Since the 2006 incident was buried, the 2013 stampede took place, a Bhopal-based RTI activist said.
NEW DELHI: More than six years have passed since the stampede of 13 October 2013 at Datia, Madhya Pradesh, in which 115 Hindu pilgrims died near the Ratangarh temple.
In the same spot, in October 2006, 57 pilgrims had died when they were washed away after the Sindh river suddenly got flooded after officials had opened the gates of the nearby Madikheda dam without prior information.
In both the cases, that happened under Bharatiya Janata Party rule, the then state government had constituted an inquiry commission headed by different retired High Court judges.
However, in both these cases, neither has the report of the commission been made public, nor has any official been punished for what the locals have called “state sanctioned murder”.
Interestingly, even after the Congress government came to power in Madhya Pradesh last year in November, none of the officials have been held accountable for these two incidents. This inaction and apathy on the part of first the then BJP government and now the Congress government, have been attributed by activists and locals to the nexus between bureaucrats who, they alleged, have made sure that no official is punished for these two accidents.
On 15 October 2013, two days after the stampede, the Shivraj Singh Chouhan government had appointed Justice Rakesh Saxena, a retired judge of the Madhya Pradesh High Court, to probe the circumstances that led to the stampede and identify the erring officials. The said commission was wound up on 23 March 2014. Chouhan had, at the time, announced that the finding of the inquiry commission would be executed within 15 days of its submission. It is now more than 2,070 days since the report was submitted.
The Sunday Guardian spoke to retired Justice Saxena who said that he had submitted the inquiry commission report to the state government sometime in March-April 2014.
Justice Saxena said that he was not allowed to share the content or the finding of his report with the media.
He also said that the state government is in a better position to share whether the report was placed in front of the state Cabinet or not.
Similarly, the state government had appointed retired High Court judge S.K. Pandey to inquire into the 1 October 2006 incident, the report for which was submitted to the government on 21 March 2007. However, the report of that commission, too, was never made public.
The state government fought very vigorously to avoid the said report coming in public after noted Bhopal-based RTI activist Ajay Dubey filed an RTI request for the copy of the said report. In the end, Dubey failed in getting the said report due to the “sustained pressure” by the state government who was successful in holding it back.
Local journalists said that in both these incidents, the government took minor action like transferring the officers concerned from Datia to other places and suspending, for a brief time, the lower level officials. “It was a classic case of ‘you scratch my back, I will scratch yours’ as politicians first obliged the bureaucracy and thereby earned their ‘loyalty’ who later helped these politicians. No one is concerned about the more than 170 people who died, in this ‘state sanctioned murder’ as all of them were poor people whose voice is not raised by anyone. Bhopal-based senior bureaucrats protected their brethren in 2006; they protected them in 2013 and now when there is a change in the government, they are making sure that this government, too, does not touch them,” a Gwalior-based journalist said. The official who was the collector of Datia in 2013, is now a personal secretary to an influential Union minister, while the then superintendent of police (SP) of Datia is now the SP of a “bigger” district. Ajay Dubey said that if the state government had taken action, as the 2006 inquiry commission is likely to have stated in its finding, the 2013 stampede would not have happened. “The task of such commissions is to identify and suggest what went wrong and what steps should be taken to avoid such incidents in the future. Since the 2006 incident was buried, 2013 took place. If the officials concerned had been identified and action taken against them in 2006 only, officials would have been more careful in 2013. However, now these are forgotten tragedies,” Dubey said.