Godmen And Mortal Women: Who's To Blame For Hathras Stampede?

“It was the biggest mistake of my life,” the 28-year-old rued between sobs, a day later.

Only 22 and married five years, Kamlesh and her toddler died in a stampede that broke out at the end of the satsang. The dead have thus far been counted as 121 devotees, which include 114 women and seven children.

Waiting at Bagla Combined District Hospital in Hathras to pick up his family’s corpses, Ram lamented that he “was there. And yet, [I] could not save them.” Later on the same night, he buried his little girl and cremated his wife’s body. Ram’s only living family now is his son, whose eyes darted between his weeping father and the flames that consumed his mother.

Documenting a Disaster

A stuffed bear floated, face down in a puddle of muddy water under the tented venue of the satsang held on the side of GT Road in Phulrai Mughalgadi village. A day after the fatal stampede, abandoned belongings, left behind in the pandemonium, floated as ominous reminders of the tragedy that had unfolded: broken spectacles, half-eaten tiffin boxes and discarded dupattas, hastily forgotten slippers, even a heap of crumpled wedding invitations, offerings from devotees to Bhole Baba in exchange for blessings for a match, had moulded.

For the past month, Hathras district’s loudspeakers blared advertisements, busy chowks were covered in banners and then there were Bhola Baba’s workers doing door-to-door promotions. “It was all anybody could talk about,” says Renu, a daily wager and resident of Sokhana village. Though not a devout follower herself, Renu said she went to the satsang bec­ause of her friends. Renu’s teenage daughter Sadhna also accompanied her. The venue was swarming with women when this group from Sokhana reached and getting seats was a struggle. “I remember slipping on the mud as we entered,” Sadhna said.

The sermon and event were peaceful until the Baba exited the venue.

No locals can agree on how the stampede started. Renu said that the commotion began when some people rushed toward the exit to chase his cavalcade. “The crowd spilled over to GT Road, causing some women already on the road to slip and fall off the edge of the road on the other end,” she recalled. Her friend and Sokhana resident Chameli, who had attended Bhole Baba’s earlier events, added the practice of devotees rushing to the godman as he left was common. “They often try to touch the Baba’s feet or collect the flowers that fall from his procession,” she said.

Others blame bad traffic management and claim the stampede happened an hour after the Baba’s departure. “Once the satsang ended and Baba left, a large number of people tried to leave the venue at once, choking up the road and causing a traffic commotion” claimed Sanjay Kumar Jatav, the brother-in-law of 45-year-old Savitri Devi who died in the rush. He was backed up by local Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) leader Mukesh Gupta. “The Baba left at one pm. The stampede began around two pm,” Gupta said confidently even though by their own admission, neither men were present at the site at that time.

On July 3, UP Police registered an FIR stating that the satsang organisers hid the actual number of devotees expected while seeking permission from the local administration. With two and a half lakh people at the event, the organisers took permission for 80,000. It also noted that the organisers did not cooperate in traffic management and hid evidence after the stampede. A preliminary report submitted by Sikandara Rao Sub-Divisional Magistrate (SDM) to the District Magistrate (DM) says that devotees of the Baba tried to get close to his departing vehicle to seek “darshan” and were pushed by the godman’s security. The situation worsened due to a “slippery slope” resulting in the stampede.

Though he has not yet been named in the FIR, Baba Bhole Nath accused “anti-social elements” of being responsible for the. His lawyer AP Singh said that the Baba was “deeply pained by what happened”, but not responsible for it. “The accident was caused by miscreants who wanted to give Baba a bad name. This is nothing but a conspiracy to discredit him,” he said.

In the following week, police arrested six ‘sevadars’ reportedly responsible for organising the event in connection with the stampede and said that Bhole Baba would be questioned if required during the investigation. On July 6, speaking to a news agency, the Baba urged his followers to “keep faith in the government and the administration.” He assured them that those who “created the chaos will not be spared.”

Those who were present at the satsang like Renu have vivid recollections of what was undoubtedly a quick and fatal event. “It like a wave went through the crowd. People started falling on top of each other. No one could understand what was happening,” she said. At some point, separated from her group, Renu slipped and fell.

Renu’s voice is hoarse as she continues remembering, “Instantly, many others fell on top of me and it became hard to breathe. I thought I would not survive”. She did not give up. Instead, Renu pulled herself up by grabbing a low -hanging tree branch. “Once I was standing, I didn’t notice anything else. I must have stepped on dead bodies but I had to come out. May god forgive me,” Renu said.

An elderly Sohan Devi, who lived down the road from Renu, did not make it out alive; neither did Vinod Kumar’s 70-year-old mother Jayawanti, Rajkumari his 49-year-old wife and nine-year-old daughter Bhumi. Vinod, a mason who sells bags makes a living selling bags and doing masonry work in nearby cities, was in Bareilly when his relatives informed him about the incident. He returned the same night and joined his three young sons in the search for their family. “My mother’s body was found in Agra, my wife was found in Aligarh, daughter was found in Hathras hospital,” Vinod recalled. His mother had insisted on going to the satsang, she had been a devout follower of Bhole Baba for over 20 years. Vinod said that he had always been against the practice and had tried to dissuade her from pursuing it. “I used to tell her not to go but she would not listen. This time, she took my wife and kid too. My whole family was wiped out in one day,” he wept.

Baba and his Followers 

Phulrai resident Rani Devi attested that the Baba had healing powers. She claimed her “pathri” (kidney stone) was healed after she visited the Baba’s satsang held in Hathras a decade ago, though admitting she had never seen a doctor for it. ‘Baba healed me,” she said. Such beliefs perhaps stem from self-styled godman’s mysterious and controversial history.

Originally from Bahadurpur village near Kasganj, Surajpal Singh Jatav alias Baha Bhole Nath is the son of a Dalit farmer. He served as a policeman for the first part of his youth, working with an intelligence unit of Agra Police in UP for 18 before serving as the head constable in the Superintendent of Police (Rural Area) office till 2000, Aligarh range IG Shalabh Mathur confirmed. He then took voluntary retirement and began his journey as a spiritual healer by claiming he could heal the sick and restore life to the dead. He was arrested later that year after he forcibly took the body of a local 16-year-old girl from her family and kept it with him at his residence, claiming he could bring her back to life. The case was eventually closed and Surajpal released but his cult as a healer with divine curative powers grew, first in his village Bahadurpur, and quickly spread across districts like Agra, Hathras, Etah, Aligarh, Kanpur, Farukkhabad, Mainpuri and others.

Those who joined Baba’s cult were called “sevadars”. These pink-robed emissaries - both male and female - are known to travel to rural areas with Dalit or backward populations and reach out to the locals, especially women who form a major chunk of the Baba’s followers while private security personnel are at his disposal at night and day to provide him safety. The sevadars and his security personnel are the ones seemingly responsible for crowd control in his satsangs. The ‘modern’ Baba, known to always sport a white suit and dark glasses, remains digitally elusive. He has no website or social media profiles, and does not believe in broadcasting his sermons. “Followers are instead urged to come to his satsangs and connect with him in person,” Chota Nabipur resident Mohini, daughter of Asha Devi, who passed away in the stampede, stated. Her mother too, had been a devout believer in the powers of Baba and had even kept pictures of him at home which she worshipped alongside other deities. Followers maintain that the Baba does not accept any offerings from followers in cash or kind.

The mysterious ’Baba’ has nevertheless built a sprawling empire over the years with grand ashrams in Mainpuri, Kasganj, Kanpur, Etah and Dausa (Rajasthan). His former home in Bahadurnagar, which remains vacant now, has also started being revered as a shrine by his former neighbours and residents.

A senior Etah-based journalist with a national Hindi daily who has been covering Surajpal Singh Jatav since his early days stated without wanting to be named that inside the Ram Kutir Charitable Trust, the Baba’s Mainpuri ashram, there were no CCTVs and entry was carefully restricted. “In his sermons which he always gives with his wife Premvati at his side, he talks about divinity and immortality, implies that he is both divine and immortal, and asks followers to follow in his path,” the scribe said.

In the wake of the tragedy, Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath visited the Trust in Manipuri and also visited Phulrai where he met victims of the stampede. The UP government has ordered a judicial probe and a three-member team under the chairmanship of retired Allahabad High Court Judge Brajesh Kumar Srivastava has been formed to investigate the matter. In Hathras, a section of the locals has been demanding justice, and another which comprises even kin of victims, remain unwavering in their faith in the Baba. 60-year-old Munni Devi from Bishana said she has been worshipping Baba for 20 years and believes he has healing powers. Her 22-year-old daughter Shikha Kumari was brought in to the Hathras hospital on July 2 after she passed out during the stampede but miraculously survived with just a few injuries to her stomach. Munni Devi believes Baba saved her because she had done ‘good deeds’ and those who did not survive had their own bad karma to blame. Defending the Baba, she added, “Accidents can happen anywhere. So many people die in accidents in Kedarnath or Vaishno Devi. Do people blame Shiv ji or Durga Mata?”

A closer look at the Baba’s followers reveals a complex set of factors that contribute to the godman’s enduring mystique. The majority of Baba Bhole Nath’s followers in Hathras and other districts of UP are women from the Scheduled Caste communities and come from marginalised economic backgrounds. Renu from Sokhana who attended the satsang is a sweeper while Munni Devi continues to work as a farm hand despite her age. Mohini’s mother Asha Devi who died at the stampede had been a widowed daily wager who raised her children single-handedly with the income she made doing “majdoori”, often putting aside her own needs to feed the family. Jayawanti was a daily wage worker and her son said she had claimed for years that drinking water blessed by the Baba cured her arthritis and gave her strength to continue to work. “She found peace in the Baba’s words,” Vinod said.

Studies in positive psychology note that events like satsangs can have beneficial effects on women, especially in rural settings. Noting that there are various categories of satsangs, Kamlesh Singh who teaches psychology at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi said that women typically exhibit certain “group behaviours” like “social modelling” and “placebo effect.”  “Social modelling is when women mimic their larger social groups when participating in religious or social events or rituals. That’s why we see many women turning up to these events in large interconnected groups,” Singh explained. She added that it was “placebo effect is the general feeling of satisfaction, contentment and well-being that many of the satsang attendees reported after the event.” Such placebo effects are compounded by “attributional error” that lead to “skewed perceptions” like the belief that attending a satsang or getting darshan of a certain entity, will make their problems go away. When Baba Bhole Nath’s devotees claim that his blessings cured their husband’s alcoholism or that going to the satsang brought peace between quarrelling mother-daughter in-laws, they really believe it. Singh, who has researched the positive effects of bhajan-singing in satsangs as a strategy for increasing well-being among women stated that such events lead to increased social cohesion among communities and act almost akin to festivals. They allow women to “disengage with their daily stressors” and engage with “pious thoughts of God”.

While satsangs are popular in urban and affluent areas as well, Singh noted that the gendered aspect was more at play in rural areas. “In cities and where you have grand satsangs organised by the likes of Shree Shree or Sadhguru, both men and women show up in large numbers. These are usually people from advanced economic backgrounds and caste allegiance is less. In more localised settings, we see a larger number of women and higher role of caste and community allegiance or kinship,” Singh noted. While Singh’s research has mainly focused on the communal singing of bhajans as a source of social cohesion, godmen remain a recurring aspect of a majority of satsangs in north India. A study co-conducted by Singh among 150 women across villages in Haryana found that 47.6 per cent of the respondents attended talks or sermons by some religious guru or preacher, even as it noted that a considerable percentage including those who attended such talks remained divided on whether to follow the guru’s teachings.

Sociology researcher Swati Rath from Cuttack, Odisha, noted that engaging with godmen was often a way for women to fight against gender oppression embedded in traditional religion, especially for women from marginalised castes who were denied permission to participate in the religious practices of dominant castes. Rath noted that the segregation of the lower caste and women in religious practices, the practice of untouchability, creating fear psychosis through superstition, sorcery etc. are the “key ingredients of the traditional religion.” Godmen, on the other hand, offer a more open, relaxed and inclusive path to salvation. One does not need long days of fasting or arduous visits to remote temples to attain mukti or get blessed by a god. A simple ‘darshan’ at the satsang and purchasing a Rs 10 locket (voluntarily) is enough to heal body and soul. “Unlike traditional religion which is time-consuming and full of dogmas, mysticism and lack of realistic approach to life etc, godmen offer “quick fixes” to the daily ailments and solutions of ordinary women,” Rath noted in a 2020 essay published in the Andhra Pradesh-based feminist journal Mahila Prathishta.

In Hathras, however, the stampede, one of the biggest of its kind in recent years, has left many in doubt about the Baba’s credentials. Lala Ram, the husband of Kamlesh, asked that if the Baba was so powerful, why couldn’t he bring the dead back? “He could have prevented the stampede with his powers, he could have provided oxygen to those asphyxiating in the mud. At least he could have saved the babies” Lala Ram said.

Amid questions over Bhole Nath’s involvement and debates over the extent of his accountability in the incident, many like Subhash, son of Asha Devi, remain convinced that Baba should be investigated and was surprised that he had not been taken into custody or even questioned yet. “This government is known to be strict with criminals and bulldozer justice. Despite a tragedy of such scale caused obviously due to the negligence of the organisers, the Baba is not being questioned. Why is Bhole Baba being protected?” he asked.

The answer may lie in the political landscape of western UP which has a considerable Dalit and OBC population. Local journalist Parvesh Dixit noted that the Baba held sway over the Dalit and backward populations of 26 districts across the region. “He has a big support base among Jatavs,” he stated. In common parlance, Bhole Nath is often referred to as “Daliton ke Baba”. Dalit residents of Naya Nangla where two of the 121 deceased persons had lived, denied such a name for Baba and maintained that they had only one Baba: Dr BR Ambedkar. “Yes, many from the community support him because he is from the same caste and not many from our caste become revered godmen. That does not mean we must believe in superstition,” Sonu, whose mother Munni Devi passed away in the stampede said, insisting further that “the death of so many people should not be reduced to a matter of caste or religion”. The administration and the Baba are to blame and they should be brought to book,” a resolute Sonu said.

Rakhi Bose in Hathras, Uttar Pradesh

(This appeared in the print as 'Gomen and Mortal Women')