Footwear of pilgrims lie scattered after the stampede in Haridwar on Tuesday. (AFP)

Nov. 8: A temple stampede killed 14 women and two men today at a Haridwar “Kumbh” organised by an influential religious outfit, praised by the chief minister for its purported crowd management skills and allowed a free hand with police staying away.

Gayatri Pariwar had announced that only 1,500 women would be allowed at a late-morning fire ritual at its main temple, but more than 3,000 tried to force their way in when the gates opened at 11am, said outfit member Acharya Promod Krishna.

“Everyone wanted to gatecrash the temple, triggering a stampede,” said another member, Santosh Ahirwar.

Eyewitnesses in Haridwar — which is located in BJP-ruled Uttarakhand — said most of the dead had come from Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Bihar where Gayatri Pariwar enjoys wide popularity.

The organisation’s five-day “Gayatri Kumbh” that began yesterday has drawn at least two lakh people from across India, but in a reflection of the outfit’s clout within the Sangh parivar, the local administration and police were kept out of its supervision.

The entire event, spread across myriad venues in Haridwar, was being managed solely by the organisation’s 35,000 volunteers.

Local people said the organisers had initially tried to play down the stampede, which also injured 30-odd people, at their headquarters of Shanti Kunj Ashram. This, coupled with the administration’s hands-off policy, delayed the news coming out.

Even at 1pm, state police chief Jyoti Swaroop Pandey told reporters he hadn’t heard of any tragedy except for a few people falling ill. The ambulances arrived and rescue efforts began only at 2pm.

On Sunday, though, while officially declaring the event open, state urban tourism minister Madan Kaushik had said: “Our chief minister (B.C. Khanduri) told us at yesterday’s cabinet meeting that we should learn crowd management techniques from the Gayatri Pariwar.”

The outfit has close affinity with the RSS but has no direct connection with politics. It was holding the event to mark the 100th anniversary of its founder, Pandit Sriram Sharma, and had billed it as a Kumbh. Today’s disaster revived memories of the previous Kumbh at Haridwar in April last year, when a stampede killed seven people.

Earlier, 50 people had died in Haridwar in a 1986 stampede while another had killed 21 in 2003.

Khanduri today announced the ongoing event will be cut short by two days and will end tomorrow. He said his government had ordered a “high-level probe”.

A huge kund (fire pit) had been lit at Shanti Kunj Ashram, around 1km from Har Ki Pauri, for 1,500 women to circle it while chanting the Gayatri Mantra. Eyewitnesses said that as the stampede broke out, people began running helter-skelter. Many women and children fell on the temple passageway and were trampled.

“People fell on each other; two died in front of me. I don’t know whether my mother, who was shouting for help, is dead or alive,” PTI quoted a woman as saying.

Subdivisional magistrate Harbir Singh said that most of the women devotees had been fasting since last night. “They died of suffocation and head injuries.”

“It is strange that security arrangements for such a huge programme were being handled exclusively by the Gayatri Pariwar activists with minimum intervention from the police,” said a local social worker, Rohit Malhotra.

Gayatri had planned it big. It set up an 815ft temporary bridge across the Ganga connecting its ashram with the other bank and dug 1,551 kunds across the pilgrimage town.

Himachal Pradesh chief minister P.K. Dhumal and several other VIPs were performing a ritual near the ashram when the stampede happened.

Pandit Sriram Sharma had set up Gayatri Pariwar in 1953 to “carry on a mission to bring heaven on earth and divinity in man” through meditation and the repeated chanting of certain scriptural texts. He termed it “scientific spiritualism”.