JODHPUR, India (AFP) — A collapsed wall, rumours of a bomb, coconut milk spilled by devotees; the checklist grew Wednesday of possible catalysts for a stampede at a Hindu temple in India that left 149 dead.
But others pointed to a more fundamental problem: a simple lack of organisation that attaches a largely avoidable level of risk to the mass religious pilgrimages undertaken by hundreds of thousands of ordinary Indians every year.
Tuesday's disaster at the 15th-century Chamunda Devi temple in Jodhpur in the tourist state of Rajasthan took the death toll from stampedes in 2008 alone beyond the 360 mark.
Several newspapers noted that the figure was more than double that of those killed in a spate of bomb blasts this year that triggered a far larger media and public outcry over official accountability.
"While we are alive to the menace of terror, it's strange that we are quite content to let avoidable disasters like stampedes kill more people than blasts do," said the Times of India.
"The 'enemy' here is not difficult to identify -- it's the grossly inadequate attention given to crowd management," the newspaper added.
Pilgrimages are a part of life in India and the vast majority of Indians, across the entire social spectrum, will take part in at least one during their lifetime, while many will be regulars.
The choice is vast, as is the level of participation, which can range from just several hundred pilgrims to the tens of millions who flock to the massive Kumbh Mela festivals at the confluence of the holy Ganges and Yamuna rivers.
In most cases, crowd management measures are rudimentary, or even non-existent, and police action has often been blamed for exacerbating panic when things go wrong.
The Jodhpur incident was the fourth in India this year and came less than two months after around 150 Hindu worshippers died in a stampede in the northern state of Himachal Pradesh.
That disaster was partially blamed on rumours of an impending landslide at the hill-top Hindu temple where the devotees had gathered.
Similar rumours of a bomb blast were cited for the panic that triggered Tuesday's deadly rush, while some officials said the collapse of a wall leading to the pilgrimage site was the main cause, and others suggested that devotees had slipped on water from smashed coconuts offered to the deity.
The stampede occurred as more than 25,000 worshippers clambered to reach the Chamunda Devi temple in Jodhpur's hill-top Mehrangarh Fort.
It came at the start of Navaratri, a nine-day festival which is one of the most important in the Hindu calendar and when crowds are particularly large.
The Rajasthan state government moved quickly to order an official probe into the disaster. But similar inquiries in the past have done little to prevent such tragedies being repeated.
In the meantime, politicians lost little time in seeking to extract what capital they could from the incident, with the Congress-led government in New Delhi accusing the main opposition BJP party, which controls the Rajasthan state legislature, of negligence.
"This loss of lives is inexcusable," said Congress spokesman Abhishek Singhvi.
Senior BJP leader and former foreign minister Jaswant Singh offered the observation that "No one has done this deliberately, but someone is responsible."
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