Hathras stampede: Making sense with Bhagavad-gita

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Hare Krishna recently there is a tragic news of a religious stampede during a gathering in Hathras district in Uttar Pradesh in India where after a spiritual teacher gave some discourse the people rushed forward to take the dust off his feet or according to some reports the dust from the car in which he departed and during that rush over a hundred people were killed including primarily women and children such a tragic death raises disturbing questions I will try to make sense of this using the wisdom of the Bhagavad Gita I will talk at two levels individual and state individual level will talk about the importance of common sense and common human considerations and at the state level we will talk about the civic sense of responsibility at individual level devotion is an extremely strong emotion and such emotion can very easily override all common sense and even common decency the mob mentality can madden people with religious emotion and even with any kind of righteous emotion even if it comes from secular sources in this particular case the people wanted to take the dust off the person whose discourse they wanted to hear what exactly happened and who is precisely responsible will be revealed hopefully after due legal investigations there is a series of charges against that particular religious teacher itself there are charges of negligence by the organizers of the event in terms of the sheer overcrowding and further beating back of followers by the guards of the teacher when they crushed forward towards him however, if we consider from the perspective of common sense the purpose of devotion is to elevate human consciousness and how can the consciousness be elevated if we become so infatuated with one thing with one expression of devotion in terms of getting the dust that is considered sacred that we neglect everything else that is sacred around us as the Bhakti tradition does tell us about the importance of getting the dust off the lotus feet of great souls but that same tradition also tells us that God is present in every living being’s heart in the Mahabharata it is described how when Bhima who was a powerful warrior as well as a great devotee was racing up the Himalayas to look for a flower for Draupadi at that time he found an old, weak and insignificant seeming monkey had stretched its tail across the path and refused to even step over it leave it alone trample it because he saw everybody even the body of a non-human being to be a temple of the Lord, to be sacred because the Lord as the super soul is present there the Bhagavad Gita states that the sign of our devotion is that we are kind, friendly and compassionate towards all living beings this is 12-13 in the Bhagavad Gita if we are trampling over others what is such devotion? how can we please God or get His mercy if we are hurting and killing those who are the precious children of God we need proper spiritual and philosophical education which trains people in reason based on scripture so that the emotion of devotion doesn’t become disruptive or worse still, destructive this is the example of education provided by the Bhagavad Gita when Arjuna’s emotions were taking control of him and that is the example that the rich religious tradition and culture of India needs today. However, it is not fair to blame only the people assembled for their blindly maddened devotion it is also the responsibility of the organizers to have a civic sense the Bhagavad Gita states that Lokasangraha maintenance of the world is the responsibility that is to be fulfilled by everyone especially the leaders by their diligent dutifulness Krishna talks about in 320 Lokasangraha so the leaders over here knew that the crowd assembled was several times more than what was allowed and yet they did nothing except beat down those who started overcrowding such tragic mismanagement of crowds who have come for a religious purpose doesn’t happen only in the Hindu tradition every year when millions of Muslims go to the Hajj pilgrimage over a thousand people or more at times die because of the sheer heat and negligence or unavailability of facilities especially afflicted are those who travel illegally and who therefore do not have facilities accessible to them which are provided by the government this year the death toll was especially more than in the recent several decades because of the cauldron like heat that was there now can the government not manage such crowds if we consider when the Indian cricket team came back to India and especially to Mumbai after winning the World Cup people assembled in not just hundreds but thousands upon thousands and yet because the organizers the government authorities proactively planned so the occasion of celebration did not degenerate into any kind of disruption or destruction so we pray for the souls of those who have departed and we pray that the heads and the hearts of both individual worshippers and the organizers of such events be guided with wisdom and a sense of responsibility by which they can have both common sense and common human consideration at the individual level and a slick sense of responsibility at the social level.
Thank you. Hare Krishna