Chorbagan Puja tragedy – paying the price for living dangerously?

It’s meant to be Saptami 2.0 or Ashtami today – a rare phenomenon on the Durga Puja calendar which would effectively mean an extension of the festivities by a day.  Instead, Kolkata woke up with a heavy heart as it’s still trying to process the humongous tragedy at the Chorbagan Sarbajanin puja where stampede led to loss of at least 19 pandalhoppers on a fateful Saturday evening.

We are a country where the severity of a human tragedy is usually measured in terms of death toll. Stampedes at religious festivals are often the ‘usual suspects,’ no matter the colour and creed of the political dispensation in power but for now, charges of insufficient policing, the battle for control in the build-up to the biggest festival of the state after the regime change in Bengal are being held responsible for the first-ever recorded deaths at the Durga Puja. And with good reasons.

However, what about the last major tragedy in Uttar Pradesh in January last year at the Kumbh Mela in Prayag Raj (Allahabad), where the official death toll was anything between 30 and 37? An investigation by BBC Hindi had actually put the figure at 82 or more due to unaccounted or privately compensated casualties. It was, however, not the first time that Kumbh claimed lives in this manner as there were at least three such documented instances in 2013, 2010 and 2003. 

Durga Puja in Kolkata, meanwhile, had usually worn a badge of pride on their shoulders that nothing of that magnitude had ever happened so far but trust me – it had often been a disaster waiting to happen. If one had been through the ordeal of visiting the famous pujas belonging to the political heavyweights across the city, whether in the south, north or the ostentatious one on VIP Road, one would vouch for what I am referring to.

Back in 2015, the Deshapriya Park pandal – which boasted of a 88-feet idol – started attracting an unmanageable crowd when the organisers had to shut it down to public after a stampede-like situation. Then barely five years back in 2021 when the city was still recovering from a second and deadly wave of Covid, the Sreebhumi Sporting Club Durga Puja in Kolkata created a replica of Burj Khalifa of Dubai – the tallest building on earth – where three people were grievously injured and the organisers had to shut it down to public.

The so-called overenthusiasm of the masses to tick the boxes of the major pujas has carried on for too long, but what has worsened the landscape for the festivities had been the politicisation of Pujas where each pandal is associated with the leader associated with it rather than the name of the club. Add to this is the gross corporatisation of the Pujas – which began innocuously with the introduction of Puja awards but has now come a hydra-headed monster.

Add to this is the invasion of the social media of the Puja space – where pujas are now trending hashtags and hence a game of one-upmanship. My personal experience says that year after year, the Kolkata Police, it’s traffic department and the Fire Brigade had been doing an exemplary job in ensuring incident-free Pujas. But then, there’s only that much one can do.

The mileage-crazy new committee of Chorbagan has to be charged with criminal negligence on several counts, but they are not in it alone – mostly in the North where the roads are narrow and dingy as that’s the old and original part of the city. The pujas inside them, including one which boasts one of the BJP MLAs is virtually a talismanic figure, are simply sitting ducks for stampede and fire hazards.

One understands that the Puja is a lucrative industry in the state but it’s time for some serious reforms. Otherwise, Chorbagan will only remain a reference point of an avoidable human tragedy few years down the line!