Puri: Alleging mismanagement during the Rath Yatra in Puri, the opposition in Odisha Monday demanded a judicial inquiry and accused the BJP government of suppressing facts about casualties during the festival.
Addressing a press conference here, BJD vice-president Sanjay Das Burma alleged that the government had failed to disclose the true circumstances surrounding the deaths and injuries reported during the festival.
He accused Health Minister Mukesh Mahaling of misleading the public by attributing the deaths to causes such as heart attack and suffocation instead of a “stampede-like situation”.
“The state government has not made public what exactly transpired during the Rath Yatra. No official information has been provided regarding the number of people who died or were injured. The BJP government is making every effort to suppress the incident,” Das Burma alleged.
Claiming that four critically injured devotees were admitted to Puri Hospital, he said three of them later died, and over 350 people were injured.
Demanding a judicial inquiry, Das Burma said the government was refusing to acknowledge the incident as a stampede despite the casualties.
BJD spokesperson Lenin Mohanty also criticised the health and law departments, alleging that inadequate handling of the huge gathering led to a “stampede-like situation”.
He further claimed that postmortem reports had confirmed stampede as the cause of death, while the health minister continued to attribute the fatalities to other reasons.
Congress leader SS Saluja demanded Rs 50 lakh compensation for the families of the deceased and an SIT probe monitored by a sitting high court judge.
Meanwhile, the state government announced financial assistance of Rs 10 lakh each from the Chief Minister’s Relief Fund (CMRF) to the families of two devotees who died in Puri during Rath Yatra.
In a post on social media, the Chief Minister’s Office (CMO) said CM Mohan Charan Majhi expressed grief over the deaths of Anil Das of Cuttack and Ashok Subare Raikar of Mumbai.
The CMO had earlier said that an unprecedented turnout of devotees, coupled with continuous rainfall, led to incidents of fatigue, dehydration, suffocation and other health-related problems during the festival.
According to the government, seven devotees had fallen ill and were immediately shifted to hospitals, where one elderly man died while another devotee suffered a fatal cardiac arrest in what it described as an unrelated incident.
The state government maintained that the overall conduct of the Rath Yatra remained “peaceful, orderly and well managed” and asserted that there was no stampede or systemic failure in crowd management.
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