The mechanics of crowd control: anticipation, preparation, prevention
In his 1997 book ‘Dominance Without Hegemony’, historian Ranajit Guha recounted how Mahatma Gandhi, “perhaps India’s foremost ideologue of self-discipline”, created an “elaborate” set of rules about how people should behave around him as they travelled the country. To Gandhi, Guha wrote, a haphazard crowd was “unmanageable”, “uncontrollable”, “undisciplined”, and ultimately entailed a “mobocracy”. Gandhi…