Stampede at Hindu shrine in India’s Kashmir kills 12
At least 12 people died and 13 were injured in a stampede at a religious shrine in India in the early hours yesterday as thousands of pilgrims massed to offer prayers, officials said.
The disaster happened around 3 am (local time) while it was still dark on the route to the Vaishno Devi shrine in Indian-administered Kashmir, one of the country’s most revered Hindu sites.
“People fell over each other ... It was difficult to figure out whose leg or arms were tangled with whose,” witness Ravinder, who gave only one name, told AFP by phone from the scene.
“I helped pick up eight bodies by the time ambulances arrived after about half an hour. I feel lucky to be alive but am still shaking with memory of what I saw,” he said.
One official said that there was a rush to offer special prayers for new year but this was not confirmed by others.
Millions of shrines dot Hindu-majority India’s cities, towns and villages as well as remote sites in the Himalayas or in jungles in the south.
Some are hugely important pilgrimage sites and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government has invested heavily in improving infrastructure to ease access.
Before the pandemic, every day about 100,000 devotees would trek up a steep winding track to the narrow cave containing the shrine to Vaishno Devi.
Authorities had capped the daily number to 25,000 but witnesses and press reports said that this may have been exceeded several times over.
Two stampedes in as many months in India in 2008 left more than 370 Hindus dead. Others in Kerala in 2011 and in Madhya Pradesh two years later each killed more than 100.
In the latest incident, other reports suggested an argument had broken out between devotees.
Rescue operations started immediately and the injured — some of whom were reported to be in a serious condition — were taken to hospital.
Access to the shrine was halted after the stampede but later resumed.
The shrine to Vaishno Devi, a manifestation of Hindu goddess Vaishnavi, is in the hills 60 kilometres from the city of Jammu.