Ask any one of those thousands in Sialkot why he had come, and I suspect you would have got a shrug, a laugh, or a single sentence. A TikToker was getting married. That was all. By the reports, the crowd at the wedding turned into a stampede; one man died and eighteen were injured. We pray for the dead man’s forgiveness and for the wounded to recover. But a prayer is not an inquiry, and this deserves more than our usual night of sorrow. Why did thousands come, and why was nobody ready for them?
Contempt is the quick answer: a mob, a herd, a people without sense. It is also the wrong one. Gustave Le Bon painted the crowd in 1895 as a mindless force, and those who study crowds closely have long since put that picture down. John Drury and other researchers have shown that deadly crushes come mostly from density, narrow exits and poor management, and that people in danger usually try to help one another. A crowd is not born guilty. What kills is the arrangement: thousands of bodies, one doorway, no plan, and no one answerable.
Still, it would be dishonest to say they came for nothing. They came to see, to film, to belong, to stand near someone they feel they know. Drury himself found that a shared identity can bind a crowd together. So the honest question is not whether they wanted something. It is how hollow that something was, and why it was enough to move thousands.
Emile Durkheim gives us a place to begin. Human beings need to gather, and when they gather around a shared symbol they feel what he called collective effervescence, an energy that lifts a person out of his loneliness. Older societies fed this hunger on purpose: the urs, the village fair, the mushaira, the kabaddi tournament, the Eid congregation. Each had a centre. A saint, a verse, a cause, a man who had earned his place in the middle. The hunger is healthy. The tragedy begins when the hunger survives and the centres do not.
Today the centre is often a screen. In 1956 Donald Horton and Richard Wohl described the parasocial bond: the viewer feels he knows the face on the screen, while the face has no idea he exists. Social media has turned that bond into daily intimacy. The man laughs in our bedroom and eats breakfast beside us. When he marries, the wedding stops being a wedding. It becomes a chance to step through the glass and touch a friend who never knew we were his. Guy Debord saw this coming in 1967, a society in which the image of life replaces life itself. Perhaps nobody even needed to send an invitation. In a market where attention is the currency, a crowd is simply what attention looks like when it finds a street. Damascus showed the same pattern in January 2025, when a social media chef announced a free meal at the Umayyad Mosque, thousands arrived, and three women died in the crush.
Our language has been keeping the score. Urdu has always had separate words for separate reasons to be together: majma, ijtima, jalsa, jaloos, hujoom. The new vocabulary of views, reach and trending has no use for reasons. It only counts. A society that describes its gatherings by their size alone has already stopped asking what they are for.
And what are our young people offered to gather for? The UNDP’s 2018 national human development report found that nearly two thirds of Pakistanis are under thirty. Ask what we have built for them. Ray Oldenburg called the third place the spot that is neither home nor work, where people meet with no agenda: the tea house, the library, the playing field, the debating hall. In city after city the field has been sold to a plaza, student unions have been missing from most campuses for decades, and the cheapest entertainment a young man can afford is the phone in his hand. When the road to purposeful gathering is narrowed, the road to pointless gathering opens by itself.
Elias Canetti noticed that inside a crowd every member sheds his differences and feels equal to the rest. Consider a young man who is ranked beneath others every day, in jobs, in marriage prospects, in respect. For an hour among thousands he is equal. He is counted. That is my hypothesis, not proof. But it describes a hunger, and hunger goes wherever food is shining. The sad part is how cheap the price of that equality is: a gate, a phone, a famous name.
One incident cannot pass judgment on a nation, but it works as a mirror. And a nation is not the opposite of a crowd. It is a crowd that has acquired purpose, memory and institutions. Iqbal said it long ago:
فرد قائم ربطِ ملت سے ہے، تنہا کچھ نہیں
موج ہے دریا میں اور بیرونِ دریا کچھ نہیں
The individual exists through his bond with the community; alone he is nothing. The wave lives in the river, and outside the river it is nothing. Take away the bond of common purpose and the same waves become spray, flung in every direction.
None of this excuses anyone. Understanding why thousands came does not lessen the duty of those who should have expected them. A guest list is a private matter; a crowd of thousands on a public road is not. The moment a gathering outgrows a family, it becomes the state’s business, and the state’s first duty is to anticipate, not to mourn.
Responsibility, however, has names and addresses, and the inquiry should begin there. Did the organisers announce the time and place publicly, and did they estimate who would come? Did the district administration know, and what permission or monitoring was in place? Was the venue’s capacity assessed, along with its entry and exit points? What do the platforms that profit from attention owe the people their attention puts at risk? And what do we owe, we who scroll a man into fame at night and laugh at his crowd in the morning?
Three reforms would be a beginning. First, a permit regime for large gatherings that is real, with penalties that are enforced. Second, a legal duty of care for anyone who summons a multitude online, so that a post which calls thousands carries the same responsibility as a poster which calls them. Third, every district should set aside public grounds, a library and a community hall for its young people, run with their participation, so that the hunger to gather meets something worthy of it.
One man did not go home. His family is not calculating the decline of a nation tonight. They want to know why he had to go. The honest answer is that thousands arrived with nothing to arrive for, and nothing was ready to receive them.
The question was never why they came. It is why we left them nowhere else to go.