The stampede outside the M. Chinnaswamy stadium in Bengaluru took place on Wednesday, June 4 during the Royal Challengers Bengaluru's (RCB) victory parade. The event was announced following RCB's victory in the IPL 2025 final against the Punjab Kings the day before. This was the franchise's first-ever IPL title so they wanted to celebrate it with as many fans as they could. In order to do this, a victory parade and felicitation ceremony was announced to take place at the side's home venue.
However, what was supposed to be a day of celebration and joy turned into an absolute nightmare as the local authorities ended up underestimating the number of people that would turn up for the event. This lead to the event being completely mismanaged which further lead to a stampede in the crammed streets outside the Chinnaswamy stadium. The stampede ended up taking the lives of a total of 11 people and also left many injured.
The felicitation ceremony wasn't stopped despite the stampede outside the stadium
Another shocking thing here was that despite the horrid scenes outside, the felicitation ceremony wasn't stopped and ended up going mostly as planned. This disaster put a massive stain on RCB's first-ever IPL triumph and it remains to be seen whether events like the victory parade will take place in India in the future or not.
Former India cricketer Rahul Dravid gave his views on the tragic incident, stating that it shouldn't have taken place by any means.
"Very disappointing. It's very sad. Bengaluru is a sports-passionate city. I come from here. People over here love all sports, not just cricket. They follow all the sports and also all the sporting teams, be it a football team or a kabaddi team. It's really heartbreaking that such an unfortunate incident happened. Our thoughts go out to everyone for unfortunately lost their lives and those who were injured. Such a tragedy shouldn't have happened," Dravid said in a chat with NDTV.
Meanwhile, Dravid was seen coaching the Rajasthan Royals in the recently-concluded season of IPL. It didn't turn out to be a great campaign for the inaugural IPL champions as they failed to make it to the playoffs after finishing ninth on the points table.
The franchise was only able to register four wins in 14 matches and due to this poor performance in the league stage, got knocked out of the tournament. It will be interesting to see what changes will the team's management make in order to improve their performance in IPL 2026.