There is considerable confusion and far too little by way of clarity in the two virtually simultaneous disasters in the Ganga during the Makar Sankranti weekend ~ the first in Bihar and the second in Bengal’s Sagar island. As regards the second, the bereaved families deserved better than the district administration’s uninformed conjecture over whether the six women pilgrims had perished in a stampede, or a “stampede-like situation’ or whether they had died after heart attack. The last has been a convenient alibi to airbrush administrative negligence. The South 24-Parganas administration is anxious to keep itself in the clear by dismissing the accident as the outcome of an almost collective cardiac arrest. This is disingenuous, to say the least. In trying to draw a fine distinction between the first and the second probables, the jetty collapse ~ under the weight of people ~ has been overshadowed. The waters are murkier and figuratively too with the state administration and the ruling party ranting at the Prime Minister for his tweet confirming a stampede and no less crucially, for announcing a compensation to the next of kin. Mr Modi may or may not have been off the mark with the PMO’s diagnosis of the riverine tragedy, which lends no scope for a renewed bout of Centre-state shadow-boxing. As a report in this newspaper indicates, thoroughly unprofessional crowd management by the South 24-Parganas police and poor dredging of the river were at the root of the disaster. Both ought to have been in place before the annual ritual of the holy dip and the Ganga Sagar mela ~ twin  events that draw hundreds of thousands of devotees from across the country. The returning pilgrim's progress has been  halted and mortally so. The fundamental rules of water transport were ignored as pilgrims were allowed to board an already overcrowded vessel. This is the core of the  tragedy which ought not to be obfuscated  by debunking the Prime Minister's humanitarian intervention. The negligent nonchalance is mirrored no less acutely in Bihar's Saran district where 24 people perished in a boat capsizal, once again due to overloading. As it turns out, it was a tragedy of errors. Hundreds of people, who had turned up to watch the kite festival in connection with Makar Sankranti, were initially stumped by the sudden announcement to vacate the venue. To that was added the failure of a government vessel to dock as the “landing platform” had caved in, and the diversion of “response boats” to Patna’s Gandhighat. Clearly, the state capital was accorded precedence over the dire imperative to rescue the stranded pilgrims in Saran. Just as the riverine tragedy has ignited a Trinamul-BJP kerfuffle, so too has it sparked a dispute between the RJD and JD(U) over security arrangements, which were wholly inadequate, almost perfunctory. The deaths in the river lend no scope for putrid politics.