Fifteen people died in a stampede on Saturday at New Delhi’s main railway station as a crush of pilgrims were trying to make their way to a huge Hindu festival in northern India, an official said.
The caretaker chief minister of the Delhi region, Atishi, who uses one name, told reporters outside a hospital in the capital that 15 people had been injured in the stampede, in addition to the 15 killed, according to Indian media reports.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi expressed condolences for the dead in a statement on social media, adding that the authorities were “assisting all those who have been affected by this stampede.” Ashwini Vaishnaw, the country’s minister for railroads, said that an investigation had been ordered.
Before the stampede, crowds at the railway station had swelled because trains bound for the festival, the Kumbh Mela, had been delayed, according to local media reports. The Ministry of Railways said it later ran extra trains to alleviate the crush.
The Kumbh Mela, which began in mid-January and will end late this month, is the world’s largest religious gathering. It is expected to draw more than 400 million people over six weeks, according to government estimates.
The festival takes place every three years in one of four cities in India. This years’s event is being held in Prayagraj, in the state of Uttar Pradesh, where the Ganges and Yamuna Rivers meet. Hindus believe that a third, mythical river called the Saraswati joins the other two there in a sacred confluence. Devotees take baths in the holy waters in the belief that they wash away sins.
The event this year, which is being called a Maha Kumbh, or Great Kumbh, is larger than usual because it coincides with a celestial alignment that takes place once every 144 years.
Managing the huge crowds who attend the festival is a major challenge for the Indian government.
Last month, 30 pilgrims died in a stampede as they rushed to take their baths. In 2013, the last time that Prayagraj hosted the event, 42 people were killed in a stampede at the train station there. Ten years before that, in the western city of Nasik, 39 devotees were crushed in an alley.
In 1954, during the first Kumbh Mela since India’s independence seven years earlier, hundreds of pilgrims died in a stampede.
