Relatives of India crush victims accuse authorities of leaving people to die

Relatives of victims of the deadly crowd crush during a Hindu religious gathering in northern India have accused the authorities of leaving their loved ones to die in the mud and on hospital floors due to a lack of medical staff and ambulances.

More than 120 people died at the religious gathering of about 250,000 people held on Tuesday as devotees surged forward, causing panic, with many falling over in the wet conditions.

Most of those who died at the gathering for a popular spiritual guru, known as Bhole Baba, were women and children as the crush took place in a women-only section.

On Thursday, police said six people had been arrested. The four men and two women were aides to Baba who were involved in organising the event but fled when the crush occurred, police said.

According to a police report filed after the incident, permission was only granted for 80,000 people but more than three times that number were in attendance at the venue at a village in Hathras, with local organisers blamed for the “uncontrollable crowd”.

However, several victims’ relatives and eyewitnesses accused the police, authorities and a hospital of being slow to respond to the fatal crush, with families left to dig through the mud to find the dead and injured and carry them to get medical care due to a lack of ambulances, paramedics and police on site.

Hari Singh, 54, a construction worker from a village near Hathras, said his wife, Rekha, was only saved due to his frantic search for her in the aftermath.

Singh described rushing to the area of the disaster, searching for a glimpse of the bright orange of his wife’s sari. “There were no medical staff, police or ambulance around,” he said. “I walked over several dead bodies and many injured people who were desperately gasping for breath, and some were sobbing and wailing. I lifted the faces of several people lying lifeless and even helped some injured stand up.”

After almost losing hope, he finally found his wife lying unconscious, half buried in the mud. With no medical help or police around, he carried her in his arms and into a rickshaw, driving her to hospital where doctors said her life had only just been saved.

“I am so angry, dozens of people could have been saved if the injured were rushed to hospitals on time or if medics were around,” said Singh. He also claimed his wife had been forcibly discharged on Thursday morning without receiving proper treatment and was still suffering terrible pain in her spine and ribs.

Others described how many of the injured were left on hospital floors unattended due to a lack of beds and doctors, alleging that several had died due to a lack of immediate medical attention.

One doctor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said only eight doctors had been working at the hospital when the injured and dead started arriving, and claimed many more lives could have been saved if they were better staffed.

“The hospital was running out of capacity to handle so many injured and dead bodies,” they said. “Because of the shortage of staff to deal with such crises, we could not make proper efforts to revive patients.”

Surya Prakash, the medical superintendent of the district hospital in Hathras, said it was unprepared to deal with a catastrophe on this scale. “It was very difficult for us to handle the situation because of the panic and crowd in the hospital,” said Prakash. “It was difficult to manage the crowd and then treat patients.”

The hospital morgue, which usually only has space for six bodies, also quickly overflowed with the dead. “It was difficult for us to manage, and that is why ice cubes were brought in to manage the dead bodies,” he said.

Anuj Kumar, 31, a resident who rushed to the scene after watching the crush unfold, said he was among several villagers who had used local transport to carry the dead and injured to the hospital.

“I could see many lying in the field, crying out for help, but there were no ambulances,” he said. He described carrying 20 injured women and children into rickshaws, travelling to a hospital with three unconscious women in one vehicle. But as they arrived he said there were “no doctors and no hospital beds”.

“We kept each of them on the floor as there were no doctors to see them,” said Kumar. “They were alive. I put my ear on their chest, and their hearts were beating; they were breathing. But by the time doctors started checking them, two of them were dead, and another one also passed away soon.”

Shailender Kumar, from Agra, was at work when his uncle called him with the news that his aunt, Sangita, had been killed in the crush. They hired a vehicle and rushed to the trauma centre in the town of Sikandra Rao.

“I walked into a scene of carnage. It looked like a war zone. The injured were fighting for their last breaths. There were at least 100 or more bodies, some just lay unattended on the floor, and some on the beds. There weren’t enough beds or enough medical staff to attend to them. I didn’t see a single doctor. Those fighting for their lives weren’t given oxygen cylinders. Because they probably didn’t have any.

“I am outraged at the lack of responsibility in the face of such a tragedy.”

Reacting to a viral video of a man carrying the dead body of a relative on his shoulders, Kumar said: “The situation was worse than this. People were begging for help to carry the bodies of their loved ones home. There’s no dignity for us, even in death.”

The location of the guru, whose real name is Narayan Sakar Vishwa Hari, remains unknown since the incident but a statement by his lawyer on Wednesday accused “antisocial elements” of a conspiracy to stir up the panic.