page_title: 1994 Gowari stampede
section_title: Current situation
hierarchical_section_title: 1994 Gowari stampede / Current situation
caption_attribution_description: Plaque showing names of victims of Adivasi Gowari Stampede, 1994 at Shahid Gowari Memorial, Zero Mile, Nagpur
context_page_description: The 1994 Gowari stampede occurred at Nagpur, India on 23 November 1994 in which 114 people from the Gowari community were killed and 500 more injured. Nagpur Police were trying to disperse almost 50,000 Gowari protesters using a baton charge but it created panic and triggered a stampede amongst the protesters. Gowaris are an ethnic tribe of central India and are predominantly present in Nagpur. The main language of the tribe is Marathi. The majority of casualties were women and children who were crushed to death under the crowd’s feet as they scrambled to escape the police line. Some were victims of barbed wire piercing as they were climbing over high fences to escape. The Maharashtra state government appointed the one-man Justice S S Dani Commission to investigate the event, but it held nobody responsible and referred to the tragedy as an "unfortunate" one. The Commission justified the police action of baton-charge to control such a huge crowd. The commission also cleared state Chief Minister Sharad Pawar and the rest of the government for any responsibility in the incident.
context_section_description: After coming to power, the Bhartiya Janata Party-Shiv Sena-led government had announced a Special Backward Caste (SBC) category for 47 such communities with 2 percent reservations in education and government jobs. However, the Supreme Court of India ruling that reservation quotas cannot exceed 50 percent has created legal problems for SBC quotas. Political efforts to assimilate 2 percent SBC under already existing scheduled tribe or other backward caste (OBC) quotas have faced tough opposition from their respective legislators' lobby. After losing the 2004 Maharashtra state assembly elections, the BJP seems to have lost interest in Gowari incident. The Gowari issue surfaced periodically during assembly sessions. The Nagpur bench of Bombay High Court on 15 August 2018 ruled that Gowari community in Maharashtra should get benefits under the Scheduled Tribes (ST) category, pointing out that Gowaris were categorised as a tribe more than hundred years ago in the records of British India.
  A monument has been built in central Nagpur to commemorate those who died in this tragedy. Also, the flyover in Sitabuldi has been named Aadivasi Gowari Shahid flyover.
caption: Names of victims at the memorial
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