By Sushil Kutty
Samajwadi Party Chief Akhilesh Yadav woke up Wednesday to a great possibility. A stampede at the Mahakumbh! Similar to the one in 2013, when the ‘Kumbh’ 12 years ago, had been similarly met with a stampede and 36 ‘shradalus’ were stomped to death, their last breath escaping into the Triveni-Sangam, final absolution!
Then, Akhilesh Yadav was Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister and the 2013 Kumbh’s ruling political deity was Azam Khan, a minister in the Akhilesh Yadav government, who is now cooling his heels behind bars because the Yogi Adityanath government wanted to make an example of him.
Thirteen years later and Akhilesh Yadav has called for the Yogi Adityanath government to take responsibility for the Maha Kumbh stampede, which killed and injured a number of devotees, the numbers not yet officially released because the Yogi Adityanath government can’t get around to the “official count.”
Akhilesh Yadav says the Uttar Pradesh Police failed and Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath must admit culpability and hand over the management of the Mahakumbh to the care of the Indian Army, which is dog-whistling of the next level. In other words, the sprawling ‘Mahakumbh’ grounds, which when seen from outer space is earth-shaking, must be placed under martial law!
That would be the day, perhaps the first time in 5000 years of kumbhs, people ordered to line-up for a dip in the Triveni Sangam by soldiers in battle fatigues, a sward of holy land dotted with olive green and saffron.
For sure, the Yogi government wasn’t about to give Akhilesh Yadav the satisfaction he wanted from fishing in the troubled waters of the Triveni Sangam. Instead, Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, after receiving a series of phone calls from Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Home Minister Amit Shah, ordered his police to get back to running the ‘Mahakumbh’ like it should be run.
A move by the ‘Akharas’ to stop the ‘Shahi Snan’ for a couple of days, till the holy waters of the ‘Sangam’ settled down, was shot down by the state government and the ‘dips’ in the Ganga-Yamuna-Saraswati confluence was resumed with the crowd of ‘shradalu’ surging to the designated ghats as if the stampede was ‘never’. Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath made it clear that the ” biggest show on Earth must go on!”
And the show went on, with another 3 crore devotees taking the holy dip by eight in the morning Wednesday. This, after people were stampeded like cattle on the range, stories of which abound in American wild west dime novels that cowboys took home with them, eager to learn the alphabet when schooling was in its infancy and illiteracy was the hallmark.
Member of Parliament Akhilesh Yadav and AAP convener Arvind Kejriwal were the first ‘Opposition’ politicians to go for Yogi Adityanath’s jugular when news broke of the stampede at the Mahakumbh, two opposition politicians who had reason to dislike Yogi Adityanath and wanted to witness his fall from grace in the eyes of the electorate. The Yogi is a thorn in the side of Akhilesh Yadav and bete noire of Arvind Kejriwal.
The former Delhi Chief Minister is secretly scared of Yogi Adityanath when the monk takes the stage in Delhi as he has been doing for the last several days, campaigning for the BJP in the Delhi assembly elections. On February 5, both Akhilesh Yadav and Arvind Kejriwal would be on tenterhooks, praying to Ganga, Yamuna and Saraswati to end this saffron-clad monk’s run of luck.
The Yogi is the Samajwadi Party Chief’s nemesis and if the Milkipur assembly constituency remains ‘Samajwadi’ on February 8 it will cut Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath to size, for the second time in a matter of a little over six months, the last time when the Samajwadi Party’s Awadhesh Prasad won the Faizabad Lok Sabha seat and was hailed as the ‘Raja of Ayodhya. If the Yogi loses the Milkipur bypoll, it will be at the hands of Awadhesh Prasad’s son, Ajit Prasad.
Akhilesh Yadav Wednesday “condemned” the stampede as if the calamity was a living thing and could hear Akhilesh Yadav like a living mortal. Unconfirmed news reports say the stampede claimed 15 lives and injured considerably more. But it’s the women and children missing which was causing the most trauma. Children lost (and found) at the Kumbh has been a recurring theme at kumbh for tens of hundreds years and movies have been made on the phenomenon.
Akhilesh Yadav says Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath should take back his brag of a “world class system” in place at the Mahakumbh and take “moral responsibility”, and that heads must roll. Those responsible for the “tragedy” should be identified and sacked. Yadav wants the Indian Army called in to take charge as if devils had risen from the depths of the confluence and taken over the Mahakumbh. There is no doubt that imagination is running riot in the Samajwadi camp.
“Now that the truth behind the claims of ‘world-class system’ has been exposed, those who were making these claims and spreading false propaganda should take moral responsibility for the people killed in this accident and resign from their posts,” Akhilesh posted on ‘X’, which is every man-sized child’s ‘blackboard’.
Yadav wants the Army takeover of the Mahakumbh to “re-establish faith” in the “devotees and saints.” Akhilesh Yadav hadn’t felt the same in 2013 when the then stampede killed 36 devotees and the government of Akhilesh Yadav didn’t call the army to take charge of the 2013 kumbh.
Different strokes for different kumbhs, Akhilesh Yadav is a different man today from the man he was in 2013. The big difference is, he was Chief Minister then and is a Lok Sabha MP now. As for Arvind Kejriwal, the AAP convener, when he is not imagining “genocide from the poisonous Yamuna waters”, he is dreaming of decimation at the hands of the Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister, whose rallies in the national capital had been dismantling Kejriwal’s well-laid plans to make a comeback for at least another Five years.
Yogi Adityanath’s rallies in Delhi have been pulling massive crowds and consolidating ‘Hindus” behind the Bharatiya Janata Party even as Muslims all over the nation’s capital have been lining up to shore up the Aam Aadmi Party’s chances despite the three anti-incumbencies and the open secret that Kejriwal’s open lies have in them the antidote to honest dealing. Don’t be surprised if Arvind
Kejriwal claims the Mahakumbh stampede was the “Hand of God” to punish Yogi Adityanath. (IPA Service)
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