Families of victims recount Kharghar tragedy
Disregarding the pleas of their families to skip the Maharashtra Bhushan award function in the searing afternoon heat, Gulab Patil, 56, and Meenakshi Mestry, 58, decided to attend out of love and devotion to Appasaheb Dharmadhikari. On Monday, when they received the mortal remains of the women, the families were shattered.
NAVI MUMBAI/THANE: A day after heatstroke tragedy marred the Maharashtra Bhushan award ceremony, the official death toll increased to 13 on Monday after two more patients put on ventilators succumbed. Meanwhile, politicians of different political hues made a bee line to hospitals slamming the Eknath Shinde government for organising a massive programme outdoors in the peak of dehydrating Mumbai summer.
However, it is the stories of the families of the victims that throws more light on how the tragic Sunday unfolded and changed their lives forever.
Disregarding the pleas of their families to skip the Maharashtra Bhushan award function in the searing afternoon heat, Gulab Patil, 56, and Meenakshi Mestry, 58, decided to attend out of love and devotion to Appasaheb Dharmadhikari. On Monday, when they received the mortal remains of the women, the families were shattered.
“She was a diabetic. So, I had asked her to carry food, but she did not listen,” said an inconsolable Baban Patil, Gulab’s husband, who lost his wife to dehydration on Sunday. Gulab’s son Rupesh, who was also present at the Panvel sub-district hospital to receive the body, said the family came to know about the heatstroke tragedy late on Sunday night.
“When we saw the news, we started frantically calling my mother, but her phone was switched off,” he said. Rupesh left his Virar residence, went to the venue, then to Kharghar police station and eventually to MGM Hospital in Kamothe, where he was told that there was an unidentified patient at the hospital. It was his mother, who was on the ventilator. She died an hour later.
Patil’s and Mestry’s bodies were handed over to their relatives on Monday morning. “My mother had gone for a good cause,” said Vivek Mestry, son of deceased Meenakshi Mestry. “I don’t know how this could happen to her. It definitely has to do with mismanagement of the event. If the ceremony had been organised in the evening, my mother would have survived.”
Mestry averred that people were bound to show up at Dharmadhikari’s events out of faith in him, whatever the time and venue, and the government should have kept that in mind. “The ceremony should have been arranged indoors, given the weather conditions,” he said. The next time, the organisers should keep that in mind before making such a huge plan.”
Mestry’s brother, Sunil, said the VIPs were exposed to the sun only for a few minutes, but the common people were scorched by it for hours. “I had told her not to go, but she didn’t listen,” he rued. Both Patil and Mestry had reached the venue on Saturday night and camped at the ground.
Like them, Nilesh Pathak, 24, had also reached the Kharghar ground on Saturday night from Lonavala. On Sunday evening, he realised that his uncle, Kailash Dhabade (46), had gone missing. “When I called him, a doctor from MGM answered and told me he was in hospital with a heart attack due to sunstroke,” said Pathak.
Asked whether water arrangements at the venue were inadequate, Pathak said, “There were arrangements, but they were at a distance and people could not access water. The main problem was the lack of announcements about dispersal and other arrangements.” Pathak said he had been attending Dharmadhikari’s events since his childhood and reached the venue a day or two earlier as was the norm for his followers.
45-year-old Narendra Gaikwad from Murbad, who was injured in the stampede, said, “Appasaheb can never go wrong. His arrangements and planning are never faulty. The first public meeting Nanasaheb took was in 1943 and since then nothing has ever gone wrong.”
Among the 13 victims of the tragedy was Vinayak Haldankar, 55, who was brought in with heatstroke symptoms and suffered a heart attack. A resident of Kalyan East, Haldankar’s wife and two daughters remained tight-lipped about his death, while other family members claimed that all the necessary arrangements were made for him after he suffered suffocation during the programme. They claimed they had no complaints.
The family of 64-year-old Pushpa Gaikar from Kalwa, however, demanded a government job for her son. Sarika Patil, daughter of Gaikar, said, “My younger brother used to live with my mother. The loss of a mother cannot be replaced but we demand a secure government job for our brother so that he can live his life ahead.”
Fifty-eight-year-old Bheema Krishna Salvi’s neighbours in Kalwa said she was looking forward to the awards ceremony and was a regular at Sunday congregations of the Nanasaheb Adhikari Pratishthan. “She was very excited on Saturday when I went to her house,” said one of Salvi’s neighbours. “On Sunday, while the other women returned safely, she didn’t return. Later, we found out she had died.”