India: "dead" man asks for water, or how the medical officers messed up after the Naina Devi tragedy...

The images often get blurred in his mind and he still wakes up from sleep seeing splattered blood. But what Mange Ram remembers quite clearly is that minutes after Sunday's killer stampede at Naina Devi, he was crushed under the weight of falling, fleeing bodies. Disoriented with fear and straining with exhaustion, he soon lost consciousness. 

"When I woke up, I was in the middle of a row of bodies waiting for postmortem," the 19-year-old said, shivering, "my throat was parched and I asked for water. Towering over me the doctors and nursing staff at Anandpur Sahib Civil Hospital looked dazed. They must have been surprised to see a dead man come alive like that. But when was I dead?" 

In a startling revelation that lays exposed the callousness with which the Himachal Pradesh government dealt with the Naina Devi tragedy and its 146 victims, it now seems that no officer cared to segregate the dead from the living before piling them up into waiting trucks for postmortem at the nearest hospital. Chillingly, many mela officers, those people in the administration given charge of overseeing pilgrimages, asked social workers running langars (free food stall) to identify the dead. 

"How can we declare people dead," asked an incredulous Dr Sat Pal Aggarwal, an ayurvedic doctor from Nabha who has for years been running a langar at Naina Devi.

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