Imagine a night match between two national teams, as sworn rivals in soccer as India and Pakistan are in cricket, watched by around one lakh fans. The host country’s president is sitting in the VIP box with a minister who has come with the neighbouring country’s team.
Just as the match is about to warm up, the crowd hears two blasts from the stadium gates; half an hour later, a third. Police copters hover in the night sky, sirens rent the night air, and bursts of automatics ricochet on the stadium walls. Even a dimwit would know, men with murder in mind are trying to enter the stadium, and the police are fighting them.
What do you think would happen next? That guards would swoop down to cover the VIPs? Stadium custodians would scream do’s and dont’s into mikes? Players would stop the match and run for cover? Guards would open the stadium doors for people to escape? Panic-stricken multitudes would surge towards the narrow exits and cause stampedes?
Imaging: Deni Lal
Nothing of the kind. I am not here to tell you another tragic tale of death, destruction and devastation in the wake of the two stampedes that marred this Kumbh Mela. On the contrary, I will tell you a heroic tale, the aftermath of which I went to report in Paris a decade ago, of how a disciplined bunch of crowd managers turned their soccer-crazy mob into rule-abiding citizens. Together they defeated the devilry of terror.
The match was between France and Germany in Paris’s Stade de France on the ominous night of a Friday the 13th. In the VVIP box was President Francois Hollande with the German foreign minister. Hardly had the first bomb gone off when Hollande was whisked away to the safety of his office from where he would lead the war on terror. His guest stayed back with his country’s team and his host’s people.
That done, the police quietly told the match managers—get on with the game; keep the crowd in. No public announcement, no exhortations as “keep calm; no need to panic”. Who knows, they might even have quietly told the match managers to let France score a goal or two.
The crowd had by now been wiser to the mayhem unfolding outside. Yet they sat tight, cheering their teams and gulping more of their beers, while the real game was afoot on the city streets. They watched France beat Germany 2-0, trooped into the field and, guided by the match marshals, spread themselves out and waited an hour with the host and guest players. When the gates finally opened, the sombre crowd broke into France’s national anthem La Marseillaise, and walked through the exit corridors into the sanitised streets.
No panic, no bodies trampled over, and no headlines as “it could have been avoided” the next day. What could have been avoided—a stampede—was avoided. They didn’t manage disaster; they avoided disaster.
Indeed, floods, hurricanes, wild fires, and quakes still haunt them, but most of the civilised world has graduated from disaster management to disaster avoidance. Stampedes, the worst curse of human crowding ever since men began community life, are rarely heard of.
Not in India. We have more people, we have more faiths, we have more melas, we also have more stampedes than most of the world. Fetes of faith have been happening since time immemorial, and so have been stampedes at mega gatherings. We may be faith-crazy. No harm; let us be. The French are soccer-crazy.
Disaster managers, please note! Good crowd management is not telling people what not to do, but letting them do what they like to do, while you find ways to channel their passions safely.
prasannan@theweek.in