Abstract
Political campaigns represent vibrant expressions of democracy, yet their large-scale
mobilisations frequently expose participants to significant safety hazards—structural,
electrical, vehicular, and crowd-related. Recent incidents, including the Karur rally disaster in
Tamil Nadu, have revealed systemic lapses in safety planning and inter-agency coordination
that demand urgent attention from both safety engineering and public policy perspectives. This
study extends safety engineering principles to the political domain by developing a conceptual
model—the H.A.R.M.O.N.Y. Framework (Hazard Analysis, Risk Mitigation, and Oversight
for Non-industrial Yields). Drawing from system safety literature, accident models such as
STAMP (Leveson, 2012), the Swiss cheese model (Reason, 1997), and contemporary risk
governance approaches, the framework provides a cyclical mechanism to anticipate, mitigate,
and learn from campaign-related accidents. The study concludes with strategic recommendations for institutionalising safety engineering as a mandatory
dimension of democratic process management, proposing a Safety Certification System
analogous to environmental clearances in industrial sectors.