Twenty-six men were killed in Baisaran Meadows near Pahalgam in Jammu & Kashmir on April 22, 2025. They were killed by terrorists, most of them on being asked which community they belonged to, and selectively targeted on being given an answer that weighed in favour of pulling the trigger. Terror killed these men.
Forty-three days later, on June 4, 2025, eleven young lives – those of four women, five men and two minors, a girl aged 14 and a boy aged 17 – were snuffed out when massive crowds, estimated to be about 2.5 lakh to 3 lakh, converged on Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bengaluru, trying to gain entry into the premises to be a part of the celebrations planned by Royal Challengers Bengaluru (RCB), which won the Indian Premier League (IPL) 2025 title for the first time in its 18th edition. Stampede killed them.
It may not be fair to compare the two, but what is common in these two horrific incidents is ‘Death’. And both these incidents have evoked intense shock and anger – the first, leading to targeting terror bases in Pakistan as part of “Operation Sindoor”, ahead of a “mini-war” with the neighbouring country – understood to be a major terror-sponsor – lasting three days; and the second, in which action is still unfolding with leaders in the state government, the opposition, the police, RCB, Karnataka State Cricket Association (KSCA) and DNA Entertainment Ltd, the event organisers, locked in a blame-game with no clue yet where the case is heading until an impartial, thorough probe does justice.
Blame is another common factor when such deaths occur; when life is cut short in its prime; when we desperately start looking out for those responsible for the deaths; when we hunt high and low for what caused the deaths; and when it gets us to hurriedly fix the blame on someone or the other in an attempt to come out clean.
But all these are post-catastrophe scenarios, a kind of reactive exercise that, any which way you see it, will not get the dead back among their loved ones.
There is yet another thing that is common between the Pahalgam terror attack and the Chinnaswamy Stadium killer stampede: both lacked a sense of anticipation that it could happen, and conspicuous by their absence were the necessary measures to avoid or stave off the deaths.
Both the incidents involved people going to the respective fateful venues for a thrill of very different kinds from each other. One was targeted by terror, the other by a stampede – the former clearly allowing blame to be fixed on the elements responsible, but the latter leaving one and all perplexed about who or what caused it.
The important part that needs to be stressed here is that death must not be treated with a label stuck on it after it claims people – “terror-related” deaths, “stampede-related” deaths, “road accident-related” deaths, “pandemic-related” deaths, “crime-related” deaths, “suicide-related” deaths, and so on.
When “death” itself is common in all the factors posing a threat of cessation of life, measures need to be taken appropriately to fight that common enemy called “death” with a solitary aim: enhancing life in all its glory by keeping death away! The main weapon in this war against death is “anticipation based on logic”, which enables us to gauge possible death-attracting scenarios and put in place measures to keep death out of reach.
The lack of anticipation based on logical thinking was the main ingredient in the killer stampede that has left multiple families grieving for their loved ones who never returned home alive from it, and never will.
Death lurks everywhere. An over-speeding driver is thrilled by the speeds he is touching, never bothering about being on the brink of death with one little mistake, nor is a wheelie-addicted two-wheeler rider.
The families and honeymooners who went as tourists to Pahalgam never realized what they were stepping into, nor did the lakhs of people, mostly youngsters, who gathered near Chinnaswamy Stadium to spend a few hours celebrating the victory with their favourite triumphant team, while failing to realize the possibility of a stampede – a thing that failed on the state government, the police and the city administration, too.
Daniel Handler, American author and television producer, using the pen name Lemony Snicket, writes in his 2007 wit and wisdom quotation book Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can’t Avoid, “It is a curious thing, the death of a loved one. We all know that our time in this world is limited, and that eventually all of us will end up underneath some sheet, never to wake up. And yet it is always a surprise when it happens to someone we know.”
But we can keep death away for longer and longer, and to begin with, anticipation will help.
