When they were rushing to collect charity handouts, some new clothes to wear on the coming Eid, they did not know they were hurrying at death's door. Instead of smile they were awaiting to be brought on their faces the cold fingers of death suddenly clutched them.
They died like pariah dogs trapped in a ditch. Instead of enjoying joy on the eve of Eid day the bereaved at the loss of their dear ones were sucked into a whirlpool of despair. They have to suffer the anguish of grief for the rest of their lives. Samu, her daughter Sakhina and her granddaughter Lamia and at least 24 others met their horrific death. Their horrible shrieking was not heard by those who trampled them in a stampede. Life just snuffed out off their bodies!
The tragedy occurred in Mymenshing town after the main gate of a businessman's house was opened on Thursday morning for distributing Zakat gifts. Over 1,000 poor people, after a night-long wait, scrambled for Zakat inside a narrow passage of the house. Suddenly, all of them tried to get in at once in their frantic attempt to reach the handouts before the others. Many fell to the ground and got trampled, triggering a deadly stampede.
What is more tragic, as some witnesses have alleged, is that the workers of the businessman's factory had cudgelled the charity seekers as a way to "manage" the crowd, further aggravating the situation. Such inhuman treatment, if true, is a crime that deserves punishment.
Why did police say they were not informed? It is not comprehensible that about 1000 people who waited outside of the house of the charity-giver for the whole night did not attract the attention of the police personnel who must have patrolled the area on that night as a regular duty. Had police taken steps to manage the crowd, this calamity could well have been averted.
As usual, probe bodies have been formed to find out the cause of the accident, meagre compensations were declared for the affected, police issued statements asking people to seek their help in distributing Zakat and leaders expressed their condolences. That's all.
Is it not high time that the government shored up its reputation by enforcing law in iron hand and plugged the holes by making contingency plans to protect citizens from such mishaps?
The government may enact laws requiring charity-givers to distribute their handouts from the safety of a community service centre, banning such distribution from houses or factories that are not suitable for crowd management. At the same time, the law-enforcement agencies may be trained to make use of crowd management strategies whenever and wherever there is a possibility of a stampede.
After the stampede in the Victoria Hall in 1883, a law (still in force) was passed in England which requires all public entertainment venues to be equipped with doors that open outwards and with crash bar latches that open when pushed. There are other modern devices that can be employed to prevent stampedes at places where there is a possibility of crowds gathering.
As the holy month of Ramadan nears the end, the well-off regularly distribute Zakat to the poor, an act of charity, in the form of clothes and money. And this is not the first time that poor people of Bangladesh died from stampede when they gathered to collect Zakat clothes.
Distribution of Zakat clothes would continue till the Eid day and there may be a similar accidents this time or in the future, if the same negligence is shown and the same mistakes are committed.
It is neither the tragic death of innocent humans nor the negligence of the Zakat donor that is lamentable, so much as our society's apathetic attitude to unnecessary deaths being repeated time and again. Always lost in such tragedies is the fact that the laws meant for safeguarding human life are not properly framed, nor is their implementation effectively monitored. So many lives have been lost in the past from accidents, fire, collapses of weak buildings etc., that could have been averted if only the regulators were good gatekeepers and the law enforcing agencies had a minimum of vigil.
The government understands this and the law enforcement agencies with their limited resources cannot be expected to baby-sit the citizens to get them out of harm's way. The trouble is that we are less willing to accept our responsibility. We are notoriously laggard in preventing disasters. We have not been educated and guided to know what is good for us and our society. The only lessons we have learned well are when to jump the traffic signs, how to overtake others in the race of personal gratification and how to grease the palms of the authorities to satiate our greed.
How do we deal with tragedies like that of the latest stampede that killed so many hapless people? Not much painfully, I guess. Perhaps we feel no more pain at the news of such unnecessary casualties as we used to do. So many casualties and deaths with no remedial measures taken have made our minds anesthetised and unresponsive.
We feel down after such events, if we call them tragic, only for a few moments or at best a few days and then the tragedy sinks into oblivion and the deaths turn into just a statistical figure. We pass such an event as 'business as usual' expressing no regret, anger, bargain or complaint.
There was a time when our social conditioning taught us to interpret events like death, accident, or disaster as tragic. But, of late, it seems death, avoidable catastrophes and calamities have become a part of our daily life in Bangladesh. We have now been cultured to take leave as immediately as possible from the dead and the people who grieve the loss of their beloved. There should be an end to this culture of our being immune to human sufferings.
There is nothing more uncertain than when life comes to an end. But there are always ways to see signs of diseases in progress and probabilities of accidents imminent and prevent those from causing injuries and premature deaths.
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