Heads Roll after Bangalore Stampede Deaths; Silencing the Academy in India and the US; Tharoor Questions Tharoor in DC

A newsletter from The Wire | Founded by Tanweer Alam, Sidharth Bhatia, Pratik Kanjilal, Seema Chishti, Sushant Singh, MK Venu, and Siddharth Varadarajan | Contributing writer: Kalrav Joshi, with additional inputs by Anirudh SK

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Over to Siddharth Varadarajan for today’s Cable

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Snapshot of the day

June 5, 2025

Siddharth Varadarajan

While the Karnataka government expected that about 35,000 people – the capacity of the M Chinnaswamy Stadium – would arrive there to celebrate the Royal Challengers' maiden IPL victory on Tuesday, the actual number of people who turned up was in the ballpark of “two to three lakh”, chief minister Siddaramaiah told the press yesterday; the stampede that occurred at the gates of the stadium claimed 11 lives and injured dozens of others, he said. He announced Rs 10 lakh as ex gratia and a probe into the incident. Fans, who reportedly fell over each other outside the stadium, were waiting for a bus carrying the victorious team to arrive there from the state legislature, where Siddaramaiah and his deputy DK Shivakumar had congratulated them. The Hindu has reported that the narrow passageways in addition to the overcrowding resulted in the crush.

Today the Cubbon Park police station in Bengaluru registered an FIR against RCB, the Karnataka State Cricket Association as well as event management firm DNA entertainment, invoking against them provisions including culpable homicide and endangering lives due to recklessness or negligence. B Dayananda, Additional Commissioner of Police, the city’s top cop, has been sacked.

Meanwhile, the final that was initially slated to take place in Kolkata ended up happening at the Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad due to ‘scientific inputs’ and not due to political motivations, a BCCI official has said. The grounds for the change was an advance forecast of clear weather in Ahmedabad, the official told Cricbuzz. It did end up raining in Kolkata on the day of the final, which went on uninterrupted in Ahmedabad, Vijay Tagore recalls.

US President Donald Trump’s claim to have stopped the recent four-day way between India and Pakistan has been endorsed by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aide, Yuri Ushakov. Giving reporters an account of a 70-minute