Why Qutub Minar has been closed for 40 yrs

TOI + EXCLUSIVE

Why Qutub Minar has been closed for 40 yrs

45 Visitors, Many Of Them Students, Died In A Stampede Inside The Minar on Dec 4, 1981

Abhilash.Gaur@timesgroup.com

Years ago, Friday used to be the busiest day of the week at Delhi’s Qutub Minar because entry was free and schools and colleges brought their students to picnic in the morning. On December 4, 1981, a Friday, the Qutub grounds were abuzz with tourists and there was a crowd at the minar door trying to get inside.

While public access to the minar’s top had been stopped in the 1950s, to prevent suicides, tourists were still allowed to go up to the first balcony, which is roughly as high as a 10-storey building.

By 11am busloads of tourists were inside the spiral staircase that leads up to the balcony. Around 11.30am – reports from that day say – the power supply tripped and the lights inside went out. The minar has large vents at regular intervals for air and light, but as scared visitors sought safety close to the staircase wall, they cut out the daylight. Then, as the 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 TOI they were descending the dark stairs in a single file when they suddenly “found themselves sliding down uncontrollably”. He survived with chest injuries.

Trapped behind jammed doors

The minar gate had heavy steel doors that opened inwards. As the number of people inside swelled, the chowkidar had pulled the doors shut. But 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.

Luckily, 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. They extricated many survivors and bodies over an hour.

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.

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

What caused the 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.

Next day, Delhi Police 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 and shirt. Later, district and sessions judge Jagdish Chandra’s inquiry report in the case also made a mention of their harassment.

Overcrowding was an old problem in the minar, especially on holidays.

There had been another stampede 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.

‘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 Chandra Commission report found power failure to be one of the major causes of the tragedy, and held Delhi Electricity Supply Undertaking responsible for it. The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) was held equally culpable for the “very bad and dangerous condition” of the steps, which had “dangerous depressions and contours” because they had never been repaired, it said.

The inquiry commission concluded that the stampede had occurred when a girl – not one of the New Zealand tourists – slipped near the minar’s 8th ventilator and some boys raised a false alarm: “Qutub is falling...go down, go down.”