Congress leaders blame DMU driver, Railways for Amritsar tragedy

AMRITSAR: Ignoring all lapses on part of Municipal Corporation, police and civil administration and especially organisers of the ill-fated Dussehra event which left 58 dead, the Congress leaders are unequivocally putting the blame on the driver of the DMU and the Railways.

Punjab minister Navjot Singh Sidhu visits a victim of the train accident. PTI file

Manmeet Singh Gill
Tribune News Service
Amritsar, October 22

Ignoring all lapses on part of Municipal Corporation, police and civil administration and especially organisers of the ill-fated Dussehra event which left 58 dead, the Congress leaders are unequivocally putting the blame on the driver of the DMU and the Railways.

Local Bodies Minister Navjot Singh Sidhu said, “The land (track on which people were standing), the engine, the driver, the guards and the police (GRP) all belong to the Railways.”

Sidhu was responding to a question if he felt that main organiser of the event Mithu Madan was guilty or not.

Sidhu went on to say that GRP patrol failed to detect the tall effigy which had been erected on the place a day prior to the event.

“The police permission was for the walled ground.” He said that track around 60 feet away from the outer wall is the property of Railways.

He said that DMU in local parlance is called “ladooan wali gaddi” because of its slow speed and questioned that why it was running at such a high speed on the day of the accident.

He also questioned why the guard at the railway crossing which is just 200 metres away from the accident site could not see that people were standing on the track.

Sidhu along with PPCC president Sunil Jakhar was at Government Medical College to meet the injured of the train mishap.

Jakhar said, “Even after minor railway accidents, the enquiry by commissioner of railway safety is must. It was perhaps the first instance in which the enquiry was not marked which raises many questions.”

The Congress leader said that the way Railways had given clean chit to itself instantly is wrong.

He added that people saw the train speed was too high. He added that all the investigation being carried out would identify all those responsible for the mishap.

The main organiser of the event, Saurabh aka Mithu Madan, is the son of a Congress councillor and considered a blue-eyed boy of the Sidhus’.

The local body minister’s wife Dr Navjot Kaur Sidhu was a chief guest at the event.

Mithu earlier had been in the eye of the storm recently after he had got a public servant conducting an anti-encroachment drive transferred using his clout with the local bodies’ minister.

Later his name was also rumoured to be behind attack on a veteran Congress councillor.