Families of India stampede victims pin blame on guru.

Namita Singh meets relatives raw with grief and desperate for answers after the prayer-meeting crush that took 121 lives

- Namita Singh

Somwati Devi, 60, wanted prosperity for her family: jobs for her four sons and good marriage prospects for her daughters. With her husband unemployed and unable to lift them out of poverty, she became a devotee of Bhole Baba in the hope of divine intervention.

But on 2 July, she was one of 121 people killed in a stampede at a prayer meeting organised by spiritual leader, who reinvented himself as a religious figure after retiring as a police constable. “Her blind faith has killed her,” her son Brijesh Kumar, 32, tells The Independent. “She just wanted some stability and success” for all of her eight children.

Ravi Kumar, 30, saw how the disaster began after dropping off his uncle at the gathering in Hathras, in northern India’s most populous state of Uttar Pradesh.

“After the congregation was over, people ran after him [Bhole Baba] to collect the soil that his feet touched in the hope that their fortunes might change,” he tells The Independent. “Since there was rainfall, people slipped on top of each other,” he says. It resulted in one of the deadliest stampedes the country has seen.

Speaking from his home in Patiali, a village in Hathras not far from the scene of the stampede, Brijesh Kumar describes the moment he found out about the unfolding tragedy. “I received a call saying that my mother is unconscious but she is breathing,” Kumar says.

“But someone else snatched the phone saying she is dead. As soon as I heard, I left for the hospital in Etah [district], where I was told she had passed away. But I was not allowed to touch her, see whether she had a slow beating heart, or if she had a pulse. She was put in a room with 20-25 dead people. I don’t even know whether she was alive when I reached there or if she was left to die with others. We have not been given any reason for how she died, even though they have done the post-mortem.”