Showing posts with label Qutb. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Qutb. Show all posts

Sunday, November 14, 2021

Why Qutub Minar has been closed since 1981


45 visitors, most of them students, died in a stampede inside the minar on December 4, 1981. Demands to reopen the monument have been made over the years, but no government wants to risk the blame for another tragedy

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Long ago, you could climb to the top of Delhi’s Qutub Minar. In the early 1850s, British agent Thomas Metcalfe’s daughter Emily used to take “a basketful of oranges to the top of the Kutub Minar, 283 feet high, to indulge in a feast in that seclusion” (her papa disapproved of women eating cheese, mangoes and oranges; and she got the minar’s height wrong – it’s 238 feet).

A century later, the tower was still open. Football lore has it that Delhi owes its lone Santosh Trophy triumph, in 1944, to the Qutub. On the morning of the final, a Delhi official allegedly took the visiting Bengal side sightseeing to the minar, and told them it was impossible to climb its 379 steps without a rest. Six Bengal players trudged upstairs to prove him wrong. They returned with legs so sore that Delhi beat Bengal 2-0.

The free run ended a few years later because of all the suicides that happened at the Qutub. One of the more sensational cases was that of a rani of Kapurthala – a Czech woman named Nina Grosup, a.k.a. Evgenia Grosupova and Tara Devi – who jumped to her death in December 1946. So, in the early 1950s the government barred access beyond the minar’s first balcony. It did not affect the suicide rate, though, because even the first balcony is as high as a 10-storey apartment building.

Picnic turns calamity

Like any other Friday, December 4, 1981 was a very busy day at the minar. Entry to the Qutub compound used to be free on Fridays then, and there was no ticket for going up either, so schools and colleges scheduled their Qutub picnics for Friday mornings. It was the last time the general public saw the monument from inside.



By 11am, busloads of students and other visitors were inside the spiral staircase that leads up to the minar’s first balcony. By all accounts – even the government admitted – there were far more visitors than could be safely accommodated.

Around 11.30am – reports from that day say – there was a power failure, and the lights inside went out. The minar has large vents at regular intervals for air and light, but as the visitors who were close to the outer wall pressed against it for safety, they cut out the daylight. Then, as the scared crowd tried to exit desperately, a stampede occurred. Within minutes, dozens of people lay dead and injured in the darkness.

Anil Kumar, a student of Delhi’s Aurobindo College at the time, was inside the minar with seven of his friends when the stampede occurred. He told The Times of India they were descending the dark stairs in single file when they suddenly “found themselves sliding down uncontrollably”. He survived with chest injuries.

Manjulal, a two-year-old boy from Faridabad, was probably the luckiest visitor. He had come to the minar with his parents Vimla Rani and JP Gulati. As chaos erupted, he “glided over hundreds of wailing and screaming people in the dark stairs...and landed outside without any injury after being passed on from hand to hand,” The Times reported.

Trapped behind jammed doors

The minar gate had heavy steel doors that opened inwards. As the number of people inside swelled, the chowkidar (watchman) had pulled them shut. When hundreds of people tried to barge outside at once, the doors jammed against the frame. Rescuers couldn’t enter through the gate because of the mass of people behind it.

Fortunately, a scaffolding had been built behind the minar to carry out repairs, and local hawkers and tourist guides used it to enter the minar through the vents in the outer wall. They extricated many survivors and bodies over an hour. Some Sikh youths undid their turbans and used them to lift buckets of water for the shocked survivors inside the minar.

By the time police and the fire brigade arrived, the dead had been laid out in the Qutub lawns and the injured rushed to AIIMS and Safdarjung hospitals in the tourist buses that had brought them in the morning. At 3.30pm, then home minister Giani Zail Singh informed Lok Sabha that 45 persons had been killed and 21 injured.

Journalists who looked inside the minar after the evacuation reported seeing books, sweaters, cameras and handbags everywhere. These were piled up at the minar gate in the evening. The Times of India of December 5 reported: “The sides of the staircase were splattered with blood as people were ruthlessly battered against the solid walls.”

A team of 12 doctors formed to do the autopsies finished its work around 1.30am on December 5. They attributed most of the deaths to suffocation and trampling, not bleeding, and few corpses had external injuries.

What caused the stampede?

The pitch dark minar must have made the people nervous, but that alone would not have started a stampede. Survivors that day gave different accounts of what had happened. Some said a group of unruly boys had misbehaved with women tourists in the dark, and the stampede started when those women tried to rush downstairs.

Others said someone had slipped in the dark, and set off a chain reaction while trying to regain balance. Some said there had been a scuffle when thieves tried to pick pockets in the dark, and that had led to the stampede.

A tragedy waiting to happen

Next day, New Delhi additional commissioner of police Nikhil Kumar denied receiving any complaint of molestation, but news reports from the time say two tourists from New Zealand, Jackie and Marie, had alleged they were molested. One of them was seen leaving the Qutub compound wearing a borrowed lungi (sarong) and shirt. Later, district and sessions judge Jagdish Chandra’s inquiry report in the case also made a mention of their harassment.

In the Rajya Sabha, the Opposition alleged police protection and political patronage to “local goondas” had caused the tragedy, but molestation inside the minar wasn’t a new thing. Twenty-four years earlier, on November 21, 1956, an MP had asked then deputy education minister Dr MM Das (the archaeology department used to be under the education minister) in Lok Sabha if he knew women were molested and pockets picked in the minar’s “dark and dingy passage”. The minar lacked electric lights those days, and the minister had replied they weren’t needed as the minar had “been like that for 750 years”.

Overcrowding was also an old problem, especially on holidays. There had been another stampede inside the minar on August 15, 1978 when a man had fainted from suffocation in the packed staircase. Twelve people were injured that day, six of them seriously.

After the December 1981 tragedy, education minister Sheila Kaul told Lok Sabha a system of crowd-control had been in place since the 1950s, when tickets were introduced at the Qutub. There are 155 steps up to the first balcony, so 300 visitors were allowed in at a time. They walked up single-file, looked around from the balcony, which had space for 40-50 persons, and then descended single-file. When 50 visitors exited the tower, 50 more were sent inside.

Ensuring that the tourists ascended and descended the steps – which are about 5 feet wide at the base and narrow to 4 feet at the balcony – in an orderly double spiral was crucial for safety, but on Fridays and other holidays this was impossible. By some accounts, more than 500 people were inside the minar on December 4, 1981. Kaul initially said the stampede had occurred because about 60 boys from a college in Nuh, Haryana had barged into the minar disregarding the chowkidaar’s warning about crowding.

‘Qutub is falling…’

Just as the police denied reports of molestation, the Delhi municipal corporation at first said there had been no power outage at the minar between 10.50am and 12.30pm on December 4. A truck had dashed against an electricity pole, tripping power at 9.15am but supply had been restored by 10.50am, it said.

But the 49-page Chandra Commission report found power failure to be one of the major causes of the tragedy, and held Delhi Electricity Supply Undertaking (DESU) responsible for it.

The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) was held equally culpable for the “very bad and dangerous condition” of the steps. The steps had “dangerous depressions and contours” because they had never been repaired, it said.

The inquiry commission concluded that while the girls from New Zealand had rushed downstairs to escape the molesters, the real stampede had occurred when another girl had slipped near the minar’s 8th ventilator and some boys had raised a false alarm: “Qutub is falling...go down, go down.”

This account agrees with what BD Singh, MP from Phulpur in Uttar Pradesh, told Lok Sabha on December 7, 1981. He had visited the minar on the evening of December 4 and found that all the casualties had occurred roughly between the 40th and the 60th steps.

Will it open again?

The Chandra Commission had recommended better lighting inside the minar, paid entry, and restricting access to 100 people at a time. It had also asked ASI to repair the minar’s steps before reopening it. The repairs were made over a year, and in 1983 ASI proposed reopening the minar to visitors but the government declined.

Twenty years later, Prime Minister AB Vajpayee’s culture minister Jagmohan directed ASI to open the minar up to the third storey, but this time the agency said the steps above the first storey would need repairs. The minar remains closed, and it seems unlikely that it will ever open again.

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A vent in the minar's wall 

A similar scaffolding stood that day

The minar doors open inwards

Hindustan Times front page on 5/12/81 


Sunday, December 4, 2011

Judicial probe's findings


Qutab Minar’s slippery and uneven steps were as much to blame for the high death toll as the power failure that plunged the tower into darkness on December 4, 1981. The inquiry committee that examined the causes of the accident criticised both the power utility DESU and the Minar’s custodian ASI in its report.

The probe panel headed by district and sessions judge Jagdish Chandra started work a day after the tragedy and submitted its report a month later, on January 6. The following were its key findings:

1) Power failure inside the tower was one of the major causes of the stampede. The fault was on the part of Delhi Electric Supply Undertaking.

2) The stampede started when a girl slipped somewhere below the Minar’s eighth ventilator.

3) Deaths from suffocation occurred due to the pressure of human bodies lying one above the other.

4) Almost all the steps inside the tower were slippery and uneven, and had dangerous depressions and contours. Poor condition of the steps led to the girl’s slipping below the eighth ventilator. Archaeological Survey of India was to blame for the dangerous condition of the steps.















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