Stop the nautanki, Mr Yogi

Even the death of scores of children in a Gorakhpur civic hospital last year has not sensitized Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath to the distress of parents who have lost their children because of the negligence of authorities, in a tragedy that could have been easily avoided.

Any other person would have maintained a sombre silence when confronted by agitated family members and relatives of the 13 school children who died in a collision between a school van and a passenger train at an unmanned railway crossing in Duddahi village.

But Yogi Adityanath does not bother about such niceties; more important, he did not want the tragedy to turn into a national spectacle on TV with thousands pillorying his government for its contributory negligence and callousness.

So, he flew off the handle while addressing the crowd that had gathered at the site of the tragedy, mocking at their sense of outrage, and dubbing the spontaneous reaction as a "nautanki." Further, he tried to muzzle them by cautioning against any sloganeering.

"Ye ek dukhad ghatna hai...Narebaazi band karein ... Abhi main bol raha hoon, nautanki baad mein karein,’’ he was heard telling the crowd on video.

The school van of Divine Public School with nearly 25 students was passing through the unmanned crossing on Thursday morning when the accident took place.

It reportedly stalled on the tracks and was badly smashed by the train that passed moments later. Most of the children were below ten.

The mishap spot was strewn with water bottles, school bags and books; among them lay blood splattered bodies of seven-year-old Ragini, her brothers, and many of their schoolmates (Details inside).

Kushinagar is 50 km from Gorakhpur, the pocket borough of Adityanath that had sent the saffron-robed monk to Parliament for five straight terms. Yet, it took the administration considerable time to rush an ambulance to the spot. Locals, who rushed to the spot first after hearing the wails of the children, dragged them out of the crushed vehicle and rushed the injured to a government hospital, 30 km away.

The chief minister, as is his habit, jumped the gun and said that the van driver was to be blamed for the deaths. "I am told that the van driver was wearing earphones while driving... this is a case of pure negligence," he said without waiting for a preliminary inquiry to be over.

There was a similar knee-jerk response from the Yogi administration to the Gorakhpur hospital tragedy. The family members of the deceased children hit out at Adityanath for his insensitive ‘nautanki’ remarks. They lamented that the compensation given by the chief minister was just a legal formality and it would not bring back their children.

The chief minister's office lost no time in countering the charge against him, saying he did not say "nautanki band karo" to the aggrieved parents but to those who had hounded him to click selfies with him. There was no such evidence of people mobbing him for a selfie in the video footage that is doing the rounds.

Meanwhile, he principal of Kushinagar's Divine Public School has been detained by the police for not following government guidelines on security and safety of children. Yet another scapegoat for the Yogi government.