Given our population and its density and a large number of opportunities to gather, crowds have been literally the face of this nation. Long many years back “Crowds and Power” delineated the dynamics of crowds and “packs” of people. The writer Elias Canetti analyses the human behaviour in crowds from ancient rituals to modern politics. Crowd in simple terms is not a physical conglomeration of people, it is way beyond that, its negative and senseless power, we have faced all throughout human history. The person’s / political & religious leaders / organisations / farmers / labour / protesters et al. who bring the crowd together find euphoria and power in it.
India is a land of the crowds and political functions and protests dot the Indian landscape till every nook and corner. Crowd control has been one of the core competencies which the police need to be trained in and practice with professional expertise to the satisfaction of one and all. There is a standard drill of crowd control and a step by step system of crowd management depending on the nature and the current behaviour of the crowd. What is taught in the laboratory environment and what it is actually supposed to handled in the field are two radically different things.
Expertise and resource crunch come into play, finally it has to be somehow managed. Mostly it carried through with the gut and some native expertise, but when it fails, it is outright tragedy. There is an exception to the rule, that is when you have top political executives, for whom a clear cut protocol has been laid. You will rarely find a lapse, not even in road shows and any number of them criss crossing the nation. Otherwise, it is mayhem at the first instance, police leadership also leaves it to lower down the line to manage it. At that scale and near zero prominence, mismanagement is the norm and given the limitations is tolerated too.
Wherever there is stress and strain, for sure, it leads to a tragedy, more often than not it is deaths and injury, in the ensuing stampede. We have at least half a dozen of this kind across the country from gathering for a Godman in Hathras to Air Show in Chennai to the Allu Arjun Sandhya theatre episode in Hyderabad. Fast forward to the Maha Kumbh 2025 and Maha Crowds. God knows if any in law enforcement have seen the crowd like the one at New Delhi Railway Station or earlier in Prayagraj. The religiosity has added another element to crowd gathering and crowd behaviour and it has been fuelled to happen in that manner. Can different stakeholders even put their act together? Has there ever been any dry run for any component of such crowd management? The talk of technology has been more for media consumption. Evacuation or disaster management nothing worked. Somehow something happened and it ended. A chilling end.
WITH OUR CURRENT RESOURCES, MINDSET, LACK OF EXPERTISE AND WORKING TECHNOLOGY, WITH NO WILL TO LEARN AND OWN, CROWD MANAGEMENT IS NO ONE’S BABY
Sanjay Sahay
Have a nice evening.