Stargazing

PEOPLE POURED OUT of their homes in Karur, a city in central Tamil Nadu, to see the actor-turned-politician Vijay, on 27 September last year. He was expected to reach the city by 12 pm, according to a social-media post by his party, the Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam. Since Vijay had announced his entry into Tamil Nadu’s electoral politics in February 2024, tens of thousands of his fans—boys and young men, women, children of all ages—had been thronging his rallies across the state. In Karur, too, despite the scorching heat, people began gathering in large numbers, the air festive, with youth dancing in the streets.

Lalli was particularly excited because Vijay was to speak at Velusamypuram, on a narrow road, around eighteen metres wide, merely two hundred metres from her home. Along with her husband, she took her two children and her brother’s two-year-old son, Dhruv Vishnu. The family found a corner to stand in. Many supporters took pictures with Dhruv, whose head had been wrapped in a turban fashioned out of a TVK flag. The crowds kept swelling.

With the hours passing and no sign of the actor’s motorcade in town, people became increasingly restless. By 3 pm, with the motorcade yet to arrive, one of the attendees recalled hearing a mother tell her exhausted little daughter, “Let’s just see Vijay mama once and go.” Many of the attendees could not afford to buy bottled water, and were too hemmed in to step away anyway. Nearly four hours later, as Vijay’s humongous vehicle finally turned onto the narrow, packed street approaching Velusamypuram, the commotion turned into panic. As people surged forward to get closer to him, police took to lathi-charging them. People began pushing each other in a desperate bid to avoid getting hit. Within moments, the gathering, attended by around twenty-seven thousand people turned chaotic—many fell to the ground and were trampled. Several people, already exhausted after waiting for hours under an unrelenting sun, were fainting from dehydration and breathlessness.

When Vijay began speaking from the makeshift stage on the roof of his tour bus, people started pushing closer to the stage to hear him. Amid the crowd’s pushes and shoves, Lalli fell to the ground, and found her legs suddenly trapped under a motorbike. She quickly handed her nephew to someone nearby, hoping they would take him to safety. By the time Lalli managed to crawl out from under the bike, her nephew had disappeared from view. She could not find him anywhere.