Qutab Minar, the 72.5-metre-high monolithic tower that Iltutmish built 750 years ago, witnessed two shocks in its hoary life-span. In 1368, it was struck by lightning that ripped through its top; in 1803, an earthquake shook down a harp-shaped cupola that adorned its fifth storey. The latest shock, which came last fortnight, damaged none of the fluted arabesques on the ancient pillar. But, following a tragedy that took only a couple of minutes to strike, the victory tower at once turned into a tower of grief.

On December 4-a sunlit Friday morning-45 visitors to the Qutab including 30 schoolchildren, were choked and trampled to death while tumbling down its spiral stairway. To give it a final macabre touch, the stampede occurred in pitch darkness while the tower, like a mousetrap, was closed from outside. The incident sent down instantaneous shockwaves. Both the Houses of Parliament, which were in session, were adjourned. The capital’s eveningers feverishly jacked up their print-orders: the morning’s newspapers ran banner headlines. Finally, a judicial enquiry was ordered under Jagdish Chandra, district and sessions judge, in the face of rampant buck-passing by officials.

School Excursion: Twenty-six of the 45 dead were from a single village, Pali, in Faridabad district of Haryana, lying on the industrialised southern fringe of Delhi. They were students of the local Higher Secondary School: 130 of them, accompanied by two teachers, had gone out in two buses on an excursion to the Qutab, the zoo and the trade fair. A day later, at the village cremation ground, 26 funeral pyres were lit up in a row. There were people from further afield who had walked into the deadly trap that morning. There were four boys from Ropar in Punjab, a tourist from Kharagpur in West Bengal, and a Singapore girl named Elizabeth Emmanuel who had come in from Madras the same morning. The Ropar boys — 58 altogether — were on a 10-day educational tour of Delhi, and the Qutab was their first sightseeing engagement.

The incident occurred between 11.30 a.m. and noon, which also coincides with the peak hour during the winter months. The likelihood of such a tragedy was also the greatest on Fridays when the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), who maintain the Qutab and other historic monuments of the country, do not levy the normal entry fee of a rupee on each visitor. The local vendors who hang out at the manicured lawns all the year round aver that the rush multiplies “‘tenfold” on Fridays.

Lax Vigilance: Though the size of the sightseeing crowd fluctuates, the level of vigilance does not. On that fateful Friday, there were only two policemen, as on any other day, at the gate of the tower. The ASI attendants were present only at the ground. There was apparently no check on the number of people entering the tower at the time, because at least 350 people had got into it when the tragedy occurred, though some of the attendants later said that 40 to 50 persons were normally allowed.

The conical tower of Qutab, which has a base diameter of 14.4 metres and tapers out to just 2.7 metres at the apex, has 387 steps-most of which are treacherously bevelled and slippery. However, the stampede occurred not around the narrower top of the tower’s 28.93 metre-high first storey. the point above which visitors are not allowed-but closer to the spacious base of the first storey. The steps in this zone do not accommodate more than four people abreast, though, when the avalanche came down, at least three times that number must have been packed in the same space. It is no wonder that most of the people who died had broken ribs and were asphyxiated.

The stampede began amid circumstances that can be explained only after the enquiry is over. However, eyewitness reports confirm the facts that:
► there was a power failure while the tower was bustling with tourists,
► the exit door was mysteriously closed,
► somebody fell down in the ensuing darkness, and the combined screams, echoing down the spiral staircase, led the trapped insiders to believe that it was the tower itself which was crumbling down. The last point is borne out by the fact that even Rajiv Gandhi, who was sitting in the Parliament at that time, was first told that the Qutab had crumbled down.

Hooligans: One nugget of truth that has come out of the conflicting reports, which is too embarrassing for the authorities to own up anyway is that the stampede was caused by a few hooligans who had been teasing two women tourists from New Zealand. Later on, talking to a reporter of The Statesman, Jackie, one of the two women, said: ” I had six people under me; my head was down under and my legs were up in the air.” They were caught in the melee while climbing down the stairs “because of too many troublesome youngsters who were there at the top.” A rather credible line of thought is that it is one of these hoodlums who switched off the light, maybe, as a police official applied his hindsight to suggest, “to heighten the fun”.

The New Zealanders further alleged that their clothes were ripped, their gold chains and watches were stolen, and some people tried to lift their wallets. “It was pre-planned,” they accused. Writing on the front page of the Indian Express, S. Nihal Singh, the paper’s chief editor, observed: “The permissive political climate in the country cannot but lead to a degeneration of the moral tone of society and a situation in which unescorted women, native or foreign, are considered fair game for making passes. and worse.”

The final verdict on the debate over whether there was failure of power supply will, no doubt, come from the enquiry commission itself. But there is every possibility that the spell of darkness was a handiwork of miscreants. Similarly, the enquiry will also establish who locked the main gate from outside, and thus heightened the fun”. Right now. the questions being asked are:
► Why no arrangement for an emergency light was kept ready at the Qutab?
► Why was the place so thinly policed’?
► Why didn’t the ASI post more attendants on the rush days?

Smiling Politicians: Rather than being willing to solve these puzzles, the authorities were busy letting themselves be seen at the site of the tragedy. The dignitaries, apart from Mrs Gandhi and Rajiv, who made a beeline for the Qutab are: Delhi Lieutenant Governor S.L. Khurana, Tourism Minister A.P. Sharma and Zail Singh. Bhajan Lal, the Haryana chief minister, visited Safdarjang Hospital and All India Institute of Medical Sciences, where the 24 injured and the dead were brought.

At the Qutab, Rajiv was photographed with a broad smile on his face, flanked by tour operators of some travel agencies. It invited such hot criticism that next day the powerful MP broke his vow of silence in Parliament by issuing a statement that the “cameramen present there” had really caught him unawares. Not to be outdone, the Delhi unit of Bharatiya Janata Party brought out a procession to express “sympathy for those killed”. Thus, like the sickening ending of all Indian tragedies, the Qutab episode finished with a close race between politicians and vultures.

It was one of the bleakest weeks in memory. Even to a nation inured to bad news by an endless spate of calamities, it seemed as though the year was ending on a particularly tragic note. The cataclysms began on December 4 when 45 people died in the Qutab Minar stampede in Delhi. Two days later, 46 people, mostly women, were burnt to death in an inferno that engulfed a makeshift religious ‘model’ in Ahmedabad’s Asarva area. The capital was struck twice more before the week ended: on December 9, 18 hapless labourers pouring concrete on a span of the Sewa Nagar flyover in Delhi were seriously injured when the span’s shuttering collapsed. And on December 11, at least 35 people were drowned when the charter bus carrying them to the New Okhla Industrial Development Area (NOIDA) from Delhi’s Lajpat Nagar ran off the Patparganj Road and plunged 20 feet into a canal at the Chilla Jhal Regulator.

The Ahmedabad fire, investigations later revealed, was due to some blatant dodging of rules by the authorities of the Nilkanth Mahadev temple in the Asarva locality. The five-storey 20-metre-high model of the Himalayas, made of timber, cloth and grass, at first seemed to have caught fire because of a short circuit. Later it emerged that the wiring used for the structure had been faulty, and Police Commissioner Manmohan Singh said the wires had clearly melted due to a power overload.

Mysterious: At least 100 devotees were climbing up the model when the fire broke out. Around 50 near the top were the most unfortunate ones; they had no time to try to escape. An exit gate leading into an adjacent school also owned by the temple had mysteriously slammed shut immediately after the fire began raging.

Police and municipal authorities said — the temple authorities had not secured permission before putting up the religious exhibition. The temple obviously hoped to rake in substantial revenues from the gate receipts for the festival, which was to end on the day of the fire and had been extended by four days “on public demand”. Devotion had turned into ugly death in a trice. Little was forthcoming from the temple’s priests: its mahant, Shivram Giriji, pleaded “speechlessness” at the horror of the five.

The Ahmedabad police termed the tragedy “culpable negligence”, but no action had been taken against the temple authorities, and the contractor who had put up the structure. Matters were further complicated when Union Minister of State for Home Affairs Yogendra Makwana and Gujarat Home Minister Prabodh Raval. who are at loggerheads, gave conflicting figures of deaths. Makwana told the Rajya Sabha the day after the mishap that 60 people had perished in the fire, but Raval disputed this, saying only 46 had died. With a familiar gesture, the state Government announced that it would set up a judicial commission to look into the causes of the fire. In the welter of claims and counter-claims, however, few tears were shed for the unfortunate people who had met a fiery end that dark evening.

Serious Flaws: The Delhi flyover collapse had been preceded a day earlier by the death of Shamsul Haq, a labourer, who was buried under a cave-in at the site of the Asian Games village complex. Both incidents exposed serious flaws in the many facilities that are being constructed at breakneck speed for the Games. The flyover’s construction is under overall charge of the Railways, and is contracted to the National Projects Construction Corporation (NPCC), which in turn farms out work to sub-contractors. Until the fortnight’s end, the police were hard put to figure out which of the three parties was actually responsible for the accident. ,

Circumstantial evidence showed that a small defect in the scaffolding had led to the snapping of the 50-metre span shutter. NPCC officials termed the accident “one of those unfortunate ones”. But the truth seemed to be that contractors were using substandard material, and paying scant attention to safety procedures, in their hurry to complete the work. Of the four seriously injured labourers, one was reported to have a severe spinal wound that could lead to paralysis.

As frantic enquiries began into the incident, and workers began clearing the 400 tonnes of debris that littered the site, another fact emerged: that many injured workers had possibly been whisked away in contractors’ vehicles, ostensibly for ‘first aid’, but actually to deflate casualty figures.

Various Mishaps: The flyover collapse seemed to portend more tragedies for the Asian Games projects. Three mishaps have so far occurred in the last nine months in the village complex. The indoor swimming pool at Talkatora Garden will now not have a roof because experts warned that it would collapse if built. The huge indoor stadium at Rajghat has also been reported to have been constructed with faulty structural components. Quality control is exercised by the Delhi Development Authority (DDA), which is an interested party in the construction and therefore cannot be expected to be impartial.

Above all, the flyover tragedy, although it did not fortunately result in any deaths, showed up .the callous disregard of the authorities towards the plight of the thousands of labourers who are paid a pittance as wages. No relief had been announced for the injured labourers until the time of going to press. It was inevitable, therefore, that the news of the NOIDA bus tragedy on December 11 cast a gloomy pall over the citizens of Delhi.

—Chaitanya Kalbag