Large public festivals may appear spontaneous, but the ones that endure and attract millions year after year are not improvised. They are carefully planned and managed by governments through formal rules, security arrangements, medical preparedness, licensing systems, crowd control, and coordinated public services. Rio Carnival, Munich’s Oktoberfest, London’s Notting Hill Carnival, India’s Kumbh Mela, China’s Lunar New Year travel period, Spain’s Running of the Bulls, and La Tomatina succeed because their risks are systematically planned for and managed. Regulation in these events is not an obstacle to celebration; rather, it ensures that no injury, panic, or loss of life is incurred.
In Rio de Janeiro, Carnival is treated as a citywide safety and risk-mitigation operation through mandatory event registration, route disclosure, crowd estimates, emergency planning, heavy policing, surveillance, and medical deployment. This strategy, therefore, sustains its multi-billion-dollar economic impact.
Munich’s Oktoberfest follows the same logic through strict controls on entry, prohibited items, operating hours, and crowd movement. All of this, backed by fencing, screening, and large police and medical teams, makes it one of the world’s most profitable festivals, with safety costs justified by returns.
London’s Notting Hill Carnival shows how safety failures threaten legitimacy, forcing redesigns of crowd flows, expanded policing, and formal reviews, with existing public order and licensing laws used to regulate routes, sound systems, alcohol, and timings because of its national cultural and economic value.
India’s Kumbh Mela represents the extreme case, with tens of millions gathering, requiring the state to build full-scale temporary infrastructure and treat the event as a disaster-management exercise, where past stampedes highlight the need for constant adaptation rather than the futility of regulation, even as the event drives massive tourism, informal employment, and permanent infrastructure.
China’s Lunar New Year operates at a national scale, producing the world’s largest annual migration, forcing the state to coordinate transport, impose safety controls, and ban fireworks in many dense cities despite cultural attachment, while promoting the holiday as a major consumption period worth billions of dollars.
Spain offers two festivals to the world: Pamplona’s Running of the Bulls is governed by strict rules barring minors, removing intoxicated runners, prohibiting interference with animals, and positioning medical teams along the route, keeping fatalities rare through active risk management, while La Tomatina in Buñol, though appearing chaotic, is tightly regulated through attendance caps, ticketing, time limits, and bans on hard objects, allowing a small town to generate millions annually without turning celebration into a public threat.
Festivals flourish over time when governments do three things. They legally define what is allowed and what is prohibited. They enforce those rules visibly and consistently. They invest in safety infrastructure because the economic return justifies it.
These global cases show a consistent pattern. Festivals flourish over time when governments do three things. They legally define what is allowed and what is prohibited. They enforce those rules visibly and consistently. They invest in safety infrastructure because the economic return justifies it. Effective governance is what allows cultural traditions to grow into large, safe, and sustainable public events.
Lahore is all set to reverberate with shouts of “Bo Kata” (to celebrate the cutting of an opponent’s kite) and beating drums. Basant here is linked to older South Asian spring-heralding traditions; its exact beginnings in the city, however, cannot be chronicled. History has it that by the early nineteenth century, under Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s rule, Basant had become a visible and organised public celebration in Lahore, with court patronage, fairs, and kite flying described in later historical accounts. Over time, the celebration expanded beyond elite patronage and became embedded in the city’s popular culture, eventually turning into a mass rooftop festival.
By the early 2000s, Basant celebrations evolved into a hyper-competitive, commercialised, and, to a certain extent, dangerous activity. Sharp metal- and glass-coated strings turned the skies into lethal traps. People were decapitated on motorcycles, electrocuted while retrieving kites from power lines, or killed by celebratory gunfire. Courts intervened, and the provincial government imposed a ban that lasted nearly two decades. The ban reduced the hazard but did not eliminate illegal kite flying, which continued to cause sporadic fatalities.
This year, the government has chosen regulation over prohibition as an administrative strategy. The new legal framework bans dangerous materials outright, imposes heavy prison sentences and fines for violators, introduces vendor registration, mandates traceability through QR codes, restricts kite sizes, prohibits spools, bars minors from flying, and limits the festival to specific dates and locations. Motorcycle safety wires have been mandated to prevent throat injuries. All this reflects the same logic as in Pamplona, Buñol, Munich, and Rio.
Safe Basant will depend not on the formulation of laws, but on how strictly they are enforced. It has to be managed as a citywide safety operation, with active policing, immediate confiscation of dangerous materials, visible prosecutions, emergency-ready hospitals, protected infrastructure, crowd monitoring, and restricted kite-flying hours.
The economic logic for Basant, however, remains strong. In the past, Basant filled hotels, attracted foreign visitors, and sustained thousands of informal workers. That supply chain went underground during the ban. Legalising it through registration can bring it into the tax net, improve product safety, and provide accountability for money changing hands. Last weekend, I had the opportunity to take a guided tour of the Walled City of Lahore. Our guide briefed us on the mind-boggling rental rates of rooftops being booked ahead of the scheduled festival from 6th to 8th February 2026, which vary from half a million to a million rupees per day, depending on the visibility of a historical monument like the Badshahi Mosque, Wazir Khan Mosque, or Lahore Fort in the backdrop.
Citizens must enter into a social contract by complying with enacted laws to keep the festive spirit of Basant alive, thus ensuring that the tradition continues in the years to come. It is yet another attempt by authorities to regulate Basant and could prove to be a stress test. Every injury will be amplified. Every failure will be politicised. That is unavoidable. Lahoris, however, must take a cue from citizens’ conduct at other festivals worldwide to reclaim a lost cultural event safely. Let us welcome it – Bienvenue Basant.
The writer is a freelance columnist and can be reached at zulfiqar.shirazi @gmail.com