shastra and Thachu Shastra, every step, corridor, and courtyard was planned to control flow of people, of energy, of sound. Ask yourself: how are stampedes still happening then? More than double the authorised number showed up for a rally for actor-turned-politician Vijay in Karur, Tamil Nadu. At least 41 died in a stampede, including children. Instead of arresting film stars, why can’t a safety system be put in place involving all stakeholders? For centuries, India’s civilisation has prided itself on order: dharma, the principle of right conduct, the harmony between self and society. Temples once had measured courtyards, layered access, and ordained sequences for pilgrims. Ritual meant rhythm; one entered, offered, exited. The queue was a sacred metaphor: everyone awaited their turn before the divine. The crowd is now an assertion of the self with every man pushing forward to prove themselves. In such a society, stampedes are not anomalies; they are logical consequences. There is also a deeper philosophical decay. The Bhagavad Gita teaches that desire ungoverned by discipline leads to ruin. Yet the modern Indian crowd has reinterpreted freedom as the right to disregard all limits of space, of order, and of respect. We are no longer a civilisation of balance; we are a civilisation of impatience. Anarchy disguised as emotion is spectacle elevated above sanctity. To stop stampedes, we must do more than install barricades. We must recover that civilisational instinct which once made order sacred. Temples must again become models of measured design, not mob spaces of human density.
Governments must enforce capacity and safety with the same zeal they reserve for election rallies. But more than regulation, we need self-regulation—the inner discipline that once defined us. The Rig Veda says: “Let us move together, let us speak together, let our minds be of one accord.” It was not a call for frenzy, but for the spiritual geometry of coexistence. Somewhere between the ancient queue and the modern stampede, we lost that geometry. There must be mandatory risk-approval rules for gatherings over a mandated number of people. Any temple festival, film-star appearance, political rally or railway surge must file a crowd-management plan: entry and exit routes, maximum numbers, emergency medical and evacuation, water and shade, and trained crowd-controllers. No token approval, but real enforcement is the need. Police, fire, medical services, civil administration, and the event organiser should work under a joint control room for that event. There must be real-time monitoring of crowd densities via CCTV or drones, stop-gaps for sudden surge and pre-planned exit corridors. Sure, organisers and officials bear the primary load. But we need to wake up the crowd too. Respect for lines, waiting your turn, recognising conditions can turn dangerous, raising voice when you see fatal bottlenecks. Instead of “I’ll push through”, the thought should become “Wait, this is unsafe”. If a film star’s entry triggers a crush because millions follow, then the star and organisers must commit to safety checklists before the event. Crowds are not goodwill playlists; they are volatile human masses when poorly managed. Collapsible railings, narrow staircases, single entry and exit points are a must. A crowd might be unruly but the system need not be. It can act. And it must. Because every human life lost in a preventable crush is a scandal. Not of fate. Only of failure. The Rig Veda was meant as a hymn to harmony, not a manual for trampling one another at temple gates. But the new India has no patience for poetry, only for spectacle. So we’ll keep dying in stampedes, and someone will call it destiny, and Gen Z will hashtag it #Tragic before switching to the next trending reel. We are not dying for God or glory anymore. We are dying because we can’t stand in line. Literally.