Hathras stampede: Govt hiding failure with minor arrests, says Akhilesh

Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav on Saturday accused the Uttar Pradesh government of trying to hide its failure in the Hathras stampede that killed 121 people by making "minor arrests".

Yadav, in a post on X, said it looks as though such accidents will continue to happen since the state government does not seem to have learned from the administrative lapses that led to the stampede.

The SP chief also tagged a letter addressed to him in his post, in which Ankit Yadav, a resident of Mainpuri district, claims his father has been wrongly framed in connection with the stampede, and insists that his father has no link with the incident.

In the post in Hindi, Yadav said, "To hide its failure in the 'Hathras incident', the UP government wants to shirk responsibility for the deaths of hundreds of people by making minor arrests. If this happens, it will mean that no one has learned any lesson from the administrative failure in such events and such accidents will keep repeating in the future."

"The government and administration are needlessly arresting people who were absent from the original venue with a specific motive, and is preparing to hold them guilty after the arrest. These arrests are a conspiracy in themselves. There should be an immediate judicial inquiry into these arrests, so that the game of the BJP government of UP can be exposed before the public," he said.

He also said that if the BJP government says it had nothing to do with the event, then it has no right to stay in power. "Most of the people who attended the programme were poor, unhappy, exploited, oppressed, deprived, suppressed," Yadav said.

This shows that the BJP government has no concern for such people even though the government's attention should first be directed towards such people, the SP president said. "Condemnable!" he added in his post.

On 3 July, the Uttar Pradesh government formed a three-member judicial commission headed by a retired high court judge to probe the Hathras tragedy, looking also into the possibility that a conspiracy was behind the stampede.

Police have so far arrested six sevadars (volunteers) who were members of the organising committee of the satsang (religious gathering) condicted Surajpal alias Narayan Sakar Hari alias Bhole Baba on 2 July in Fulrai village of Hathras.

Devprakash Madh(ukar, the main accused in the case, has been taken into custody by Uttar Pradesh Police after he surrendered in Delhi, his lawyer claimed on Friday night. Madhukar, the mukhya (chief) sevadar of the satsang, is the only accused named in the FIR lodged at Sikandra Rao police station in Hathras in connection with the incident.