In a disturbing episode that lays bare the deep divide between the privileged and the powerless, a grieving son was forced to carry his mother’s body across a closed bridge on a stretcher, while security personnel had earlier allowed a VIP vehicle to pass just minutes after the shutdown order.
It was around 9:30 AM on Saturday when Binda, a daily wage labourer from Tedha village in the Sumerpur area of Hamirpur, arrived at the Yamuna Bridge with the body of his 63-year-old mother Shiv Devi in a private ambulance. She had died during treatment in Kanpur. But despite his desperate pleas, officials manning the barricades did not allow the ambulance to pass, citing a two-day vehicular ban on the bridge due to repairs.
A few hours earlier, at around 6:44 AM barely 34 minutes after the bridge closure at 6:10 AM barricades had been removed to allow the car of the local BJP MLA to pass. The legislator later claimed he wasn’t in the car, and that his ailing brother was being taken to Kanpur. But the stark contrast in treatment between a VIP’s vehicle and a grieving son carrying his mother’s body has ignited outrage and forced many to ask: Are rules only for the poor?
Unable to persuade the authorities, Binda lifted his mother’s body from the ambulance, laid it on a stretcher, and began the nearly one-kilometre walk across the bridge, under the harsh sun, as onlookers and pedestrians watched in silent discomfort. Once across, he hired an auto-rickshaw to cover the remaining distance to his village.
The haunting image of a man carrying a stretcher, with the help of driver of ambulance and his helper, bearing his mother’s corpse across a major bridge—shut to all but the privileged—has become a symbol of the everyday subjugation of the poor in the face of an unfeeling system that bends for the mighty.
The Yamuna bridge on the Kanpur-Sagar highway was closed for all vehicles from 6 AM on Saturday for urgent repair work on pillar number 10. According to site engineer Pankaj Singh, two bearings were replaced, and six were greased or repaired. However, pedestrian movement was still permitted.
But this is not the first time the barricades were moved for VIPs. On June 21, a convoy escorting a principal secretary was allowed to cross the bridge after it had been officially shut. The administration offered no satisfactory explanation in either case, raising troubling questions about preferential treatment.
In the face of such disparities, the common man not only battles poverty, illness, and bureaucracy—but also a system that often refuses to recognize his pain. Binda, already reeling from the loss of his mother, had to shoulder a burden that wasn’t just physical. It was symbolic of how invisible the poor remain in the eyes of the state.
The alternative route to Kanpur from Sumerpur—via Kurara and Manki—is a 25-kilometre stretch that has become almost impassable. Over 10 kilometres of it has disintegrated into potholes. The road is narrow, riddled with ditches, and in places reduced to stretches of black soil, causing vehicles to get stuck. The journey that should take less than an hour now lasts over two hours. Overloaded trucks avoid the route altogether, diverting through distant villages like Jolhupur.
In theory, traffic regulations exist for all citizens. In practice, however, they seem to apply only to those without connections, without privilege, and without a voice. “It is a single road and we are trying to manage as best we can,” said a police officer stationed near the bridge. But there was little effort to explain why the barricades had been removed for a VIP’s car, but not for an ambulance carrying a corpse.
The stark inequality was not just in access to infrastructure, but in dignity. For Binda, there was no dignity in mourning. No comfort. No convenience. Just an endless walk, a lifeless body, and a bitter lesson: when the powerful drive through roadblocks, the powerless must carry their dead on foot.
This tragic episode has not made headlines for the right reasons. There have been no political visits, no apologies from the administration, and no assurances that such a situation will not repeat. In a land where protocols can bend for politicians and bureaucrats, one wonders what it will take for the grief of a common man to be treated with equal urgency.
In the end, the bridge is not just a structure under repair. It stands as a metaphor for a society under strain—where the gulf between privilege and suffering is wide, visible, and painfully walked, step by step, by those left behind.
